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Chang Cheh — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Early life

Born to a military family in Hangzhou and raised in Shanghai Chang studied politics at the Faculty of Law of the Central University of Chongqing but dropped out to join a social education troupe. After World War II ended, he attracted the notice of Chang Tao-fan a high-ranking KMT official who appointed him secretary of the Cultural Movement Committee (CMC), Shanghai. His first contact with the film industry came when he took up the cause of the "Twelve Filmmakers Collaboration Case" in which twelve Chinese filmmakers who worked for the Japanese-owned China United Film Company during the war were accused of collaborating with Japanese forces.

At this time, Chang ran a KMT-operated theater in Shanghai's Hongkou district and had difficulty securing films until he befriended the Liu Brothers (Liu Zhongliang and Liu Zhonghao) who ran the Jincheng Grand, now the Lyric, and Jindu Theaters. The Liu Brothers also produced films and as political tensions grew between Nationalists and socialists, Chang suggested that they movie equipment and personnel to Taiwan as a safeguard. To mask the move, they arranged to film a movie in Taiwan and Chang appointed himself its director. Happenings in Ali Shan (1949) became Taiwan's first locally-produced Mandarin-language film, and the song Chang wrote for it, "Over the Green Hill", became a popular hit.

After this experience, Chang caught the eye of Chiang Ching-kuo, the oldest son of President Chiang Kai-shek, and became a member of his newly-established "Chief Political Department" and through that he became an official in the only film studio in Taiwan at the time, the KMT-run Central Motion Picture Corporation. However, Chang got caught in the middle of a political struggle and when he received an invitation from the MP&GI star Helen Li Mei to come to Hong Kong and direct her film Wild Fire (1957) he leapt at the chance to escape. Li produced the film herself and wanted a younger director who collaborate with her, but because Chang was unknown in Hong Kong rumors spread that the two were having an affair, and MP&GI persuaded her to remove Chang and finish shooting the film with an assistant.

After that, Chang became a movie critic writing reviews for New Life Evening Post and columns for Taiwan's United Daily News, which caught the eye of MP&GI's Stephen Soong, who recommended him for a contract as a screenwriter for the company. Chang was unhappy there and within a year he had been recommended by his bridge partner, Raymond Chow, to Shaw Brothers as a screenwriter and took a contract with Shaw Brothers that began the day his MP&GI contract ended.

Early years at Shaw Brothers

Shaw Brothers' enormous Movietown film studio opened in 1961, around the same time Chang started working there, and he successfully convinced the company's head, Sir Run Run Shaw, not to soundproof the studios and instead shoot films without sound and dub them later. As a result, Chang became head of the dubbing department as well as a screenwriter. In 1965 he received his first directing credit at Shaw alongside Yuan Qiu-feng for the huangmei opera movie, The Butterfly Chalice.

In 1965, Shaw Brothers' magazine, Southern Screen, published an article called "Shaw Launches Colour Wuxia Century" in which it announced seven new films that were either completed or in production, claiming, “Shaws will break with tradition...Creating a new vista for martial arts films. The fake, fantastical, and theatrical fighting and the so-called special effects

of the past will be replaced by realistic action and fighting that immediately decides life or death.” The films were Temple of the Red Lotus (1965) and The Twin Swords (1965), which were both supervised by Chang and starred Jimmy Wong Yu; Tiger Boy (1966), a black and white low-budget film written and directed by Chang, also starring Jimmy Wong Yu; Come Drink With Me (1966) directed by King Hu and starring Cheng Pei-pei; Knight of Knights (1966) written by Chang; and One-Armed Swordsman (1967), written and directed by Chang, starring Jimmy Wong Yu, and featuring action choreography by Tong Kai and Lau Kar-leung. It became a massive hit, often heralded as the Hong Kong movie to earn one million dollars at the box office, although in reality that barrier had been broken by The Golden Eagle (1964) three years previously. The success of One-Armed Swordsman heralded a new wave of martial arts movies at Shaw, shot in color, featuring more violent and realistic action choreography, and focusing on male, rather than female, leads who were Hong Kong's biggest box office draws at the time. The other two movies in the "Colour Wuxia Century" met less auspicious fates. The Sword and the Lute was shelved for two years until 1967, and Red Maiden was never released.

That same year, Chang also wrote and directed the Jimmy Wong Yu movie, The Assassin, another hit with action choreography by Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai. Together, this team would go on to make Golden Swallow (1968) a sequel to King Hu's classic wuxia picture Come Drink With Me co-starring Cheng Pei-pei and Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969), both of which became box office hits.

The Iron Triangle

In late 1969/early 1970, Jimmy Wong Yu broke his contract with Shaw Brothers and the ensuing legal conflict saw him barred from making films in Hong Kong for three years. Without his leading man and feeling like his movies were simply recycling previous films Chang made a musical, The Singing Thief (1969), and hired its screenwriter, Chiu Kang-chien, to write Dead End (1969), a semi-experimental "youth gone wild" thriller which he believed would represent a new direction for his work. However, the movie ran afoul of local censors, and Chang felt he needed to return to wu xia films.

Chang took two young actors he had been working with and successfully paired them together as action leads in Have Sword Will Travel (1969). David Chiang came from a film family and he had been working as a stuntman at Shaw. Noting his good Mandarin, Chang began giving him lines, leading to bigger roles. Ti Lung had entered Shaw's Actor Training Program and after impressing Chang in a minor role in Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969), Chang had offered him the lead in Dead End. In 1970, Chang paired them in his movie Vengeance! which represented a new direction for him as a filmmaker. He abandoned the Qing Dynasty setting of most wu xia movies for a movie set in the early Republican era, and he abandoned wu xia swordplay for kung fu. The movie was an enormous hit, and won Chang "Best Director" and David Chiang (billed as John Chiang) "Best Actor" at the 16th Asian Film Festival, the first time a Hong Kong film had won these two categories.

One year later, Chang delivered another David Chiang/Ti Lung action picture set in the early Republican era, The Duel (1971), which became the second martial arts movie to be dubbed into English and receive a general release in the United States. Now linked firmly in the public's mind, Chang, Ti Lung, and David Chiang became known as the "Iron Triangle" and would go on to make 19 movies together, not counting Vengeance! and the five films they made before it.

Chang's Film Company & the Shaolin Cycle

Around 1974, Shaw Brothers encouraged Chang to start his own production company, which he called Chang's Film Co. (in Chinese 長弓電影公司, or Longbow Film Co.). Shaw had funds in Taiwan that could not be transferred out of the country due to financial controls and they wanted Chang to use these funds to make Taiwan-based productions. Shaw received all the profit from these movies, but because Chang was in charge of production he had more freedom.

While checking into a hotel in Taipei, Chang ran into popular Hong Kong comedian Michael Hui. During their conversation, Hui told Chang that Taiwanese and Hong Kong films should focus on the folklore and traditions of Southern China, including their martial arts. When Chang returned to Hong Kong he met with Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai to discuss how to make authentic Southern Chinese style martial arts movies and Lau Kar-leung suggested focusing on the legends of Shaolin Temple.

Their first Shaolin movie, Heroes Two (1974), started with the burning of Shaolin Temple and focused on the Southern Chinese folk hero, Fong Sai-yuk, played here by Alexander Fu Sheng, a charismatic 20 year old graduate of Shaw's Southern Drama School. The movie emphasized the realism of Southern Chinese martial arts styles and in theaters it was preceded by a 9-minute short film called "Three Styles of Hung School's Kung Fu" in which stars Alexander Fu Sheng, Chen Kuan-tai, and fellow Shaw's actor, Chi Kuan-chun demonstrate authentic Southern style kung fu. It was the first movie for Chang's Film Company and became a box office success. Chang had enormous confidence in Alexander Fu Sheng's potential and cast him in the youth drama Friends (1974) that same year for which he won "Best Newcomer" at the 20th Asian-Pacific Film Festival.

Fu Sheng went on to play one of the leads in all of Chang's follow-up Shaolin movies, including Men From the Monastery (1974), Shaolin Martial Arts (1974), and the epic Five Shaolin Masters, which Chang claimed drained the last of Shaw's money captured in Taiwan. It was also the first of these movies to be fully filmed in Taiwan, and because Tong Kai did not want to travel, Lau Kar-leung choreographed it with his brother, Lau Kar-wing. Fu Sheng also starred in Disciples of Shaolin (1975) but during the filming of this movie Chang and Lau Kar-leung fell out over artistic differences and it would be the last movie they completed together. Reportedly, Lau would work for a few days on Chang's historical epic, Marco Polo (1975), before walking off the set, vowing to quit the film industry and movie to America to open his own martial arts schools. Mona Fong, Run Run Shaw's mistress and then head of production at Shaw Brothers, persuaded him to come back to Hong Kong instead and make his directorial debut, Spiritual Boxer (1975).

With his films now attracting Taiwanese investors as well as Shaw's, Chang decided to shoot a World War II film, 7-Man Army (1976), set in 1933, followed by Boxer Rebellion (1976) set in 1900. With a Taiwanese distributor, Lin Chong-feng, paying $1 million Hong Kong dollars for the Taiwanese rights, at a time when the average Shaw Brothers movie was budgeted at $200,000 Hong Kong dollars, Chang rented costumes from Europe, cast Richard Harrison for a role, and convinced actress Li Li-hua to come out of retirement to play the Empress Dowager in the film. For 7-Man Army, the Taiwanese military contributed troops, tanks, artillery, and aircraft for certain scenes. However, Chang's association with Chiang Ching-kuo caught up with him. Chiang's close associate, General Wang Sheng, considered himself the natural successor to the presidency and didn't appreciate the return of Chang Cheh, viewed as a one-time favorite of President Chang's. He pressed for Chang to return to Hong Kong, and claimed that films like Boxer's Rebellion showing Allied forces invading China should be banned. While the film was not banned, it was cut substantially and did not perform well at the box office. When the movie was released in Hong Kong, British censors forced Shaw to change its title to Spiritual Fists, and cut it further. It failed there, too.

Despite the failure of the film, Chang's Taiwanese investor and distributor, Lin Chong-feng, stuck with him and offered him more money. Upon hearing of this, Run Run Shaw flew to Taiwan and offered Chang a $1 million, five-year contract to come back to Hong Kong and Shaw Studios. Worried that the Taiwanese film market was going into decline, Chang accepted.

Venoms Mob and later career

Before he left Taiwan, Chang had started working with several young stunt performers. Philip Kwok had attended to the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts and gotten a job doing stunts on Shaolin Avengers (1976). Lau Kar-leung pointed him out as being particularly impressive, so Chang asked screenwriter Ni Kuang to write a role for him in Marco Polo (1975). Lu Feng and Chiang Sheng also studied Chinese Opera in Taiwan, but at a different school than Kwok. However, the three of them knew each other and soon Lu Feng was working with Lau Kar-leung as an assistant choreographer, and Chiang Sheng came with them as a stunt performer. When Chang returned to Hong Kong he took them with him. There he decided to team them up with Alexander Fu-sheng on a movie he had in production called Chinatown Kid (1977), a showcase for a lot of his Taiwanese talent including Robert Tai and Johnny Wang Lung-wei. Philip Kwok would co-star with Alexander Fu-sheng, alongside a 22 year old newcomer who had beaten 1,000 candidates for the role, Sun Chien, and an accomplished Mantis Fist boxer, and the accountant at Chang's production company, Lo Meng. Lu Feng and Chiang Sheng appeared in small parts doing stunts.

Sensing he had something, Chang asked Ni Kuang to write a script using these five newcomers and the resulting film The Five Venoms (1978) became a hit in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the actors became collectively known in the West as the Venoms Mob. Even though Chang Cheh dismissed the movies he made on his return to Shaw Brothers as the "recycling of tired, worn-out wuxia and fist-and-kick action films" he would make 25 movies featuring either the full Venoms Mob or some combination thereof. After making Ode to Gallantry (1982) the Venoms disbanded and returned to Taiwan, where Philip Kwok directed his only movie, Ninja in the Deadly Trap (1982). The following year, Chang's final film for Shaw Brothers was released, The Weird Man (1983), and his contract was not renewed.

Seeing the great success of the Mainland China-shot Shaolin Temple (1982), Chang made it known that he would like to try the same. He shot The Dancing Warrior (1985) partially in New York City, which co-starred Shaolin wu shu instructor, Dennis Brown, and later that year the Chinese Ministry of Culture invited him to shoot a movie in Mainland China. Chang relocated his career again and filmed Great Shanghai 1937 (1986) followed by Cross the River (1988) as well as four more Mainland-set movies, some in association with various regional studios across Mainland China, including Slaughter in Xi'An (1990), which was filmed with the famed Xi'An Film Studio, birthplace of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers.

In 1992, he released his final movie, Ninja in Ancient China (1993), and retired from filmmaking. He remained active as an advocate for Hong Kong film and filmmakers, and was in regular touch with the Hong Kong Film Archive. In 2001, they asked him to write his memoir, which he sent in weekly installments via fax. In March, 2002, the first draft was finished and in April of that year he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 21st Hong Kong Film Awards. He died in June of that year.

Themes and techniques

Chang is most closely associated with two terms he popularized. The first is yanggang or “masculinity” which appears in his films starting with 1967's One-Armed Swordsman. Frustrated by the fact that most of Hong Kong's major stars were women while the biggest cinematic icons around the world were men like John Wayne and Steve McQueen he believed Hong Kong movies could find a bigger audience by promoting male stars. After all, he reasoned, good-looking young men would appeal to both male and female audiences. As a result, his films focus on the friendship between men and the code of brotherhood, with their lead characters often men who are either angry young swordsmen, martyrs, or other outsiders who defy authority.

These characters are bold, love to fight, and are willing to die for their causes. In his early films, many of his main characters have been wronged by either the system or love, and their send of self-respect and yanggang is only reborn through training and the loyalty of their friends. As a result, they are willing to fight and die for these friends.

The second term associated with Chang's work is xiaozi which he first used as part of the Chinese title for 1975's Disciples of Shaolin aka (洪拳)Shaolin (小子)Xiaozi which would loosely translate into Shaolin Boxing Punk. Xiaozi or "boxing punk" is Northern Chinese Mandarin slang that made its way into Southern Chinese Cantonese vocabulary through Chang's films and it means a young, good-looking kid who doesn't respect anyone and who's a good fighter. As Chang himself describes it, "Xiaozi was that brash image of youth, a combination of liveliness and rebelliousness with good physique and good humor."

Alexander Fu Sheng embodied the avatar of xiaozi cool in Chang's Shaolin Cycle, and the xiaozi image continued in Jackie Chan’s breakthrough portrayal of a young, brash Wong Fei-hung in Drunken Master (1978) and in Jet Li’s performance of the Southern Chinese folk hero Fong Sai-yuk in Fong Sai-yuk (1993), although shades of it are also present in Gordon Liu’s portrayal of a young Wong Fei-hung in Lau Kar-leung’s second feature, Challenge of the Masters (1976) and in Yuen Biao’s portrayal of real-life wing chun practitioner, Leung Jan, in Sammo Hung's The Prodigal Son (1981).

Chang targeted his action movies at young people, writing, "They are energetic and thus more prone to pugnacious, aggressive behavior than adults…Films that favour action and excitement are born as a response." In particular, he believed that the times in which he began his career deeply influenced his movies, writing, "The 60s and 70s were the most energetic periods of Hong Kong — the period when young people exerted themselves. The age of love tales was the past. The masses were striving ahead in a rebellious mood and the colonial administration was receiving a shock to the system." 1967 saw Hong Kong wracked by civil disobedience and a terrorist bombing campaign and the same week that One-Armed Swordsman was released was the same week as the Shau Tau Kok Incident that saw five Hong Kong police officers machine-gunned on the border between Hong Kong and China, and while he was shooting The Assassin, riots broke out in Hong Kong. Chang wrote, "My wuxia films were often tinted with the passions of the times."

Chang emphasized emotion and, as action choreographer Tong Kai said, "he loved blood and excitement and crowd scenes teeming with soldiers." He pioneered the use of a handheld camera in Hong Kong cinema and studied sports broadcasts and American films like Bonnie & Clyde to perfect his use of slow motion to emphasize action. Using rapid cutting, dynamic screen composition, and copious amounts of blood, the violence in his movies seemed sensational and extreme compared to what had come before. As one critic wrote, “He is fond of emotional overstatement, expressed through an excessive use of close-ups, many in baroque compositions with odd angles...creating a slapdash energy.”

Unlike many directors, Chang was deeply involved with choreographing his action scenes. Screenwriter Ni Kuang would only indicate in his scripts when a fight happened and who was injured, but Chang would work closely with his action choreographers, telling them exactly what he wanted, placing his own cameras, and setting the frame. Part of his precision was due, in part, to the fact that Chang worked with the same cinematographer, Yukio Miyaki (aka Kung Mu-to), on 45 films, from 1969’s The Singing Thief to 1980’s Heaven and Hell.

Chang Cheh

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Chang Cheh

🎬 Filmography

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Chang Cheh across IJR

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Article

Early life

Early years at Shaw Brothers

The Iron Triangle

Chang's Film Company & the Shaolin Cycle

Venoms Mob and later career

Themes and techniques

Influence

As lyricist

Filmography

TV series

🎬 Filmography

Chang Cheh across IJR