King Hu

Hu Jinquan (simplified Chinese: 胡金铨; traditional Chinese: 胡金銓) was born in Beijing to a well-established family originating from Handan, Hebei. His grandfather was the governor of Henan in the late Qing dynasty. His father had studied in Japan and was the owner of the local coal mine, and his mother was a concubine.^[3] His uncle was a high-ranking official in the Republican government. Several of his brothers held high positions in the Communist government.

Hu grew up in Beijing as a child, and emigrated to British Hong Kong in 1949. at first he wanted to study in the United States, but could not raise the money for tuition. He then worked for the local Voice of America in Hong Kong.^[4]

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 a set decorator, actor, scriptwriter and assistant director. He acted in the classic 1959 film The Kingdom and the Beauty. Under the influence of Taiwanese director Li Han-Hsiang, Hu embarked on a directorial career, helping him on 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 in the Second Sino-Japanese War, but he is better remembered for his next film, Come Drink with Me (1966). Come Drink with Me was 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 films and his perpetual use of strong, valiant heroines.

Leaving the Shaw Brothers Studio in 1966, Hu travelled to Taiwan, where he made another wuxia movie, Dragon Inn. Dragon Inn broke box office records and became a phenomenal hit and cult classic, especially in Southeast Asia. This tense tale of highly skilled martial artists hidden in an inn was said to be the inspiration for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers (2004). In 2003, the award-winning Malaysian-born Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang made Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a tribute to Hu, in which all the action takes place during a closing cinema's last show of Dragon Inn.

Chief among the films which exemplify Hu's blend of Chan (Zen) Buddhism and unique Chinese aesthetics is A Touch of Zen, which won the Grand Prix de la Commission Superieur Technique in 1975 Cannes Film Festival,^[5] and which many regard as his masterpiece. 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 a young Sammo Hung. Other films include Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain (both dating from 1979, and shot in South Korea), which were loosely based on stories from Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The reason was that the government of South Korea would help sponsor the budgeting should he produce at least two films in the area. Both are now considered classics.

Though critically hailed, Hu's later films were less commercially successful than his first two films. After his late comedy masterpiece All the King's Men, he moved to California in the early 1980s. Late in his life, he made a brief return from semi-retirement in The Swordsman (1990) and Painted Skin (1992), but neither achieved the renown of his first two, financially successful wuxia films.

Hu loved Peking Opera and was a trustee of a Peking Opera institution. He promoted many young Peking Opera pupils into the film industry, such as Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.^[6]

Hu was multilingual, and was known to be fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, and adept in Korean and Japanese.

In 1981, Hu reunited with his nephew in the United States. He asked his nephew where his mother and father were and was told that his mother has not been heard from and his father was in a labor camp in Shanxi, but had since been in a car accident and died.^[7]

Hu spent the last decade of his life in Los Angeles. He died in Taipei of complications from angioplasty.^[8] At the time of his death, Hu was attached to direct The Battle of Ono, a project he had spent decades working on.^[9][10] He is buried in Whittier, California.

In a 2013 retrospective, the Harvard Film Archive Hu's influence on the wuxia genre as “[what] Kurosawa would do with the samurai film and Minnelli with the Hollywood musical. While Kurosawa had a direct influence on Hu, the comparison with Minnelli is equally apt since both men were highly cultured aesthetes who paid special attention to the décor and art direction of their films and who reveled in the ability of mise-en-scène, movement and the spatial composition of the frame to express character and the relations between characters.”^[2]

The British Film Institute wrote that "Hu is not simply the progenitor of the wuxia blockbuster: he goes beyond the escapist pleasures of the genre to take the audience on spiritual journeys that confound expectations."^[11]

Hu is considered one of the most influential figures in the history of Chinese-language cinema.^[2] Directors that have cited his influence include Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, and Tsai Ming-liang.^[12][13]

• King Hu at IMDb
• King Hu at Hong Kong Cinemagic
• Senses of Cinema - King Hu
• King Hu at the Hong Kong Movie Database