By the 1960s, the Shaws had put him to work as a screenwriter, and he successfully made the transition to directing, becoming one of the studio’s mainstays, effortlessly moving from the swordplay films of the 1960s to the exploding kung fu genre of the 1970s, often collaborating with action choreographer and future director Lau Kar-Leung (aka Liu Chia-liang).
It was produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio and directed by Chang Cheh.
He was first and foremost a writer filmmaking came his way, including several shots at directing, but he spent far more time toiling as a newspaper columnist and pulp novelist. The Water Margin, also known Outlaws of the Marsh and Seven Blows Of The Dragon, is a 1972 Hong Kong film adapted from the Chinese classical 14th-century novel Water Margin. “Prolific” barely does justice to a director who averaged a half-dozen movies annually during the 1970s boom. The martial arts action in his movies was awe-inspiring-and so too was his career. At the vanguard of it was director Chang Cheh. You can read about Chang in depth in Sean Gilman’s Notebook article “Chang Cheh: Death and Glory,” but here is the Quad’s introduction: As the storied Shaw Brothers began to transform the Hong Kong film industry in the 1950s, a new golden age was on the horizon. Known as “The Godfather of Hong Kong cinema,” Chang Cheh (1923-2002), who directed nearly 100 films between the late 50s and the early 90s, is currently the subject of a week-long, 14-film retrospective at the Quad Cinema in New York, co-presented by the New York Asian Film Festival.
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