Jane Bond spoof movies bounce back in Hong Kong

They faded out in the 1960s having seduced numerous film buffs in Hong Kong and now they are back in their menacing roles, if only for a few days at a film festival in the city.

Bond. Jane Bond.

A series of Jane Bond films, a uniquely Hong Kong genre, will be screened at a retrospective organized by the Hong Kong Film Archive. Selected films including Black Rose (1965), Spy With My Face (1966), The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa (1966), The Story of Wong Ang the Heroine (1960), The Golden Buddha (1966), The Precious Mirror (1967), The Mysterious Sisters (1969), Temptress of a Thousand Faces (1969) and 92 the Legendary la Rose Noire (1992), will be screened from Saturday, January 26 at the cinema of the Hong Kong Film Archive - reports The Standard.

The organizer reckons these films may be the only genre in world cinema, where women dispense the violence and that their mayhem is embraced by a largely female audience.

The genre, the female version of the James Bond films, came into being in the mid-1960s and was the amalgam of a diversity of historical and cultural factors: the Jade Girl tradition of Chinese cinema, the post-war youth culture, a rising feminist sensibility, trendy Western lifestyle and traditional Chinese values, to name a few, according to the HKFA. This was the last genre that Cantonese cinema could produce before its unceremonious collapse in the 1970s, the HKFA says.

The 1960s was an important transition period in the development of Hong Kong cinema.

The movies, some in Putonghua and others in Cantonese, are being presented to coincide with the publication of the Hong Kong Filmography Volume VI (1965-1969) and the Oral History Series: 1960s by the HKFA.

An exhibition is also being held on the first floor of HKFA, to complement the screenings.

Chor Yuen, who directed Black Rose, incorporated Western influences in his works, and HKFA says that his introduction of James Bond elements in the film, may have been the catalyst for the Jane Bond genre. The film was a hit at the box office and imitations followed.

A sequel, The Spy With My Face takes the Jane Bond genre further with thugs, secret hideouts and a range of hi- tech and low-tech gadgets. Connie Chan Po-chu, who embodied the fairy Jade Girl and the aggressive fighting woman, established herself as the Jane Bond prototype.

Tickets are available at URBTIX: HK$30.

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