Bruce Lee and the Hong Kong film industry
In the 1970s, local studios used kung fu and Bruce Lee to push for international exposure
Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, Taiwan and pre-1950 mainland China were the chief "foreign" consumers of Hong Kong's Mandarin, Cantonese and other productions, but distribution globally, apart from Chinatowns in the US, was elusive until the rise of kung fu in general and Bruce Lee in particular.
As can be seen from the Hong Kong Film Archive's The Cinematic Matrix of Golden Harvest programme, Lee's studio, Golden Harvest, built upon his worldwide fame - first, by shooting The Way of the Dragon (1972) in Italy.
The first group of these films is being screened as part of the 37th Hong Kong International Film Festival.
But it wasn't until Lee's next feature, Enter the Dragon (1973), that Hong Kong was remade as an international setting in a manner totally unlike that of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) or The World of Suzie Wong (1960). These were Hollywood blockbusters with Caucasian male leads in which the natives were little more than extras or sex objects.
Enter the Dragon, by contrast, was the product of a home-grown studio showcasing a home-grown idol, and using an array of non-Chinese personalities to support him.
Not that Enter the Dragon was very Hong Kong in terms of its James Bondian plot or, for that matter, scenery - with two-thirds of the film taking place on a mysterious island that could just as easily have been in the Mediterranean or Caribbean.