闪耀星空邵逸夫闪耀星空邵逸夫.doc

闪耀星空邵逸夫 Run Run Shaw: The Last Emperor of Chinese Movies By Richard Corliss Jan. 07, 2014 In 1964, astronomers at China‘s Purple Mountain Observatory discovered a small main-belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. They named it 2899 Runrun Shaw, in honor of a Hong Kong movie-studio boss. Shao Yifu, known worldwide as Run Run Shaw, was no minor planet. Among the bosses of any film industry, in Asia, Europe or Hollywood, he was the sun and the moon, and the launcher of many stars, including Chow Yun-fat and Maggie Cheung. Shaw’s entertainment empire stretched from Taiwan to Malaysia, and from the silent era to the present — nearly 90 years in all. With his death today, at the astounding age of 107 (The New York Times says 106, but we’re not quibbling), one can bid farewell to the last emperor of Chinese movies. The Shaw Brothers logo — the “SB” initials on a scallop-shaped shield — appeared on many of the biggest hits in the first golden age of Hong Kong cinema. The studio’s top stars of the ’60s were women. Linda Lin Dai graced Li Hanxiang’s blockbuster opera film The Kingdom and the Beauty and the four-hour love-and-war epic The Blue and the Black. Vivacious Cheng Peipei, Chan Ping and Lily Ho played the lovelorn trio in Shaw’s lively, MGM-style musical Hong Kong Nocturne, directed by the Japanese import Umetsugu Inoue. But Cheng Peipei steered Shaw in a new direction when, at the age of 20, she played a solemn warrior goddess in King Hu’s seminal wuxia film, Come Drink With Me. With the success of Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed Swordsman, which triggered a martial-arts craze in Hong Kong, the company’s focus switched on a dime from femme to macho, and Run Run Shaw became the kung-fu mogul. The 1972 King Boxer / Five Fingers of Death, starring Lo Lieh as the man with the Iron Fist, was the first martial arts film to be widely released in the West; in America it earned more than 12 times its $300,000 production cost, a year before Bruce Lee’s breakthrough Ente