“Lady General Hua Mu-Lan” (1964), the Shaw Brothers’ version of the Mu-Lan story.
“Lady General Hua Mu-Lan” (1964), the Shaw Brothers’ version of the Mu-Lan story. The Mulan story was filmed in China many times. Though today it’s associated with manliness, war, and martial arts movies thanks to figures like he-man director Chang Cheh, or the white-undershirt loving manly superstar Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong film industry in the first few decades of existence was oriented mostly to women until the 1970s with musicals and love-story movies, as housewives were the only people with the free time to go to the movies. The biggest martial arts star of the 1960s was Chang Pei Pei, for instance. An earlier version of the Mulan story was made in Shanghai in 1939, “Mulan Joins the Army.” Filmed in Japanese occupied Shanghai (the setting, incidentally, for Bruce Lee’s Chinese Connection), there’s no coincidence that they made a Mulan movie just then: it’s a story about a person joining the army to push out an aggressive invader and conqueror.Oh, and fun fact, Mulan also exists in DC Comics as well, she was an ally of Arak, Son of Thunder (a historical book that was much more like Umberto Eco’s Baudolino than like the Conan ripoff everyone thought he was): -- source link
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