Lung Kong, born Lung Kin-yiu in Hong Kong on 8 February 1935, came from Anhui stock; his father was the Cantonese-opera actor Siu Saan-saan. Introduced to the screen by the actress Ma Siu-ying, he signed with Shaw Brothers and made his first appearance in Murder at the Hotel (1958), directed by Chow Si-luk, who also gave him the stage name Lung Kong. He joined the studio's Cantonese section, mainly playing villains and supporting parts and later assisting Chow as his assistant director. In 1962 he moved to Kong Ngee and Sun Ngee, the sister companies run by Chun Kim, and from 1964 worked on both sides of the camera. He directed his first film, The Prince of Broadcasting, in 1966, and the following year wrote and directed The Story of a Discharged Prisoner, a social-realist study of an ex-convict's return to society that later inspired John Woo's 1986 A Better Tomorrow. The Window (1968) and Teddy Girls (1969), which set a Cantonese-film box-office record of HK$850,000, kept testing subject matter and technique. As Cantonese cinema declined in the 1970s he turned to Mandarin films, adapting Camus's The Plague as Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (1970), followed by Last Night's Dream (1971) and Call Girl (1973), which won him a directing prize at the 19th Asian Film Festival, and the controversial Hiroshima 28 (1974) about the after-effects of the atomic bomb. He emigrated to the United States in 1982 and settled in New York, still acting occasionally in films such as Shanghai Blues (1984) and Black Mask (1996). In August 2014 he received a lifetime achievement award from the New York Asian Film Festival, and he died in New York on 2 September that year.
Lung Kong turned his camera on ex-convicts, dance-hall girls and other marginal figures, pushing Cantonese cinema beyond pure entertainment in the late 1960s. His study of an ex-prisoner's return to society became the blueprint for John Woo's 1986 classic and helped shape the look of Hong Kong's gangster films.
Achievements
- 1967 · Wrote and directed 'The Story of a Discharged Prisoner', later an inspiration for John Woo's film of the same title
- 1969 · Directed 'Teddy Girls', which set a Cantonese-film box-office record of HK$850,000
- 1973 · Directed 'Call Girl', winning a directing prize at the 19th Asian Film Festival