Stephen Teo's Top Ten Hong Kong Movies
This is my list of the Top Ten of the last century.
THE PURPLE HAIRPIN (1959, dir. Lee Tit)
Included because a Top Ten of the last century list should have a Cantonese Opera
Film in the list, and this is perhaps the best of the Yam-Pak collaborations. It works
well as a blend of opera and film.
THE WILD, WILD ROSE (1960, dir. Wang Tianlin)
A fine example of the Mandarin-musical, and one of the best adaptations of
Bizet's Carmen, with brilliant show-stopping numbers performed by Grace Chang
(Hong Kong cinema's greatest singing star in my opinion). Other things in its favour:
evocative setting of North Point nightclubs, and Zhang Yang's surprisingly affective
performance as the Don Jose figure.
THE GREEN-EYED DEMONESS (1967, dir. Chan Lit-bun)
Marvellous Cantonese martial arts-cum-horror picture that is the true precursor
of the late 90s techno-martial arts flicks like The Storm Riders, etc., but so
much better and with such great Gothic atmosphere.
A TOUCH OF ZEN (1970, dir. King Hu)
Strictly speaking a Taiwanese film but there's an undeniable HK association in that
director King Hu began his career in HK and he was one of the great pioneers of the new
style martial arts picture that grew in popularity in the mid-60s onwards (cf. Come
Drink With Me, The One-Armed Swordsman, The Golden Swallow, etc). Still, A Touch
of Zen wouldn't have made it into the list simply because of that association. It
contains great action setpieces and exhibits great finesse in art direction, sets,
costumes, cinematography -- in virtually all departments of filmmaking -- but finally, it
is a film that truly transcends the political barriers that have largely kept the three
Chinas (the Mainland, HK, Taiwan) apart, through its examinations of Confucianist and
Buddhist philosphies and its assertion of a universal understanding of Chinese art within
the scope of a martial arts epic. Such a "universal understanding" is
manifested, as I see it, in Hu's interpretation of the Xia Nü (the Chinese title, meaning
Lady Fighter) -- this central protagonist is more than the equal of any male fighter but
she is quite plainly portrayed as a woman bound by the social conventions of her time. Yet
she gives up her baby born out of wedlock to take up holy orders as a way of recompensing
social conventions, and this is how Hu has managed to display greatness by conjuring up
universal themes and associations from characters apart from mastery of technique and
narrative.
THE VALIANT ONES (1975, dir. King Hu)
I thought we should include this one as an example of a truly Hong Kong-style
King Hu martial arts masterpiece (since Hu's other masterpiece, A Touch of Zen,
was made in Taiwan), capped by Sammo Hung swordfighting choreography. The last fight
sequence is an eye-popping, adrenalin-inducing, and, above all, emotionally-draining
climax which I regard as the finest climactic setpieces ever seen in HK cinema, and which
evidently influenced Tsui Hark into designing his own great climactic fight sequence in The
Blade (q.v.).
DISCIPLES OF SHAOLIN (1975, dir. Zhang Che)
Included in the Top Ten because I wanted a kung fu picture on the list. Zhang
Che, and his martial arts choreographer Lau Kar-leong, develop a foot fetish motif by
making the hero (played by the late Alexander Fu Sheng) an expert with kung fu footwork --
leaving his imprint on the backside of a bully without the latter feeling anything, for
example. After the climactic battle, the hero is mortally wounded but before he expires,
he caresses his foot. Yes, it sounds like camp but this is one of director Zhang Che's
melancholic masterpieces of martial arts cinema (cf. The Assassin, The Golden Swallow,
The Duel, The Boxer from Shantung, etc) with allusions to Bruce Lee's The Big
Boss -- and much better, in my view. Director Zhang Che's mastery of film language
includes impressive use of black and white segments (at a time when movies were mostly
shot in colour) -- the hero's death occurs in one such sequence. As an extended time
narrative, these B & W sequences work in an almost surreal fashion.
NOMAD (1984, dir. Patrick Tam)
Patrick Tam is better known today as Wong Kar-wai's mentor (Wong worked under
Tam's wing as his scriptwriter on the 1987 Final Victory; and Tam edited Days
of Being Wild and Ashes of Time) but he will be remembered for Nomad,
one of the youth movies of the 80s that marry libertarian impulses with those impulses of
social responsibility that somehow makes this an oxymoronic youth movie -- being heavy in
the social and light in the libertarian. An example: Leslie Cheung uttering "We are
society!" Compare and contrast with Marlon Brando's line in The Wild One:
"What'cha got?"
DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990, dir. Wong Kar-wai)
The great film of the 90s -- an updated Rebel Without a Cause with
Leslie Cheung as Jim Stark (the James Dean part), Maggie Cheung as Judy (the Natalie Wood
part), and Jacky Cheung as Plato (the Sal Mineo part). Throw in extras such as Andy Lau's
policeman, and Tony Leung's mystery bit at the end, and you have a very resonant youth
movie indeed. So resonant, in fact, that it's much greater and evocative than the sum of
its parts, including its nostalgic associations with Ray's Rebel and 60s "Ah
Fei" culture (and even narrative allusions, perhaps unconscious, to Joseph L.
Mankiewicz' classics All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa, etc). So much greater
and evocative is it that it's difficult to pin-point just how great and evocative it
really is. But the identity quest is certainly one of the great features, and the kind of
unrequited romances that mark Maggie Cheung's character study is certainly one of the
evocative ticks (alluding to the tradition of Chinese melodramas such as Spring in a
Small City, etc). In the final analysis, the mysterious ending makes Days a
really abstract youth movie and I suspect that it's because of this that this is one youth
movie that will keep us middle-aged jocks forever young.
THE BLADE (1996, dir. Tsui Hark)
Tsui Hark is Hong Kong cinema's genuine movie brat, and he's shown it so many
times before in evocatively-designed movies such as Shanghai Blues, Peking Opera
Blues, Green Snake, The Lovers, etc that it comes as no surprise that The Blade is
just one more in a routine indulgence of HK movie movie-culture that the director is prone
to indulge in. Well, The Blade is cinematically-compulsive and sound-bitten, and
it's truly frenzied with the kind of violence that we instantly recognize as HK movie
violence (not your Hollywood sort!). Which all amounts to Integrity in cinematic terms.
More -- there's the kind of Tsui Hark boldness that most HK directors lack. Compare this
with Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time, and you'll find out that boldness and daring
is what Tsui Hark is really all about (and that WKW lacks that hard edge to make him a
truly effective director of martial arts cinema).
RUNNING OUT OF TIME (1999, dir. Johnnie To)
Johnnie To is Hong Kong cinema's most surprising end-of-millennium auteur. To's
thrillers -- A Hero Never Dies,Where a Good Man Goes, ROOT, and those made under
his aegis: Expect the Unexpected and The Longest Nite -- are
game-playing occasions. They are all apocalyptic up to a point, but To gives way to a
rather touching soft core in his narratives. The softness doesn't make one bleary-eyed or
dims one's wits; on the contrary it's elemental to the game and it's part of the fun. If
playing the game isn't what you are into, you've just been suckered into hoarding up your
sensibilities just in case the millennium bug strikes and wipes out all your faculties.
12 Jan 2000 © Stephen Teo
STEPHEN TEO is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra
Dimensions, published in 1997 by the British Film Institute. He has worked for the
Hong Kong International Film Festival as the English Editor of the Hong Kong Cinema
Retrospective catalogues. He currently resides in Melbourne, Australia, where he is
working on a thesis, and teaches part time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
