Search results
永聯電影有限公司 Wing Luen (Yonglian) Movie Film Company : Production : Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman (1970)
Great Wall Movie Enterprises Limited (Chinese: 長城電影製片有限公司) was Hong Kong's leading left-wing studio and one committed to making progressive Mandarin films with social content as well as entertainment value. Unusual for Hong Kong films, some of their films were publicly shown in Maoist-era China.
While MP & GI bought mostly Great Wall films, Shaw Brothers concentrated on Feng Huang products and Kong Ngee Co acquired the Cantonese films of Sun Luen. Judging from the left-wing films of the 50s and 60s, Communist China was not intent on staging ideological activities in Hong Kong, aiming instead to maintain a point of contact with the outside.
After World War II, Shanghai filmmakers moved to Hong Kong and established four production companies-- Great Wall Movie Enterprises Ltd, The Feng Huang Motion Pictures Co., The Sun Luen Film Co. and The Chung Yuen Motion Picture Co., a joint venture between Great Wall and Sun Luen.
While traveling the Japanese countryside the blind masseur Zatoichi ( Shintaro Katsu) comes across the One Armed Swordsman, Wang Kang ( Jimmy Wang Yu ), who is in hiding and protecting a child from a corrupt Japanese priest and a group of yakuza.
Great Wall, Feng Huang and the Cantonese left-wing affiliate Sun Luen Film Company began to form a united front to become the hub of the left-wing film industry. The following year, Asia Pictures was established with funding from American sources.
Ranked among the “big four” Cantonese film studios in Hong Kong during the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, the studio style of Sun Luen and Union can be defined by a creative adaptation of the aesthetic taste and preferences of the south-bound intellectuals from Mainland China, an émigré community who had maintained a strong ...
