by Meyers, Ric
Men leaped higher than trees, women flew through the air for hundreds of yards, and fighters did endless somersaults. The actors in the Huang Fei-hong movies insisted on realism in the all-important action scenes. For the first time, kung fu was the heart of the film, not just a peripheral ingredient. The need for accuracy became vital in order to honestly portray the leading character’s life. It also didn’t hurt that the lead actor was so similar to the character he portrayed.
That actor was Kwan Tak-hing. Born in 1906, he became an actor in Cantonese opera, but more importantly, he was an accomplished lion dancer and martial artist. He initially studied Hung boxing, which goes several steps further than hung gar. While the latter melds two forms — the tiger and crane styles — Hung Fist, as it is also called, melds all five Shaolin animal styles with the horse, elephant, and lion techniques. From there, Kwan became a proponent of the white crane style. All these styles are based on the human body and mind, as well as the way animals defend themselves.
As the films progressed over the decades, Kwan became proficient in all the areas Huang himself was known for. Huang seemed dedicated to mastering the most esoteric, difficult skills — such as the Iron Wire and Tiger Vanquishing Fists as well as Huang’s trademark “Shadowless Kick,” which Kwan seemed to delight in showing throughout the series. Kwan himself was the creator of what is now known as the Omni-Directional Gangrou Fist.
So director Wu had the character and the actor. And while the honorable legend of Huang and the charming personality of Kwan were vital, it took more than those to make the series a success. First, these were pictures about a beloved personage in happier times, so they became a nostalgic preserver of particular pastimes, such as “vying for firecrackers” — another sport-contest in which a bunch of red sticks were fired into the air so different kung fu school teams could battle for possession when they fell. Whichever team held the most sticks at the end of the tournament won.
But vying for firecrackers paled in comparison to the pride felt by the school that won the lion dancing contests. A hallmark of Chinese life, these tournaments pitted teams of athletes who performed with ornate, colorful Chinese Lion costumes. It is the skill of the dancers beneath the costume that imbues the rippling dragon-like body and heavy, puppet-like lion head of the outfit with character. Maneuvering this lion in competition with other lion dancers can call for the greatest skill a martial artist possesses. In this area Kwan was a master, making the many Huang movies that involved lion dancing a visual delight.
But the nucleus of the Huang Fei-hong films was kung fu ... and not just the external, martial variety. Unlike his contemporary film series competitor, Fong Sai-yuk (aka Fan Shiyu), a hot-tempered Shaolin renegade, Huang Fei-hong was first and foremost a healer, who spread wisdom and traditional Chinese medicine from his famed school/clinic known as Po Chi Lum. Although he would be disappointed in his students whenever they were undisciplined, he rarely angered and would always teach that the highest form of kung fu was not to fight.
Of course, his many envious, greedy villains would always force the issue … to the delight of audiences who preferred the real thing to the artificial, theatrical feats portrayed in years past. For the record: there were apparently five basic Kwangtung schools of kung fu teaching at the time — the Hung, Liu, Cai, Li, and Mo Schools. They taught the ten major fist forms, based on the movements of the crane, elephant, horse, monkey, leopard, lion, snake, tiger, and tiger cub. In addition, there was training utilizing the eighteen legendary weapons of China, which included staffs, spears, and swords. From there the possibilities seemingly become endless.
The Huang Fei-hong movies of the era made use of many of these possibilities, in addition to showcasing the subtler, but just as important, concept of “wu de” — which means “martial virtue.” As usual, Chinese action films concentrated on savage tales of vengeance, characterized by a plot that had rival martial arts schools in conflict with one another due to pride or greed. This tried-and-true plot is still being overused today, but the Huang Fei-hong movies introduced an honorable martial artist who sought to use kung fu for health and self-defense only. He was a chivalrous, considerate saint of a man who was always patient, humble, and eternally on the underdog’s side.
Wu Yixiao, a Cantonese opera writer, scripted the first four films, but Wang Feng is generally credited as being the main influence on the series, since he wrote, as well as directed, many of the most popular. But this was truly a partnership between the actors and the crew. Although choreographers Leung Wing-hang and Yuen Siu-tin were credited with the lion’s share of the series’ action scenes, Kwan was said to have choreographed most of his own battles with his main opponent, Shih Kien (best known as the evil Han in 1973’s Enter the Dragon). Together, they created believable bouts that remain the series’ high points. Almost every major modern kung fu director was influenced by, or actually worked on, these motion pictures.
The best of them, like Huang Fei Hong Vied for the Firecrackers at Huadi (1955) and How Huang Fei Hong Vanquished the Twelve Lions (1956), not only displayed fine martial arts but Huang’s wisdom, courage, restraint, morality, and intelligence as well. Although there were some other martial arts films during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Huang Fei-hong movies practically monopolized the market. By 1956, twenty-five of the year’s twenty-nine kung fu pictures starred this hero.
These films were in the cinemas practically every month, and there were some years when the only kung fu movies were the Huang Fei-hong ones. Just about the only other film series that was any kind of competition at all concerned the aforementioned Fan Shiyu (aka Fang Shih Yu aka Fong Sai-yuk), an eighteenth-century, fiery-tempered master swordsman and bare-handed fighter who was trained at the Shaolin Temple. There were about sixteen films concerning this legendary young man over the same two decades the Huang movies reigned.
The reason why the genre didn’t flourish sooner is obvious. Just like the great dance movies of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, great kung fu is not easy to fake. It can, and has, been done, but it is rarely convincing unless the actor is also, not coincidentally, a good dancer. It takes years of dedication and discipline to perform kung fu well on-screen, no matter whether you are a martial arts student, a Peking Opera alumnus, a gymnast, an acrobat, a dancer, or an actor. And if you don’t perform kung fu well it is painfully evident to the audience.
Still, the Hong Kong film industry wasn’t very artistic during the 1950s and 1960s. Seemingly, just about the only man who seemed to know what to do with a camera was King Hu — an epic filmmaker who toiled in Taiwan. He probably was the best action filmmaker China had ever seen, but far from the best moviemaker. This is not as fine a distinction as it might first appear. The “film” aspect of entertainment is technical. The “movie” is emotional. King Hu’s films, including his masterpiece, A Touch of Zen (1966), concentrate far more on character interaction and cinematic technique than on the niceties of the kung fu.
“I have no knowledge of kung fu whatsoever,” the director said in a 1989 interview. “My action scenes come from the stylized combat of Peking Opera.” To Hu, kung fu was dance, and was treated as such.
There’s hardly any action in A Touch of Zen, but plenty of mood and symbolism — not to mention three distinct endings — within its three-hour running time. Rumor has it that the studio was so impressed with the first ninety minutes, but so unhappy with its inconclusive ending, that they asked for a more fight-oriented finale. King Hu showed what could be done cinematically with what the Chinese movie industry had to work with, but essentially his films were magnificent visual elaborations of legends and stage plays.
But one of the most important reasons kung fu films did not flourish earlier is a fascinating sociological one. The Hong Kong Chinese had their hands full with surviving. After the turbulent dawn of the 20th century, they contended with the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese invasion, civil war, and World War II. Once the Communists took over the mainland and the somewhat sup
ercilious British took over Hong Kong, movies were the last thing on the breadwinners’ minds.
As far as 1950s Hong Kong society was concerned, the only people who had any free time would be spoiled housewives, and their hard-working husbands didn’t want them ogling handsome hunk heroes at the local cinema. So the local movie industry felt inclined to have women playing their male movie action heroes (which is something, considering that they hadn’t allowed women to even play women’s Peking Opera roles for quite some time).
The result were cute, interesting, but hardly convincing tales of heroic chivalry that held back Hong Kong action cinema for nearly a decade, as the rest of the world produced stirring masterpieces. By the 1960s, the South China audience was finally ready for real kung fu action, and a few folk were ready to give it to them … with a vengeance.
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Picture identifications (clockwise from upper left):
Bruce Li in Dynamo; Jason Scott Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story; Mike Stone, James Coburn, Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee; Bruce Le in Cobra; The Dragon Dies Hard, Brandon Lee in The Crow.
Bruce Lee remains the man who has brought more people to kung fu in general, and kung fu films in particular, than anyone else in the world. He is personally responsible for introducing kung fu to the Western world, and for forging the modern kung fu film. Through his life, he did more to educate Americans to kung fu’s benefits than anyone. Through his death, he has done more to clarify its detriments. Through his legacy, he represents the full spectrum of kung fu’s physical possibilities, as well as its mental limitations.
It was his superlative martial arts ability and canny filmmaking knowledge that galvanized audiences everywhere. But it is also Bruce Lee, simply by being deprived of the opportunity to mature, who set a trap for the kung fu film that it is still in the process of escaping. Everyone in the industry is compared to him, or forged himself in, and out, of his image. Decades after his untimely death, he remains a universally known cinematic icon. Simply put, without him, this book probably would not exist.
It started November 27, 1940, when Lee Jun-fan was born to Lee Hoi-chuen and his wife Grace in San Francisco. Since he was born in the United States, the hospital requested an Anglicized name. Supposedly, it was the supervising doctor, Mary Glover, who suggested “Bruce.” He was born into a family that included two older girls, Agnes and Phoebe, and an older brother named Peter. Soon he had a younger brother as well, Robert. To his siblings, Bruce was better known by the name Lee Yuen-kam (an adaptation of his birth name).
Their father was a well-known actor for Chinese audiences on both American coasts as well as in Hong Kong. Just three months after his birth, Bruce joined his father onstage, in a production of Golden Gate Girl. When the family returned to Asia soon after, Bruce continued his thespian ways … while starting a few new distressing ones as well. He was a thin, small, and somewhat sickly child, prone to nightmares and sleepwalking. Compensation came in the form of energy. He always seemed to be moving, never satisfied with being still. Friends and family remember Bruce as an extremely positive, assured youth, and his assurance became brazen as he grew.
His progress was marked by appearances in Hong Kong movies, starting just after World War II, when he was six years old. The director of one of his father’s films was impressed by Bruce’s attitude and cast him in a small role for Birth of a Man (1946), which was also known by the title The Beginning of a Boy. Only a year later, Bruce was already starring in films such as My Son A-Chang, in which he played the title role of a street-smart kid trying to get ahead in the sweatshop world of Hong Kong. As was fairly common at that time, he was given a movie star name: Lung, or Siu Lung, which means “Dragon” or “Little Dragon.”
Even at the age of seven, Lee’s screen persona was strong. He was a clever, capable, but short-tempered little ruffian who specialized in the scowl, the pout, the stare, and the slow burn. This character served him on the streets as well. Ignoring the lessons of his films and his family, Lee, in his own words, “went looking for fights.” By the time he hit his teens, he was already well equipped to handle those fights. He was a natural dancer, becoming quite proficient in the cha-cha, and his natural grace lent itself to wing chun, the physically economical, but extremely effective, martial art he decided to follow.
Created by a woman of the same name, wing chun was popularized by Yip Man, a venerable teacher who proved to the rest of the male-chauvinistic martial art world that the technique could more than hold its own against hung gar — then one of the most prevalent styles being taught in Hong Kong. The story goes that Bruce sought out Yip Man to start his kung fu journey, but even his esteemed sifu (teacher) could not quell Lee’s contentiousness. Some nights he would dance; other nights he would scour the streets for a fight. Often he would do both.
Lee read voraciously, and was notably near-sighted. He was known for practical jokes, which became serious if he was personally challenged by his victim. Often, it was no fun playing with Bruce Lee; his desire to win seemed almost obsessive. Some said that even when he lost a street fight, he would find a way to make it seem as if he had won. Others said that he would return to the victor again and again, eventually winning by either learning enough or simply wearing down his opponents by attrition.
And all the time he exercised and trained — seemingly wanting not only to convince himself that he was the best, but to actually be the best. He rapidly became aware of the Chinese place in the post-war world, which cried out for a Chinese Superman. Bruce Lee wanted to be that Chinese Superman. The tragedy of his ultimate fate was to be played out on a minor scale in the Hong Kong of 1959. The more famous Bruce Lee became as a teenage movie actor, the more uncontrollable he became in real life.
Things came to a head with the premiere of his most successful film of that time, The Orphan (1959). Although Wu Chu-fan was the ostensible star (playing a teacher who lost his family in a Japanese air raid), Bruce all but stole the show as Ah Sam, an orphan who survived as a street thief. Again, all the acting skills that were to lead to his superstardom were well in evidence. Lee’s emotional intensity was compelling. He portrayed frustration beautifully, as on-screen schoolmates laughed at his lack of education, and his peers were embarrassed by his bad manners. When he finally fights back, threatening his teachers and fellows with a knife during class, it is a cathartic scene that Lee plays to the hilt.
Ah Sam returns to his gang, which masterminds the kidnapping of a rich man’s son, but Sam can’t forget the kindness of his teachers. He returns when Wu Chu-fan, playing Ho See-kei, discovers that Ah Sam is his own long-lost son — separated from him in the aforementioned air raid. Repentant, Ah Sam leads the police to the gang’s hideout and single-handedly saves the kidnapped boy. The film concludes with Lee tearfully begging forgiveness from his father, teachers, schoolmates, and ancestors.
On-screen, Bruce Lee begged forgiveness. Off-screen, he begged from no one and gave no quarter. Things were getting so difficult for his family that Bruce went back to America. The story goes that the Shaw Brothers Studio — the most powerful movie company in Hong Kong (see next chapter) — offered him a contract … which his mother forbade him to take, all but banishing him to the United States, praying that education there would straighten him out. So, at the moment when Bruce Lee was to gain his greatest success, he was forced to retreat.
The exile, self-imposed or not, had served its purpose. Bruce Lee was a stranger in a strange land at the age of eighteen, forced to work all the harder to excel. At first he enrolled at the Edison Technical High School in Seattle, but moved on to the University of Washington. His energy did not lessen, but at least it was directed. Lee worked in restaurants for awhile, but soon began teaching kung fu, aka gong fu. Bruce’s wing chun had been built on a foundation of
taichi (aka taiji, aka tai chi, aka tai chi-chuan), which had been taught to him by his father.
Taichi is a greatly misunderstood style and is represented by the yin-yang symbol. Even though that symbol pictures two ever-swirling, interchanging sides, it seems as if the majority of students only learn one-half of the art — the internal, “dance-like” form. Although powerful enough to be effective, it’s like vacuuming the house with the cleaner unplugged. True taichi is a balance of both internal, healing applications and external, martial applications. Combined with the practical effectiveness of wing chun, Lee had much to build upon. He thought deeply about his skills and developed them further while attending the University of Washington. Lee’s exhaustive research led to his writing the insightful Chinese Gung-Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense in the early 1960s. But by 1964, the demons that had led him to the Hong Kong streets were now pointing him toward Hollywood.
1964 was a particularly important one in Lee’s life. He married Linda Emery, moved to California, and met Ed Parker, Chuck Norris, Bob Wall, and Mike Stone. The latter quartet were all at the Ed Parker International Karate Championships. “He did a demonstration there, and I won the grand championship in the heavyweight division,” Stone told me. “Afterward we went out for a Chinese dinner. We would work out together one day a week. I would work out with him one day, Chuck Norris would work out with him another, and so would Joe Lewis.” He had much to teach these martial arts champions. All their skills were Japanese in origin. Bruce opened the world of Chinese kung fu to them. It was as if men who had only known ice all their life were suddenly introduced to the benefits of water.
