Huang Feng was born in Hefei, Anhui, on 7 January 1919, and did cultural work in an army drama troupe during the war, touring with the troops and building a grounding in acting, writing and staging. He came to Hong Kong after the war and began acting in 1952, his first film being Killing the Dog; he then turned to screenwriting, learning under the director Yan Jun, and wrote a large number of scripts. In 1969 he completed his first film as director, The Crimson Charm, a martial-arts picture released in 1971. In 1970 he followed Raymond Chow to the newly founded Golden Harvest, becoming one of the studio's two earliest directors and being promoted to that post by Chow. He made his name mainly with fist-and-foot action films, among them The Angry River (1971), The Bloody Fists (1972), Hapkido (1972), The Taekwondo Kid (1973), a China-Thailand fighting drama (1974) and later titles such as The Shaolin Plot (1977). He liked to take his crews on location in Korea, both to save money and to bring in Korean martial-arts talent; Hapkido (1972), starring Angela Mao and the Korean martial artist Hwang In-shik, was among the first Hong Kong films to take Korean martial arts as its subject. His many collaborations with Angela Mao made his action films a benchmark for the genre. He also wrote and appeared in Sammo Hung's The Iron-Fisted Monk (1977). In the late 1970s he formed his own Gar Fu film company and retired in 1980.
Huang Feng was a mainstay of Golden Harvest in its early years; his run of fist-and-foot films shot in Korea helped the studio open up the action market in the early 1970s, and he was among the first directors to bring Korean hapkido and taekwondo to Hong Kong screens. Rising from actor and screenwriter, he was a leading figure of hard-edged, combat-driven action cinema.
Achievements
- 1952 · Began his career as an actor with Killing the Dog
- 1970 · Joined Golden Harvest, becoming one of its earliest two directors, promoted to the post by Raymond Chow
- 1977 · Wrote and appeared in Sammo Hung's The Iron-Fisted Monk