007 in Late Colonial Hong Kong: Technology, Masculinity, and Sly Humor in Stephen Chow’s From Beijing with Love

Abstract

The James Bond films, the world’s second most commercially successful series, created by the London-based Eon Productions, are hardly new to the Hong Kong audiences. Bondmania, in respect of film adaptations rather than Ian Fleming’s literary works, has swept this former crown colony back to the 1960s. The fictional MI6 super agent 007, incarnated by Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan in You Only Live Twice (1967), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), and Die Another Day (2002) respectively, has also visited the city en route to adventures elsewhere. Although the imperial spy thriller has never been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema, the influences of the Bond films, ranging from far-fetched allusions to unacknowledged borrowing of certain generic elements, can be found in countless local crime films of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was no accident that the first part of the famous nu shashou (female assassin) series, starring the young Chan Po-chu, bore the rather irrelevant English title “Lady Bond.”¹