The Asian action film
Asian cinema saw an enormous renaissance, creating everything from routine action thrillers to deeply moving and intimate dramas. Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, spent much of his youth in Hong Kong, and went back to America to work in the television series “The Green Hornet” (1966-67) and Paul Bogart’s film Marlowe (1969) before returning to his homeland and reclaiming his cultural heritage. Lee redefined the action genre with a string of balletic action films such as Wei Lo and Jiaxiang Wu’s Tang shan da xiong (Fists ofFury, 1971), Wei Lo’s Jing wu men (Fist of Fury, a k a The Chinese Connection, 1972), Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon (1973), and Lee’s own Meng long guojiang (Return of the Dragon, 1972) before his sudden death in 1973 at the age of thirty-two, just as his international career was taking off.
In the wake of Lee’s meteoric success and untimely death, a host of imitators sprang up, but none was more inventive or successful than Jackie Chan.
Both Chan and Lee often worked for the two most prolific studios in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers Studio, operated as a twenty-four-hour film factory by brothers Run Run and Run Me Shaw, and the Golden Harvest Studios. These facilities churned out an enormous amount of commercial product and dominated Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was also during this period that the action director John Woo emerged as a fierce visual stylist, starting with a string of low-budget action films for the Shaw Brothers
The twin brothers Oxide Pang (a k a Oxide Pang Chun) and Danny Pang first teamed as co-directors on Bangkok Dangerous (1999), a violent action film, but then went on to create their signature work, Gin gwai (The Eye, 2002), an unsettling psychological horror film, in which a blind girl gets a cornea transplant with unexpected results. The film was so successful that it almost immediately spawned a sequel, Gin gwai 2 (The Eye 2, 2004). Tsui Hark, another Hong Kong action specialist, created his own brand of cinematic mayhem in Die bian (The Butterfly Murders, 1979), Suk san: Sun Suk san geen hap (Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, 1983), Shanghai zhi ye (Shanghai Blues, 1984), and many others, while also producing films by other directors. But Hong Kong’s future as a vibrant cinematic center was put in doubt when the British handed over the tiny nation to mainland China in 1997, and many of its most talented directors, actors, and technicians fled to the West. Jackie Chan, for example, went on to a long and profitable career as an action/comedy star in Hollywood.
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