King Hu ( ) (April 29, 1931
- January 14, 1997) was a Hong Kong
and Taiwan
-based
Chinese
film director whose
Wuxia films brought Chinese cinema to new technical and artistic
heights. It was his films
Come Drink With Me (大醉侠, 1966) and
Dragon Gate Inn (龍門客棧,
1967) which inaugurated a new generation of
wuxia films in
the late 1960s. He is also a noted
scriptwriter and set designer.
Birth and Early Life
Hu was
born in Beijing to a line of
well-established Mandarin family originated from Da Ming, Hebei
.
His
grandfather was the governor of Henan
in late
Qing
Dynasty
. He emigrated to Hong Kong in 1949.
Career
After moving to Hong Kong, Hu worked in a variety of occupations,
such as advertising consultant, artistic designer and producer for
a number of media companies, as well as a part-time English tutor.
In 1958 he joined the
Shaw Brothers
Studio as set decorator, actor, scriptwriter and assistant
director. Under the influence of Taiwanese director
Li Han-Hsiang, Hu embarked on a directorial
career, helping him helm the phenomenally successful
The Love Eterne (1963).
Hu's first film as a
full-fledged director was Sons of the Good Earth (1965), a
film set during the War of
Resistance against Japan
, but he is
better remembered for his next film, Come Drink With Me
(1966). Come Drink With Me is his first success and
remains a classic of the
wuxia genre, catapulting the then
20-year-old starlet
Cheng Pei-pei to
fame. Blending Japanese
samurai film
traditions with Western editing techniques and Chinese aesthetic
philosophy borrowed from
Chinese music
and
operatics, Hu began the trend of a
new school of
wuxia swordplay films and his perpetual use
of a female heroine as the central protagonist.
Leaving Shaw in 1966, Hu travelled to Taiwan, where he made another
wuxia movie,
Dragon Gate Inn.
Dragon Gate
Inn broke all box office and became a phenomenal hit and
cult classic, especially in the
Southeast Asia. This tense tale of
highly skilled martial artists hidden in an inn in part resembles
Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon and was said to be the inspiration behind
it;
Zhang Yimou's
House of Flying Daggers was
also said to be dedicated to this film.
Chief
amongst the films which exemplify Hu's blend of Chan Buddhism and unique Chinese aesthetics is his trilogy A Touch of Zen (which won the Technical
Prize in 1975 Cannes Film Festival
and which many regard as his masterpiece),
Raining in the Mountains and Legend of the
Mountains (both dating from 1979, and shot in Korea
), all of
which were loosely based on Pu
Songling's Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio. After releasing
A Touch of
Zen, Hu started his own production company and shot
The
Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and
The Valiant Ones (1975)
back to back on tight finances. The action choreography in both
these films was the work of
Sammo
Hung.
Though critically hailed, Hu's later films were ostensibly less
successful than his first two films. Late in his life, he made a
brief return from semi-retirement in
Swordsman (1990) and
Painted Skin
(1993), but the latter never achieved the renown of those two,
financially successful
wuxia films.
King Hu spent the last
decade of his life in Los Angeles
, he died in Los Angeles
from a stroke while preparing for another film
project, with a 23 year old girlfriend beside him.
Selected filmography
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