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The Orphan (1959)


DragonClaws

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DragonClaws

 

Are there any other clips from this film, on YouTube?.

 

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This is one film that really deserves to be released by a company such as Eureka as it contains Bruce's best performance as an actor. Unfortunately due to the circumstances surrounding the colour print of the film, it's unlikely that will ever happen.

There were other clips on YouTube, including the scene where Bruce dances the Cha Cha. A while back Steve Kerridge also put up some clips from the colour print on Facebook which looked like they were taken from a video cassette. 

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DragonClaws
6 minutes ago, fabhui said:

This is one film that really deserves to be released by a company such as Eureka as it contains Bruce's best performance as an actor. Unfortunately due to the circumstances surrounding the colour print of the film, it's unlikely that will ever happen.

 

Could they not releas a Black and White version? or use a B&W print?.

 

7 minutes ago, fabhui said:

There were other clips on YouTube, including the scene where Bruce dances the Cha Cha. A while back Steve Kerridge also put up some clips from the colour print on Facebook which looked like they were taken from a video cassette. 

 

Yet to find any other clips, those you mention, may have been taken since?

 

This in depth book on the film, used to be advertised in Impct magazine al lthe time.

 

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I'm not sure what the deal is with the B&W print and who owns the rights etc. It's regarded as something of a classic from Hong Kong's golden era of cinema so I'm surprised that after all these years it's not been broadcast on late night Hong Kong TV and shown up on VHS or DVD in collector's circles.

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29 minutes ago, DragonClaws said:

Yet to find any other clips, those you mention

 

 

 

 

 

There's another 5 maybe 6 clips on YouTube of varying degrees of quality using both the colour and B&W prints of the film.

Type in Bruce Lee The Orphan and they will pop up.

Edited by fabhui
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8 minutes ago, fabhui said:

I'm not sure what the deal is with the B&W print and who owns the rights etc. It's regarded as something of a classic from Hong Kong's golden era of cinema so I'm surprised that after all these years it's not been broadcast on late night Hong Kong TV and shown up on VHS or DVD in collector's circles.

 

Hard to say whats going off, but like you said, its not just a Bruce Lee novelty, but a well thought of film of its era. You would think there's two markets to sell the film to, Lee collectors/completist' and general Asian film fans. Might be legal issues keeping it held back, or maybe the Estate got plans for it?. Or the owner's ot the right might simply want too much money? for use of the print. Making an official release not viable for dvd/blu-ray companies.

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@ShawAngela might appreciate this video link?, yet anohter very early role from BL's childhood movie career. Someone has taken the time to subtitle the movie too.

 

 

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Thank you very much !

I have a few Bruce Lee's old movies : The guiding light, My son Ah Chang, A son is born, In the face of demolition, but I do'nt remember if I have this one.

And I'm about to get Too late for divorce...

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A Century of Chinese Cinema: The 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival… and Beyond (Frank Bren)

Link- https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/festival-reports/hongkonged/

 

Quote

A Bruce Lee Coup

The Orphan (1959/60) was produced by the late Hong Kong actor/producer, Ng Chor-fan (1911 – 1993), a much loved and enduring figure in the history of Cantonese cinema. Mr. Ng’s last quest was to find the colour original of his long-lost The Orphan. Sadly, he died a disappointed man, close to the time when the HKFA formally began. The film starred 18 year old Bruce Lee as a HK rebel without a cause just before he quit HK for the US – the standard starting point of Bruce Lee biographies.

In 1994, Cynthia Liu Chu-fun – then, as now, HKFA’s Senior Manager – was in London searching through laboratories on the off-chance that old negatives of HK films had been stored and forgotten there. At Rank Laboratories, she was immediately handed about ten of them, mostly from the ’50s or ’60s, among them the long-sought The Orphan! Rank simply gave her the negatives, most of them in mint condition. “They did it without charging me a penny,” she recalls.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hong Kong had no technology for developing colour films so colour negatives were processed in either Japan or London, and sometimes remained there. “That’s how we found Bruce Lee’s The Orphan,” says Ms Liu. “The negative was just there and nobody realised. I am sure there are HK films everywhere all over the world.” It was a major break for the then year-old Archive, housed at the time in a temporary hut in Eastern Tsim Sha Tsui.

The Lee coup was part of a slow, painstaking but exciting search for Hong Kong’s film heritage whether in film prints, posters, old scripts or industry memorabilia. “We think that about 30% of the films ever produced in Hong Kong have been lost,” said Ms Liu back in 1997.

 

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On 7/8/2018 at 11:41 AM, fabhui said:

I'm not sure what the deal is with the B&W print and who owns the rights etc. It's regarded as something of a classic from Hong Kong's golden era of cinema so I'm surprised that after all these years it's not been broadcast on late night Hong Kong TV and shown up on VHS or DVD in collector's circles.

 

There is probably no tale stranger than the one we have to tell about how a Hong Kong film laid in the vaults of the Rank Film Laboratory, England, for over 30 years undiscovered until a staff member of the Hong Kong Film Archive visited the laboratory on an observation tour and found the negatives. The Orphan(1960) lying on a shelf. The Orphan, directed by Lee Sun-fung, was the last filmto star the teenaged Bruce Lee before he left Hong Kong for America.Apparently, it was the practice for some Hong Kong film production companies to process the colour negatives of their films overseas in those days. This way, some negatives of Hong Kong films have been forgotten and left on shelves in distant foreign lands for decades.

The Orphan thus acquired was an Eastman-colour production. Prior to this discovery and restoration of The Orphan, the only version of the film shown on Hong Kong TV was a grainy black-and-white copy.

source- https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/HKFA/archive/en/newsletter/newsletter06_e.pdf

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- With the success of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story in the mid-1990s, Bruce made a posthumous appearance in The Umbrella Story (1994) - via scenes digitally utilised from The Orphan.

- The film features some Forrest Gump-style digital manipulation of archival footage. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

source-https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/bruceleelivestributeforum/bruce-lee-in-the-umbrella-story-t1374.html

 

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