Ho Moon-hwa (Ho Meng-hua; 1923 – 19 May 2009), born in Shanghai to a family from Guangdong, was one of Shaw Brothers' most prolific directors. He graduated from the Shanghai Municipal Drama School, where the principal was Xiong Foxi and his teachers included the playwrights Tian Han, Pan Jienong and Cao Yu; this training shaped the way he handled characters and staging. In 1948 he worked on a Shanghai production before coming to Hong Kong the same year; through his former teachers he joined Yung Hwa, writing scripts and serving as assistant director, and was valued by Yan Jun, for whom he assisted on two films in 1956 and 1957. He joined Shaw Brothers in 1955 as a screenwriter and later turned to directing. His first directed film was made for Motion Picture & General Investment, but it was released after Shaw & Sons' The Evening Appointment (1958); after Run Run Shaw saw a test screening of that picture, the studio signed him, and he went on to work for Shaw Brothers until 1980. Early on he made many contemporary films. Calling himself a commercial director, he tried almost every genre: his 1967 melodrama Susanna, starring Li Ching and Kwan Shan, won Best Film at the 14th Asian Film Festival; the box-office success of The Monkey Goes West (1966) led the studio to have him turn out a run of fantasy costume pictures, including Princess Iron Fan (1966), The Cave of the Silken Web (1967) and The Land of Many Perfumes (1968). He later shifted to martial-arts films such as The Jade Raksha (1968) and The Flying Guillotine (1975), the last of which is widely regarded as his finest work. He also directed horror films such as Black Magic (1975), the crime anthology film Hong Kong Criminal Archives (1976) and the effects-driven adventure The Mighty Peking Man (1977). His final picture for Shaw Brothers was the 1980 release. After leaving Shaw Brothers in 1980 he went to Taiwan to shoot a film produced by Sun Ma Si-tsang's company, then retired from the screen, emigrated to Canada in 1994 and later returned to Hong Kong, where he died on 19 May 2009.
Signing with Shaw Brothers in the late 1950s, Ho directed the Journey to the West fantasy cycle, the martial-arts film The Flying Guillotine and the effects feature The Mighty Peking Man. One of the studio's most prolific directors, he ranged across melodrama, martial arts, fantasy and horror, balancing commercial demands with genre experiment.
Achievements
- 1965 · Directed The Warlord and the Actress, which won a Golden Horse Award as an excellent feature film
- 1966 · Directed the box-office hit The Monkey Goes West, then a series of fantasy films such as Princess Iron Fan and The Cave of the Silken Web
- 1967 · Directed the melodrama Susanna, which won Best Film at the 14th Asian Film Festival
- 1975 · Directed the martial-arts film The Flying Guillotine, regarded as his best work