Apart from Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest which other companies produced Martial arts films?

[WangYu]

Also is it just me or is Shaw Brothers much more popular than Golden Harvest? I usually hear people rave about SB and not at all of GH. I personally love the GH films just as much to be fair... For the general public Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan both of GH are much more famous names than let's say David Chiang and Lo Lieh so I'm always kind of surprised that GH is never talked about.

[saltysam]

Big GH fan here, plenty available on decent DVDs. And One Armed Boxer blu ray SE is coming next month!

[ShawAngela]

I'm fan of both.

There are also Goldig movies, First movies...

[Yihetuan]

Can't forget Ng See Yuen's Seasonal Films with their classics like Drunken Master, A Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, Secret Rivals, etc. Also, I enjoy the early Tsui Hark films they produced like The Butterfly Murders and We're Going to Eat You!

[WangYu]

But none of those companies produced hundreds of MA movies like SB and GH did, right?

[ShawAngela]

28 minutes ago, WangYu said:

But none of those companies produced hundreds of MA movies like SB and GH did, right?

There are a lot of Taiwanese martial arts movies, wuxias or not, that have been produced. Just take a look at the filmographies of actors like Yi Yuen, or Tien Peng, or Shan Mao or Lung Fei and so on, and you'll see that lots of the kung fu movies we are used to watch are often taiwanese movies, and any more that we'lle never have the luck to watch since they don't have any dvd release...

[DrNgor]

Hong Hwa International Films had a lot of classics, mainly Joseph Kuo films:

http://hkmdb.org/db/companies/view.mhtml?id=2081&display_set=eng

 

D&B Films had a pretty solid output over an 8-year period:

http://hkmdb.org/db/companies/view.mhtml?id=1198&display_set=eng

 

Goldig Films also had a decent output, as @ShawAngela pointed out, as did First Films:

http://hkmdb.org/db/companies/view.mhtml?id=1017&display_set=eng

http://hkmdb.org/db/companies/view.mhtml?id=438&display_set=eng

Edited April 20, 2021 by DrNgor

[WangYu]

Would it be a fair estimate if i say there were approx between 400 and 500 Chinese MA movies produced during the 60s and 70s ?

[DrNgor]

I'm pretty sure the answer is over 1000.

[Cognoscente]

Eternal are also worth noting since they produced some of Bruce Li's best movies, and the Billy Chong catalogue. They also produced two similarly titled Bruce Leung Siu-Lung movies (Little Godfather from Hong Kong and Little Superman).

[NoKUNGFUforYU]

Union film did a lot of excellent Swordplays, and of course Cathay did about 18 or 20. 

Shaw had a virtual stranglehold on distribution and they owned all those sets in HK, so doing period pieces that looked nice was a snap. What killed them in a way was the shift to modern settings. Sammo, Jackie, Karl Maka, Tsui Hark and others just went modern and upbeat. I think a lot of the cheap shapes movies that are now classics were actually meant for export to a certain extant.

There were Cantonese film companies that cranked out a ton of black and white as well as some color films, but most if not all were never exported to the USA, as they were pre Bruce Lee, etc.

Believe it or not, in HK and Asia there is very little sentimentality towards Shaw Brothers. They were simply a commercial studio the made low brow films for the most part, according to some film critics. When they tore down the studio there was no fuss and it wasn't like it would be a universal studios tour, etc.

Somewhat like the lack of interest in Westerns in the USA and Italy, for that matter. I would imagine most people that went to see the True Grit remake were over 45 or at least 40. Sure, there are historical dramas like The Good Lord Bird, but most kids don't know who John Wayne is now, and Clint Eastwood is that old racist dude that yelled at a chair to most young people (Gran Torino did not age well, at all.) You can forget about Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart. Tarantino can crank out Django and the Hateful Eight, but love him or hate him, Tarantino can do whatever he wants.

 

[YnEoS]

Well I think there are plenty of Golden Harvest films that get tons of praise from fans.  Maybe if it seems like Shaw Brothers gets more praise, its because their studio sets/style are more recognizable so people are more likely to mention the studio in their praise of films and some fans will watch any Shaw Brothers film regardless of who directed and starred in it. 

Golden Harvest's major strategy was offering certain actors and directors a % of the profits which helped them pull in a lot of big names, but they didn't have quite the same infrastructure as Shaw Brothers did.  So when people love a GH film with Bruce Lee, Hui Brothers, Jackie Chan, or whoever, they're more likely to praise those people involved rather than the fact its a GH production.

I think this was also reflected in the box office at the time, GH more frequently made the films that broke records and hit the top of the box office, but SB had more high grossing films overall throughout the 70s.

[DragonClaws]

On 5/2/2021 at 10:07 AM, YnEoS said:

I think this was also reflected in the box office at the time, GH more frequently made the films that broke records and hit the top of the box office, but SB had more high grossing films overall throughout the 70s.

 

Agree with your comments @YnEoS, Shaw Brothers had the edge on Golden Harvest in terms of the volume of movies they produced. They just had a much bigger studios, than Golden Harvests Nathan Road set up. Which is why they GH would often go to other venues such as Wader Studios, to shoot some of productions.