How Tsui Hark’s The Gold Dagger Romance changed Hong Kong’s TV and movie scene
Tsui’s unorthodox 1978 martial arts series was unlike anything seen before and arguably kick-started the Hong Kong New Wave film movement
At 7.55pm on July 2, 1978, a piece of Hong Kong television history was made. That was when the first episode of The Gold Dagger Romance was broadcast, on Hong Kong’s Commercial Television (CTV).
It was an unorthodox martial arts series. For a start, it did not open with a theme song. After two shots of a wintry and eerily empty landscape, a swordsman appears, treading alone across the snow. He stops, closes his oilpaper umbrella and observes two assassins emerging into view. Cue a machine-gun montage of extreme close-ups of the man’s face and medium shots of the two approaching antagonists.
A melee kicks off, ending with the death of the swordsman, his violent demise signified only by his umbrella being tossed upwards into the air. The killers scurry silently away as the ripped umbrella flutters into a stream. Hardly a word is uttered throughout the tightly edited two-minute sequence.
Welcome to the world of Tsui Hark, the screenwriter-director behind The Gold Dagger Romance.
Based on wuxia writer Gu Long’s Eagle Soaring in the Ninth Month, the small-screen adaptation stays true to the dense narrative and philosophical musing of the source material.
