Hong Kong martial arts cinema: why King Boxer (1972), aka Five Fingers of Death, remains a fan favourite
- Released in March 1973 in the US, a few months before Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury kick-started the martial arts wave there, King Boxer was a huge success
- The film also inspired Marvel’s comic book series Iron Fist, which first appeared in 1974, and later became a Netflix series
The main claim to fame of King Boxer – also known as Five Fingers of Death – is that it launched the wave of martial arts films in the US that took place in the early 1970s. Picked up for US distribution by Warner Brothers, who were seeing success with the television series Kung Fu , King Boxer surprised everybody by topping the US box office charts for a week at the time.
The movie was released in the US in March in 1973, around a year after its Hong Kong debut. That was a few months before Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury kick-started the martial arts wave in America proper when it was released in June 1973.
King Boxer, directed by Walter Chung Chang-hwa, is not a classic martial arts film in terms of its depiction of fighting styles, or its representation of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy, or Confucian values. But it is highly entertaining, and it has become a lasting fan favourite.
In the early 1970s, due to the declining appeal of the wuxia (swordfighting) films that had dominated the box office during the previous decade, Hong Kong film studio Shaw Brothers switched to making films which featured kung fu instead.
Jimmy Wang Yu, who had risen to stardom as an actor in Shaw’s wuxia films, directed Shaw’s Chinese Boxer in 1970, and that film provided the blueprint for King Boxer. Not only does the later film address similar themes as Chinese Boxer, the story is very similar, and it features some of the same leading cast members.