The stars of the golden age of martial arts cinema are dying out one by one. He was an actor, but also a screenwriter and director. A great figure in neighborhood double-screen theaters around the world, he had created a real character for himself, so popular that the French titles, willingly poetic, of some of the films in which he starred contained his name. Jimmy Wang Yu died at the age of 79 in Taipei on April 5.
His real name Wang Zhengquan, he was born in Shanghai on March 28, 1943. When Mao Zedong took power, his parents emigrated to Taiwan. The Hong Kong film studio Shaw Brothers hired him following a competition in 1963. He had previously won various swimming and water polo competitions. He made his film debut in 1965, and it was director Chang Cheh (1923-2002) who made him a star. Chang Cheh’s cinema renewed the genre of the saber film, the wu xia pianby intensifying its violence, by subjecting its characters to unprecedented torments in an atmosphere of vaguely homosexual sadomasochism, by experimenting with various formal discoveries.
In 1967, Chang Cheh began a trilogy featuring a one-armed swordsman. Wang Yu will hold this role in the first two titles, One arm killed them alland The Arm of Vengeance, in 1969. He embodies a suffering and ruthless vigilante. A new breed of hero, shaped by Chang Cheh, a ruthless, brutal, often maimed swordsman. Wang Yu began directing in 1970, and The Chinese Boxer (released in France under the title Karate to death for a handful of soy) was a huge box office success and would be a stylistic and moral revolution for Chinese martial arts cinema.
One-armed hero
The same year, he breaks his contract with Shaw Brothers, who will sue him, the result of which will be, for him, the prohibition to shoot films in Hong Kong. It falls back, therefore, on Taiwan, with titles now produced by the rival company of Shaw, Golden Harvest. In 1971, the one-armed hero will face Zatoichi, the Japanese blind swordsman, immortalized by Shintaro Katsu (1931-1997) in Zatoichi versus the one-armed swordsman, by Kimiyoshi Yasuda (1911-1983), a strange co-production between Golden Harvest and the Japanese company Daei. The outcome of the final duel, which ended with the victory of either the blind or the penguin, will vary depending on the country of operation.
Far from the splendor of the Shaw Brothers studios, Wang Yu now appears in numerous serial films, sometimes with absurdly baroque violence, some of which he has directed, such as Wang Yu has no mercy for lame ducks (1972), Wang Yu and Miss Karate go wild (1972), Wang Yu makes the yellow river blush (1973), Wang Yu’s Armed Forces Against the Flying Guillotine (1976). He will see, in the mid-1970s, his notoriety gradually supplanted by newcomers, such as David Chiang, Lo Lieh (1939-2002), Bruce Lee (1940-1973, even if the glory of this one will be dazzling and posthumous ). In 1975, he co-starred with George Lazenby in an Australian film by Brian Trenchard-Smith, Hong Kong Man. His career gradually declined and he stopped directing after 1980.
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