Sek Kin 1913 - 2009

I've learned via a post over at Soft Film that Sek Kin -- a man whom I like to think of as the Amrish Puri of Cantonese cinema, and who is known to millions as "Mr. Han Man" from Enter the Dragon -- has passed away. For me Sek's villainous portrayals have provided the high points of more films that I can reliably remember, and he will be greatly missed. To read some of my previous posts regarding the man, click here.

One more hand for Mr. Han Man

Within days of posting my somewhat goofy tribute to Sek Kin and Amrish Puri, I stumbled upon this very informative three-part post about Sek Kin over at the wonderful blog Electric Shadows (links below). These focus a lot on Sek Kin as a martial artist, which is of course something that I completely failed to mention, due to the fact that I couldn't find any parallels that I could make with Amrish Puri's career--though I'm pretty sure that Puri could send someone into a back flip with one of his eyebrows.

Mr. Han, Man: The Awesome Villainy of Shek Kin, Part I

Mr. Han, Man: The Awesome Villainy of Shek Kin, Part II

Awesome Kung Fu of Shek Kin

The Leer meets The Sneer

International genre cinema would be nothing without its villains, and today I decided to pay tribute to two of the best of them. Despite obvious differences of time and place, Amrish Puri and Sek Kin actually have a lot in common. Though both accumulated massive and varied filmographies over the course of their hardworking careers, they are primarily known for their larger-than-life bad guy roles, and both put in a lot of time serving as sort of in-house Snidely Whiplashes for their respective national film industries. In the case of Puri, that was the Bollywood of the eighties and nineties, while with Sek Kin it was the Cantonese language cinema of Hong Kong during the sixties.

Another thing that both men have in common is that each would be completely unknown to mainstream Western audiences if not for one iconic bad guy role. For Sek Kin that would be the role of Han in 1973's Enter the Dragon, and for Puri that of Mola Ram in 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Whenever one of these gentlemen appeared in a picture, you seldom had to wonder who to root against; it was just a matter of following either the twitching pencil mustache or the ominously furrowing brow.

Recommended viewing:

Amrish Puri: Mr. India
Read my review at Teleport City

Sek Kin: Girl in Red
Read my review at Movie-fan Princess