Yeung Kuen, born Yeung Cheong-kuen in Guangzhou in 1931, was a Hong Kong film director and screenwriter. He settled in Hong Kong in 1948 and, after studying screenwriting and directing at the China Film School founded by the actor Wang Yuan-lung — where his teachers included Tu Guangqi, Tao Qin, Li Han-hsiang and King Hu — he and his classmates pooled their money to make the now-lost Foggy Night Flying Corpse (1959), which he wrote and directed and which featured a young Leung Tin. He worked as a script supervisor under Tu Guangqi in 1959 and joined the To Yuen Film Enterprise in 1960, serving as assistant director to Lung To, Fung Fung, Wu Pang, Wong Tin-lam, Mok Hong-si and Chor Yuen; he regarded Mok Hong-si as his mentor, working with him on twenty-seven films in four years, including the Lady Killer series starring Connie Chan. He turned director in 1967 with Red Powder, Green Warrior, starring Josephine Siao and Wu Fung. His best-known works are the 1970 erotic comedies Lucky Seven and Beauty and the Seven Beasts, which, though tagged as sex films, contained little nudity and dealt with the frustrations of ordinary men. In the 1970s he adapted the television character 'Country Bumpkin' into a hit film that grossed more than HK$1.8 million and spawned a series, and he also made films such as Games for Three Hundred Years (1975) and Liu He Qian Shou (1979). In the 1980s he directed the youth films IQ Bong Bong and The Drummer, the latter helping to launch Leslie Cheung, and joined Shaw Brothers in 1983, making films such as Seeding of a Ghost and My Darling Genie. He directed fewer films in the 1990s, and died in New York on 30 May 2012, aged 81.
Yeung worked across romance, wuxia, erotic and comedy films. Turning the television character Big Country Bumpkin into a 1973 hit that reached the year's top ten, he showed how television and cinema could feed each other, and reflected the varied output of 1970s independent Hong Kong production.
Achievements
- 1959 · Co-financed and made Foggy Night Flying Corpse, serving as both writer and director
- 1970 · Directed the erotic comedy Lucky Seven starring Tina Ti
- 1974 · Turned the TV character Big Country Bumpkin into a film grossing over HK$1.8 million