FILM | The day good taste died

Good taste died in Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s the day Loke Wan Tho of the high-class Cathay studio died in a plane crash; bad taste in the shape of low-class Shaw films then dominated the decade.

That is the Chinese film history my father feeds me at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays which I have always filed away with every intent of checking every fact before I unleash it upon the unsuspecting world as an amateur movie historian.

Now I don’t have to. Grady Hendrix, a true professional, has gone and written that story, fleshing it out with more details and theories than I could have come up with in a zillion years (“Peter Chen plays the romantic lead in Mambo Girl but really, who cares? Actors at Cathay were an endless gallery of nobodies, with the faces of civil servants and spines of spaghetti, no match for the radiant screen goddesses who surrounded them”).

Read him here.

And here. (Post-1997 Hong Kong cinema is slimmer and sexier than ever!)

And here. (Lust and no caution in Japan’s 1960s Nikkatsu action cinema!)

And here. (The Spielbergs of Nippon’s porn!)

And here. (A celebrity has directed a movie based on the book said celebrity wrote - it isn’t terrible!)