A Critical History of Chinese Film Remakes: From Shanghai to Hong Kong to Beijing and Beyond

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hsiao-peng Lu (1997). See also Berry (2010); Kim (2010).

2 That strangely antagonistic intimacy is furthermore suggested by a line of dialogue in the Shaw Brothers’ production The Avenging Eagle. Besides inspiring the making of The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles (1993), this martial-arts classic features a brief interlude in a bamboo forest in which the guilt-ridden hero ‘Black Eagle’ Chik Ming-sing (Ti Lung) tells his secretive, vengeance-seeking accomplice ‘Double Sleeve Knives’ Cheuk Yi-fan (Alexander Fu) that they have a ‘complicated relationship’, to which his companion responds, ‘It’s actually simple. We’re getting more intimate, we need each other’. Culminating with a lengthy, spectacular fight between them and Chik’s old master, Yoh Xi-hung (Ku Feng), the Eagle Chief responsible for Cheuk’s wife’s death, The Avenging Eagle underscores the truth of that earlier comment by showing the two heroes overcoming their differences and joining forces to defeat their common enemy.

3 Like Tsui Hark, Hong Kong director Johnnie To has helmed at least five remakes (not counting The Big Heat [Chengshi tejing, 1988], which makes titular reference to a 1953 Fritz Lang film of the same title and also alludes to scenes in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop [1987]). Several individuals in Japan and South Korea have made at least four remakes each, including Ichikawa Kon, Inoue Umetsugu, Masumura Yasuzō, Miike Takashi and Yu Hyun-mok.

4 In the words of one reviewer, the fact that ‘the original story’s gay element has been muted and transposed to Macau, outside Mainland borders’, betrays this film’s mainstream status, which is a marked departure from what director Zhang Meng had specialised in previously (e.g., politically progressive arthouse films that empathised with ‘the lowest and most exploited rung of society’ instead of touting ‘a jingoistic image of the nation’s economic prosperity, with a thriving post-‘80s generation basking in the so-called China Dream’). Lee (2016).

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David Scott Diffrient

David Scott Diffrient is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. His articles have been published in several journals and edited collections about film and television topics. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book East Asian Film Remakes (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) as well as the author of M*A*S*H (Wayne State University Press, 2008), Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television (Syracuse University Press, 2022), and (with coauthor Hye Seung Chung) Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2021).