Long before John Woo's 'heroic bloodshed' films
attracted international attention and acclaim Hong Kong cinema was
filled with action. Martial arts movies date to the silent-era of the
1920s. Tianyi Studios relocated to the colony from Shanghai in the
mid-1930s in the face of Chiang Kai-shek's ban on motion pictures
combining martial arts and magic that were the company's staple.
Cantonese-dialect productions appeared in the late 1930s in the wake of
filmmakers who emigrated to Hong Kong from the Mainland to escape the
Japanese occupation. In 1949, the first of what would become more than
one hundred movies was made about Wong Fei-hung, the Chinese folk hero
and martial arts legend. Mandarin-dialect movies emerged dominant in the
late 1960s and remained so for a decade, the period when 'chop socky'
flicks found an audience in the West. Between the end of World War Two
and 1980, the Hong Kong industry produced about one thousand martial
arts (swordplay and kung fu) films.
