The movie responsible for kickstarting the kung fu genre is The Chinese Boxer, starring Hong Kong film legend Jimmy Wang Yu. Also known as The Hammer of God, the movie released in 1970, one year before Bruce Lee got his big break with Golden Harvest’s The Big Boss. Though Bruce Lee is the actor typically credited with creating the kung fu craze of the 1970s, he didn’t make the first martial arts movies.
The Hong Kong movie industry had already been heading in that direction for a few years. Beginning in the mid-1960s, a studio called Shaw Brothers, which never worked with Lee, started producing wuxia films, which are movies set in China’s past where the main characters battle it out with swords. The sword-fighting and revenge plots that took place in the movie proved popular with Chinese audiences, allowing Shaw Brothers to pump out a quite few hits in the wuxia genre, including Come Drink With Me, The One-Armed Swordsman, The Assassin, and Golden Swallow.
1970 saw Shaw Brothers, which also never hired Jackie Chan, experimented with something new by making The Chinese Boxer, which came from the mind of The One-Armed Swordsman star Jimmy Wang Yu, who was the studio’s biggest and most profitable star at the time. Wang Yu envisioned a story that centered on kung fu and karate. The actor wrote, directed, and starred in the film, which told the story of a kung fu student who has to avenge his master and all of his fellow students, who were murdered by a vicious gang of karate experts. To hide his identity, Wang Yu’s character wore a mask and began slowly killing off his enemies. Revenge quests weren’t new for Shaw Brothers or Wang Yu, but what made this one different was that it didn’t involve swords. Instead, the fights were mostly empty-handed.
The focus on hand-to-hand combat in The Chinese Boxer is what makes this film the first true martial arts movie, and the beginning of a new era for action movies in Hong Kong. The choreography in the fight scenes, the idea of a hero who has to learn powerful punching techniques to beat the enemy, the contest between kung fu and karate, and the huge amount of success it enjoyed at the box office inspired Shaw Brothers (and other studios) to produce more films with similar themes. The actor who played its villain, martial arts superstar Lo Lieh, actually went on to become the first international martial arts superstar with the release of 1972’s Five Fingers on Death.
Warm reception to The Chinese Boxer spawned a number of successful kung fu flicks, with Five Fingers of Death being just one of several. What producers and directors ultimately discovered from The Chinese Boxer is that audiences enjoyed intense, well-choreographed battle sequences, and this served as an evolution of the much shorter sword fights from the wuxia films that preceded them. It’s worth noting that the industry didn’t abandon the use of weapons in its fight scenes, but began combining them with kung fu.
In an effort to make their kung fu look even more authentic, studios started seeking out trained martial artists, as opposed to Wang Yu, who didn't have a kung fu background. As a result, new stars like David Chiang, Ti Lung, Chen Kuan-tai, and of course, Bruce Lee, were born in the early 1970s. The Chinese Boxer paved the way for even bigger kung fu films, like Five Fingers of Death and Enter the Dragon, which helped garner international attention for the martial arts genre.
