The Sifu: Lau Kar-leung

While the names of directors King Hu and Chang Cheh may be better known than that of Lau Kar-leung, it is difficult to imagine the modern wuxia or kung-fu genres, as they developed at Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios in the 1960s and ’70s, without the innovations introduced by Lau, who, among other accomplishments, helped inject both with a new strain of physical comedy. Born in 1934 in Guangzhou, where he began his intensive study of Southern Chinese martial arts at age nine, Lau moved with his family to British Hong Kong in 1948 and in due time found a demand for his talents in the colony’s burgeoning film industry, which employed him as an extra and fight choreographer. Distinguishing himself in the latter capacity in films by Chang and others, by the mid-’70s Lau was given the opportunity to direct, turning out a total of 25 films for the Shaws (and several more on his own, following their shuttering in 1985), among them some of the uncontested masterworks of Asian action cinema. A virtuoso of the widescreen frame and the punctuating zoom whose cadenced cutting lends his action set-pieces rollicking rhythm, Lau’s directorial efforts are as artful as they are entertaining—which is to say, incredibly so.

DCPs provided courtesy of Celestial Pictures Limited