26-2-09: ME AND WONG FEI-HUNG

Memories of Kwan Tak-hing.

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Never in the history of cinema has a performer become as synonymous with a single role as actor Kwan Tak-hing did with that of Wong Fei-hung. The major reason for this is that no-one ever played the same character as many times. Starting with 1949’s ‘True Story of Wong Fei-hung’, Kwan played the legendary kung fu master in almost 80 full length features and one television series. By comparison, Bela Lugosi only played Dracula a couple of times; Shintaro Katsu starred as Zatoichi in a mere 27 movies. Kwan’s nearest competition would be the much loved Japanese comedian Kiyoshi Atsumi, who played Tora-san in almost 50 movies. It’s said that, when Kwan first essayed the role, Wong’s widow, Mok Kwai-lan, told him he looked just like her late husband. By the time of his passing in 1996, as far as the prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /Hong Kong people were concerned, Kwan Tak-hing’s was the face Wong Fei-hung.

I first saw Kwan on-screen in one of his late era performances, in Yuen Woo-ping’s kung fu comedy, The Magnificent Butcher. It was at a long-since vanished Chinese movie theatre, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, situated on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown. Kwan’s role in the film was basically a memorable cameo. He demonstrates his skills at penmanship for his students, before fighting a calligraphy duel with villain Lee Hon-san. Up to that point, all the martial arts movie heroes I’d seen had been in their 30s, at most. I remember how impressed I was by this gung fu grandpa.

So I started reading up on this extraordinary character. This was in the pre-Internet era, and information on Hong Kong cinema was much harder to come by. Ric Meyers’ book From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas contained a black-and-white image of Kwan in his heyday, and mentioned his prolificacy. A super fan called Tim Greenwood (now resident in Taiwan) produced a pamphlet citing his favourite kung fu movies. He mentioned the black-and-white Wong Fei-hung films, starring Kwan Tak-hing, but admitted that he hadn’t seen any of them!

At that time, the only way to see the older Hong Kong action films in the UK was on pirated videotapes of wildly varying quality. It was on this format that I saw Kwan in his swansong as Wong Fei-hung, Yuen Woo-ping’s ‘Dreadnaught’. Cast alongside rising stars Leung Kar-yan and Yuen Biao, Kwan’s patrician Wong has to contend with a kung fu fighting serial killer. I also tracked down a really bad copy of The Skyhawk, a 1974 attempt by Golden Harvest to revive the Wong Fei-hung series in colour. This was directed by the great Korean film-maker Cheng Chang-ho, who had previously directed the ground-breaking King Boxer for Shaw Bros.

The Skyhawk has since been re-released on a (relatively!) decent DVD edition. When I was watching it again, I suddenly remembered that I’d seen one sequence (Sammo Hung fighting some thugs on a wooden bridge) as a teenager, on a Christian TV programme screened in the UK. The theme of the show was that these ‘kung fu movies’ were violent and immoral, and should be banned. The clips used to illustrate this screed had an effect opposite to the intended one: I wanted to see more of those ‘bad’ films as soon as possible!

Skyhawk had an interesting history. The rise of Mandarin language movies brought about the end of the original black-and-white Cantonese Wong Fei-hung film series. The last of these, Bravely Crushing The Fire Formation, was shot in 1970. Three years later, Shaw Brothers decided to produce a colour Wong Fei-hung film. When I met Kwan, he told me that they had approached him to reprise his signature role, but he didn’t believe they would “take care” of him. (They probably offered him the same basic actor’s contract that Bruce Lee turned down!) Shaws went ahead anyway, casting the prolific character player Ku Feng as Wong in ‘Master Of Kung Fu’ (1973).

Kwan Tak-hing was furious. After all, wasn’t he the real Wong Fei-hung? He approached Shaw’s bitter rival, Golden Harvest, and signed a contract that would have seen him shoot two new Wong Fei-hung films back-to-back. The first of these was to be shot on location in Thailand. Bruce Lee’s Harvest debut, The Big Boss, had also been shot there, and the films share several cast members. Originally, the female lead from ‘Boss’, Maria Yi, was cast as Wong’s ‘niece’, only to be replaced by Nora Miao. Despite the limited resources at his disposal, Cheng Chang-ho, working closely with action director Sammo Hung, crafted a worthy return to action for Kwan Tak-hing.

Unfortunately, local audiences had moved on from the Wong Fei-hung days, and the film did indifferent business. Harvest shelved the second movie, and it was to be a further five years before the kung fu icon returned to the screen in Magnificent Butcher.

(Next: Meeting that man Kwan.)