General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Delinquent (愤怒青年)

The Delinquent (愤怒青年, Fen nu qing nian, literally "angry youth") is a 1973 Hong Kong action film produced by Shaw Brothers, co-directed by Chang Cheh and Kuei Chih-hung and written by Ni Kuang. It stars Wong Chung as a hot-headed young martial artist in contemporary Hong Kong who is drawn into a criminal gang led by Boss Lan and pressed to betray his own father.¹ The film is notable as Kuei Chih-hung's directorial debut and for its location shooting in Hong Kong's public housing estates, unusual for a Shaw Brothers production of the period.²^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	愤怒青年 (Fen nu qing nian), "angry youth"; released abroad as Street Gangs of Hong Kong³
Release	15 February 1973, Hong Kong (rated IIB)³
Directors	Chang Cheh and Kuei Chih-hung; Kuei's directorial debut¹^•²
Studio	Shaw Brothers; producer Runme Shaw; screenplay Ni Kuang¹
Runtime	101 minutes per IFFR; IMDb lists 100 minutes and Letterboxd 105¹^•⁴^•³
Language	Mandarin¹
Principal cast	Wong Chung, Lily Li, Lu Ti (also credited as Betty Pei Ti), Fan Meisheng⁵^•²

Spoilers

Plot

The film begins with John (Wong Chung) bringing food from a restaurant; he is separated from his mother, in conflict with his father, has trouble controlling his temper, and finds it difficult to keep any job.¹^•¹⁰ John finds himself drawn into a spiral of temptation, treachery, and vengeance after Boss Lan, the wealthy head of a criminal gang, demands that he turn against his father.¹ The Apple TV synopsis gives a variant emphasis: his refusal to be recruited by the triad gang leads to street brawls to the chagrin of his righteous aging father, and his loyalties are torn when he is laid off from his delivery-driver job and Boss Lan's offer becomes more enticing.⁵ A Chinese-language synopsis describes the ending: Shen Chang, remorseful after his father is beaten to death, storms the gang's lair alone, kills the gangsters one by one, and finally descends into madness himself.¹¹ Subway Cinema's summary adds the plot device of John's single rule, never to rob the warehouse where his father works as a security guard, which is violated almost immediately.²

Production background

The roaring success of Bruce Lee's contemporary-set martial arts films encouraged Shaw Brothers to move its signature kung fu filmmaking out of historical China and into the streets of 1970s Hong Kong.⁵ The Delinquent belongs to this wave of modern-setting action pictures, alongside Chang Cheh's other 1973 youth films such as The Generation Gap and Rebel (叛逆).⁶^•⁷ A Chinese-language survey of Shaw Brothers genre production places 愤怒青年 among the youth films that turned toward violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid social unrest.⁷

The film was shot in the period following the 1967 anti-colonial, Cultural Revolution-inspired riots in Hong Kong, and much of it was filmed on location in the city's public housing estates and industrial backwaters, which the IFFR notes was extraordinary for a Shaws production.¹ IMDb records one filming location as the Kwuntong District Police Headquarters on Lei Yue Mun Road, Kowloon, used for the scene in which John is released from jail.⁴

Attribution of direction

The film is credited to both Chang Cheh and Kuei Chih-hung. Subway Cinema states flatly that Chang Cheh "really just slapped his name on to reassure Run Run Shaw" and that the film is Kuei's in every respect, marking his directorial debut.² The critic Sean Gilman, writing at The Chinese Cinema, judges it "most likely" that Kuei was the dominant voice, though he worked with Chang's regular crew, including screenwriter Ni Kuang and action choreographers Lau Kar-leung and Tong Kai.⁸ A viewer's production-credit listing gives the director credit as 張徹・桂治洪 (Chang Cheh and Kuei Chih-hung) with music by 陳永煜.⁹ Letterboxd separately credits the score to Frankie Chan Fan-Kei.³

Style

Kuei's direction is the film's distinguishing feature. The IFFR notes that he exaggerates everything, with rhythmically pumping zooms and a self-mocking 1970s jazz-pop score, so that the film teeters on the borders of parody, anger, and chaos.¹ Subway Cinema calls it one of the most aggressively experimental action movies to come out of Shaw Brothers, from the opening credits in which star Wong Chung smashes through photographs of Hong Kong to a final fish-eye shot from the point of view of a dying man.² Gilman describes the visual style as wild handheld shooting in the streets and slums of Hong Kong, distorted subjective imagery, and over-cluttered, rapidly cut fight sequences, a jolt of modernism at a time when Chang Cheh was turning out gorgeously composed, stage-bound costume dramas for the studio.⁸ The opening credits sequence, with Wong Chung bursting through cardboard backdrops of the city under negative lighting, is also noted by the Driwancybermuseum review as deliberately trippy and dated.¹⁰

Place in Hong Kong cinema

The film is cited in the Hong Kong Film Archive's volume on 1970s cinema as Chang Cheh's modern, masculine Hong Kong action film, an example of the genre's engagement with the city itself.¹² The IFFR frames it within a longer tradition: the violent potential of youthful alienation has a long history in Hong Kong cinema, and Kuei's portrait of angry youth melds action cinema with social realism while engaging with underlying social issues.¹ Later scholarship on the Shaw Brothers studio system treats 愤怒青年 as part of the studio's experimentation in crime, horror, and youth genres that informed the Hong Kong New Wave, even as the studio's soundstage-bound realism fell short of local audiences' sensibilities.⁷

The film circulated internationally under several titles, including Street Gangs of Hong Kong in English and localized titles in Danish, Greek, German, Spanish, and Korean; it reached Denmark in February 1974, the United States (rated R, Los Angeles) in March 1974, and Norway in October 1974.³ World rights are held by Celestial Pictures, and the film was shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 from a digital format.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Martial arts films › Released 1943 to 1985

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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