The other dominant director for Shaw at the time was Chang Cheh, who was more interested in “yang gang (staunch masculinity)”. Hu was concerned with having dominant female characters and “grace: the fleetness of motion and lightness of touch”. In this movie, she’s a main character and is not wearing ornate dresses. Another big difference between this and most of the future Shaw Brother movies are the roles that female play. It was more based on the Peking Opera Style and a ballet, where the fights are more layered. The style of fighting was different than in past or prior martial arts fights. One production story was that he spent over two hours on the set working on the Drunken Master’s clothing, in order to make it just right. One interesting visual is the addition of to smoke into various scenes, Hu thought that it made the scene more interesting. King Hu’s directing was meticulous, with strong visuals, art direction, and costume designs. In the end, both masters must battle and Golden Swallow has to fight the bandits in order to rescue her brother.Įverything is top notch in this movie, which is why it’s considered to be one of the greatest ever. The gang of bandits is led by an evil abbot named Liao Kung, who had previously killed his master. She battles a portion of the gang at a local inn and negotiations turn deadly.Ī local drunk named Fan Da-Pei comes to her aid and she eventually learns that he is a martial arts master. Golden swallow is sent to rescue the boy, who also happens to be her brother. A group of bandits kidnap a General’s son in exchange for the release of their imprisoned leader. Īn epic wuxia masterpiece directed by King Hu, is considered to be one of the greatest Hong Kong films ever made. Many of Hong Kong cinemas great directors and actors got their start either working on a Shaw film or on their television station Television Broadcast Limited, commonly known as TVB. Shaw decided to focus on its television station TVB, and stopped making films in 1986. Their reign started to end when other filmmakers branched off to create their own studios, such as Golden Harvest. They also invented their own machine for making martial art effects sound. They shot the films without sound to save time and then recorded the sound later, similar to the Italian film industry, and then recorded the sound later. They were able to produce around 40 films a year and since there was no union, the actors could work as long as 24 hours a day. They employed around 1,500 actors and technical employees, 500 of which lived on the studio.
#SHAW BROTHERS MOVIES DUBBED IN ENGLISH FREE MOVIE#
Called Movie Town, it had somewhere near “850,000 square feet of sound stages, processing labs, residences for casts and crew, and a back lot…of temples, fortresses…and battlefields from 5,000 years of Chinese history”. But everything changed in 1967 when they released The One-Armed-Swordsman, Chang Cheh’s macho, blood-soaked, Mandarin language martial-arts movie that captured the rage and social turmoil of the sixties, and a studio was born”.Īt its height, they had one of the largest working studios in the world. Before Shaw came onto the scene the major stars were women, the primary dialect used was Cantonese, and musicals and romances ruled the box office. The Shaw Brothers had been involved in the film industry since the 1920’s, but the Hong Kong studio wasn’t founded until 1958. This can be seen by the filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Tsai Ming-Liang paying tribute to the studio, the character of Pai Mei being used and veteran Shaw actors such as Gordon Liu still performing. Despite no longer making movies, their influence is still strong today. Not that long ago the Shaw Brothers ruled Hong Kong Cinema. When Kill Bill Volume 1 first premiered in theaters and the opening credits was a visual of the Shawscope logo, with those trumpets sounding off, how many viewers actually knew what that meant? For many others, it was a geek freak out that brought back tons of memories of crazy martial arts action shaolin monks battling ninja, evil masters with crazy long eyebrows, intense training sequences, one-armed swordsmen, absurd monsters, and so much more.