Kings of Hong Kong Cinema: The Shaw Brothers
A Brief Look at the Shaw Brothers and Their Entertainment Empire
Jul 31, 2009
Long before Indiana Jones, there was The One-Armed Swordsman, Brave Archer, and other classics of the legendary Hong Kong film studio, Shaw Brothers.
The studio was founded by Runme Shaw and his brother, Sir Run Run Shaw (who later produced Blade Runner). They came from a family of seven children and began making films in their hometown of Shanghai, but later set up operations in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. They were involved in all aspects of cinema, film production, distribution, and even owning the show venues. Runme Shaw said, “We went to all the small towns (that had) no cinema. We just tried a place, one place, two, then next place. We just started like that.”
The Shaw Brother Started with Silent Films
In the 1920s, they started making silent films. Later, they were filmed silent and then dubbed with sound. This made them cheaper to produce and easily dubbed into other languages, including Mandarin, for the export market. Since the 1980s, they are filmed mostly in Cantonese, the southern Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong, but Hong Kong films have always been enjoyed throughout Asia.
The Shaw Brothers studio produced the first Cantonese musical, which was to be a popular genre. The film, Platinum Dragon (a slang term for pistol), played to packed houses for over a year. They starred popular Cantonese opera stars. The trend was followed by the Shaw’s Chinese-American competitor, Grandview Films, based in San Francisco.
Changing Fortunes
Like the heroes and heroines of their films, the Shaw Brothers faced many challenges. War was coming. In 1937, at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese invaded Shanghai. The Shaw Brothers Studio there was destroyed. Fortunately, they had had the foresight to start production in Hong Kong four years earlier.
The Shaw family planned on emigrating to Australia, but their hopes were dashed when Run Run failed to qualify for an age-based quota applied to young men leaving the country. As it turned out, this was a stroke of luck, because the boat on which they were supposed to travel was sunk by a torpedo.
After the Japanese marched into Singapore, the Shaw brothers hid out in a deserted church and then at the home of a businessman friend. For the rest of the war, they lived in their office. Between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese permitted the Shaws to show only propaganda films and a few Indian ones. Hollywood films were banned.
The war ended and business was back to usual. In fact, it was booming, and by 1965, the Shaw Brothers Studio owned three production studios, in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, in addition to 130 cinemas throughout Southeast Asia. They published film magazines in four languages through The Shaw Printing Works, which they had owned even before the war.
A Hero of the People
They made films in Malaysia in the Bollywood song and dance style, creating stars such as Tan Sri P. Ramlee. But it is the quality of their work in Hong Kong that has gained them world renown.
A category of Hong Kong cinema made popular by Shaw Brothers are kung fu films set in ancient China. They are filled with romance and adventure. But it has been the themes of alienation that draws in huge numbers of young fans. Frequently, they feature a lone warrior or traveling monk, who answers to no one, and who is called to right some wrong. He experiences trials and tribulations, but emerges as an unrivaled martial arts master.
A folk hero, Wong Fei Hung, became the subject of 100 kung fu movies from the 1940s to the 1980s. In the 90s, when Hong Kong action films first developed a cult following in America, the actor Jet Li brought Wong Fei Hung back to life in Once Upon a Time in China (1991). (The movie spawned a series, with Jet Li starring in the first three and in the sixth, and Vincent Zhao in parts four and five.)
Cinematic Synergy
The action in Raiders of the Lost Ark is an homage to Hong Kong cinema, in which heroes often dodge deadly traps or martial arts novices must perform impossible feats, such as carrying buckets of water while walking over floating stones, in the course of their training. In turn, Hong Kong cinema was greatly influenced by Hollywood. Sam Peckinpah’s (The Wild Bunch) innovative depiction of action and violence was particularly influential.
Shaw Brothers responded to trends set by Hollywood. When James Bond hit the big screen, they made their own spy movies, hitting it big with films such as Black Falcon (1966) and Kiss and Kill (1967). Stars like Lily Ho and Margaret Tu Chuan played female Bonds in The Angel with the Iron Fist (1966), Special Agent 009 (1967) and others.
Out of the Shaw Brothers studio came Hong Kong’s most revered stars, the equivalent of Greta Garbo and Humphrey Bogart, such as Chiang Tai-Wei and Ti Lung, a deadly martial arts duo, and the versatile Ivy Ling Po, who played men as often as women.
