ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the postwar emergence of Hong Kong film's masculine identity amid the Cold War politics of decolonization and the dissolution of state-defined Chinese nationalism. It situates the sixties Hong Kong experience within the context of the Cold War, a phenomenon that led the former colony to claim an identity separate from that defined by party politics and beyond the confines of a finite geographic locale. The chapter focuses on the global business strategies of the Shaw Brothers and explains how the company maneuvered both commercial and political terrains in order to carve out its own brand of powerful "Chineseness" in film. It draws on the theory of American film genre studies, arguing that the new-style Mandarin wuxia film expressed a distinctly Hong Kong form of masculinity through interaction with international genres. The chapter demonstrates how One-Armed Swordsman portrays heroism as a twin narrative of revenge and reconciliation, pitting action and desire against aspirations for family and home.
