Szeto On, born Tsang Kwan in Guangzhou on 25 May 1927 to a family from Xingning, Guangdong, moved to Hong Kong in 1949. After an unsuccessful early venture in business, he occasionally accompanied his elder brother, the actor Tsang Cho-lam, to film sets and was invited by entertainment reporters to write film reviews; introduced by film practitioners, he turned to screenwriting and made his debut with It's Fun Getting Together (1954). From then he worked under the pen name 'Szeto On', taken from a doctor's signboard he saw in the street. He joined the publicity department of Tai Seng Film Company as a copywriter, began writing part-time and by 1960 was a full-time freelancer. His screenplays covered many genres, martial arts films most of all: with director Ling Wan he made Ingenious Sword (1962), The Miraculous Sword and the Magic Flute (1965), Three Heroines and The Dragon Fortress (both 1968) and the Young Swordsman Lung Kimfei series of 1964-68. From 1968 he wrote for the Wong Fei-hung series, including Wong Fei-hung: The Incredible Success in Canton (1968), Wong Fei-hung in Sulphur Valley (1969) and The Magnificent Kick (1980), while for Chor Yuen he penned romantic dramas such as Lover in Disguise (1965), The Violet Girl (1966) and The Man from Interpol (1967). His comedies King of Swindlers (1970) and The Adventurous Air-Steward (1974) were popular, and in the mid-1960s youth-film boom he wrote The Precious Mirror (1967) and Modern School Life (1970). As Cantonese cinema declined he was the last remaining screenwriter in the field, and he wrote radio dramas for Commercial Radio for two years before returning to the screen when kung fu films rose. From the mid-1970s he wrote for Shaw Brothers, including Kuei Chih-hung's realistic The Tea House (1974), Big Brother Cheng (1975) and Killer Constable (1980), and joined The Criminals series. He also worked for other studios on Warriors Two (1978) and Second Class Resident (1981) and for Rediffusion television and video productions. His later credits included Killer Angels (1989), Erotic Ghost Story (1990) and Thunder Run (1991). He wrote around 1,000 scripts, of which 700 to 800 were filmed. He received the Professional Achievement Award at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards in 1994 and died in Hong Kong on 23 August 2021.
Szeto On sustained post-war Cantonese cinema with a huge body of efficient, commercially reliable scripts spanning martial arts, romance, comedy and youth films; his wuxia collaborations with director Ling Wan and his work on the Wong Fei-hung series gave 1960s Cantonese martial-arts cinema much of its scripting backbone. As Cantonese films declined and many screenwriters left, he stayed on and was considered one of the last working Cantonese screenwriters. With roughly a thousand scripts, 700 to 800 of them filmed, he embodied the role of the studio-era professional writer.
Achievements
- 1954 · Wrote his first screenplay, It's Fun Getting Together (1954), launching his career as a screenwriter.
- 1968 · Began writing for the Wong Fei-hung film series.
- 1994 · Received the Professional Achievement Award at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards.