And who will go see them? In 1992, Hong Kong films earned $160 million at the local box office; last year that take was nearly halved, to $85 million. And though Hong Kong remains the rare free-market region whose homemade films outgross the Hollywood invaders, the locals' share has plummeted in four years from 80% to 54%. That has led to a slashing of the typical movie budget, from nearly $3 million to about $1.5 million. In such a stringent climate, producers naturally drool when they look to the mainland. But Beijing has said it would not relax its quota system, which allows release of only 10 foreign films a year, including Hollywood megamovies.

Hong Kong producers see the mainland not only as a revenue wellspring but as a great place to make cheaper movies. But if you shoot on their real estate, you'll have to play by their rules. A Hong Kong producer who has worked at home and in the U.S. received a recent offer to co-produce a film on the mainland. There were three provisions: the film would have no unseemly political content, would make no observations about the Chinese military and would have no explicit sex or violence. If mainland authorities impose similarly draconian censorship laws on movies made in Hong Kong, the 12-year New Wave could dry up in no time.

So boo-hoo, July 1. And bye-bye, maybe, to flush days of Hong Kong films. But if we anticipate the worst, that only puts us in a mood to remember the best. From half a world away, one fan looks back on the glories and goofiness of the most vibrant, hectic, money-mad, in-spite-of-itself-artistic cinema around.

Local audiences may be tired of Hong Kong films and ready to embrace Hollywood, karaoke or a good book, but the rest of the world is amazed that a territory with fewer people than Bulgaria could be the world's third largest producer of movies, after the U.S. and India. Indian pictures don't travel, but Hong Kong movies do: all over East Asia, to the diaspora who patronize Chinatown theaters in western cities and, most recently, to gweilo viewers. It's true that, in the U.S., most of the Chinese-language hits have been art-house films from Taiwan's Ang Lee and China's Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. With the exception of Bruce Lee in the '70s and a couple of recent Jackie Chan comedies, Hong Kong's popular, Hollywood-style action format hasn't caught on with mainstream moviegoers. But it is a mania in specialized U.S. video stores. Hong Kong has a huge video-export market and it finds new acolytes daily.

For foreign newcomers to the island's product, Hong Kong film presents a richness of perplexities. Start with the film titles: the English translations (and there may be two or three for some films) rarely have any connection with the originals. Woo's The Killer is known to the Chinese as Bloodshed of Two Heroes; Bruce Lee's breakthrough movie The Big Boss is the English rendering of Tong Mountain Big Brother; the Jackie Chan Armour of God is Dragon Elder Brother Tiger Younger Brother; Sex and Zen is really The Carnal Prayer Cushion: Almanac for Adultery. If a Westerner visits a Chinatown video store and asks for last year's coming-of-age drama Growing Up, the clerk may say, "Oh, you mean People Small Ghost Big: Three 'Peeping Tom Teenagers."'

And if you were to tell him it's "a Shu Kei movie," he might ask if you mean the Taiwanese sex kitten (also known as Hsu Chi), who two weeks ago won the Best New Performer prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards, or Shu Kei, the Hong Kong critic who has directed her in two films. Clearly, the island has plenty of movie talent but not enough names to go around. The name Tony Leung is shared by two actors: Leung Ka-fei, star of the steamy French film The Lover (hence called Tony "The Lover" Leung), and Leung Chiu-wai, star of Chungking Express (hence Tony "The Other" Leung). Actor Andy Lau (God of Gamblers) is not related to director Andrew Lau (Young and Dangerous). Still, you've got to love a film industry with two directors surnamed Lam--one Ringo, the other Bosco.

Foreign fans of Hong Kong cinema dearly hope that after July 1 the films will still be subtitled in English as well as Chinese, and not just so they can understand what's going on. Because subtitling is a rushed, poorly paid job, and English is a third language to most Hong Kongers, the onscreen words often have a vagrant hilarity. In the 1993 Daughter of Darkness, a demanding lover murmurs (per the titles): "I please your uterus, you kiss my toes. It's fair." One U.S. book on Hong Kong films, Sex and Zen & a Bullet in the Head by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, has hundreds of these goofs. Some suggest mystic wisdom of the East: "From your tiny eyes, I can tell you won't be lazy in bed" (Holy Weapon). Others offer a fresh way to confront an adversary: "Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants!" (The Seventh Curse). And a few are just beyond us: "My world is to companion with calabash till drunk" (Shaolin Drunkard).

If we can guess at the meaning of Hong Kong subtitles, we can't fathom the bustling pace of the industry's top performers and directors. In 1986, Chow Yun-fat starred in Woo's seminal A Better Tomorrow--and in 11 other movies. Last year, dreamy new star Dior Cheng made Young and Dangerous, and two sequels, and the romantic comedy Feel 100%, and a sequel to that. Jordan Chan, Cheng's Young and Dangerous co-star, appeared in a dozen films last year--a film a month. In 30 months, from mid-'94 to the end of last year, character actor Law Kar-ying was in 32 films. Tsui Kam-kong, the patriarchal stud of many a Category III escapade, showed up last year in, believe it or not, 17 films. Behind the camera, people are just as busy. In 1993 Wong Jing, Hong Kong's most successful showman, directed an impossible ten movies and produced at least three others. Some Hollywood directors take a year over a cup of latte.

What long-distance appreciators of these movies miss is the roar of the Hong Kong crowd. Local audiences are as demonstrative as any American kids at a Saturday matinee 50 years ago, hissing the villains and oohing at the stunts. In last year's Viva Erotica, the midnight crowd at a Category III movie goes nuts when a superhero guy and a superhero gal perform impossible stunts of copulation--while in another, nearly empty theater the exiting audience complains that a film was too arty. The director of the art film, who has come to gauge the popular reaction, overhears these comments and forthwith drowns himself. In Hong Kong the box office is king; the mob rules. The melancholy question now is whether the audience will be able to see the robust, free cinema they have loved and hated, or whether they will be seeing films whose real directors are the censors in Beijing.

Outsiders have loomed over Hong Kong cinema from the start: the very first film made in the colony, the 1909 To Steal a Roasted Duck, was produced by U.S. theater owner Benjamin Polaski. And international politics has long helped determine how movies get made. In the '20s Li Min-wei, who had worked with Polaski, tried securing rights to build a movie studio in Hong Kong, but the British authorities refused. Li had made patriotic documentaries for the Kuomintang, and the Brits were fearful that his connections would upset the local war lord.

But Hong Kong cinema was also enriched by successive waves of mainland refugees, of moviemakers and moviegoers, many from thriving Shanghai, the Hollywood of the East. As World War II ended, Hong Kong exploded into movie production. It also festered with battles between refugees of the right and left. According to John A. Lent's valuable history, The Asian Film Industry, the British government called in the warring directors in 1950 and asked them not to make films that would create disturbances.

The late '40s saw a new kind of action picture: the first of at least 99 Wong Fei-hung films based on the real-life martial arts master; Kwan Tak-hing starred in at least 77 of these. "There were 30 of my films released in one year," Kwan recalled in the 1993 documentary Cinema of Vengeance. "Every theater was playing Wong Fei-hung films!" But most films, of the 200-300 made annually in the '50s, were comedies, social-realist dramas and operas, in Mandarin as well as Cantonese. Whatever the ostensible genre, though, these were musicals; a character could be swinging a sword one minute, singing a song the next. Prime emoters like Zhou Xuan and Bai Guang embodied tortured women driven to prostitution for the noblest of reasons, to psychosis by the nastiest men. They were Asian sisters to Garbo and Bette Davis.

Among the most curious Cantonese opera stars were two actresses who were a romantic couple onscreen and off. Yam Kin-fai, tall and angular, played the male roles; soft, trilling Baak Suet-sin took the traditional female parts. In public Yam wore natty suits, Baak prim dresses. Everyone, apparently, knew they were lovers; no one seemed to care. The two held the easy affection of Hong Kong moviegoers until Yam's death in 1989.

When he arrived in Hong Kong in 1959, Run Run Shaw was already part of a movie dynasty. The Singapore-based Shaw brothers--Run Run and Runme--had built a chain of theaters and amusement parks across Southeast Asia. The Japanese seized as many of the family's assets as they could find and detained Run Run for subversion. In 1945 the Shaws dug up the fortune they had hidden and, as Run Run later recalled, "The pearls were a little brown, the watches rusty, the bank notes mildewed; but the gold was nice and yellow. The diamonds, sapphires and emeralds were in excellent form. We were still rich."

Once in Hong Kong, Shaw hit the ground Run-Running. He built Movie Town, a 17-hectare complex with 500 actors and a staff of 3,000 under contract, many of them living in dormitories on the lot. A grueling assembly-line schedule kept the sound stages busy in three eight-hour shifts. Though the Shaw films had high production values, Run Run was not out to make masterpieces. He needed lots of products for the company's ever-expanding theater empire. But some directors and stars didn't know better. They created a pell-mell popular art for which the world went nuts.

Violence and vengeance, fierce villains and stolid heroes, gravity-defying acrobatics and a soundtrack full of grunts and groans--with these ingredients, and in almost 80 films, director Chang Cheh spiced the kung fu stew to make it tasty for audiences in Hong Kong and way beyond. Starmaker and genre-bender, Chang found young martial artists--Jimmy Wang, David Chiang, Ti Lung, Alexander Fu Sheng, Philip Kwok--then shaped their personalities (and often shaved their heads), promoting them into lead players. From the Chang stable the hunks and hulks just kept on coming.

It was another Shaw director, Cheng Chang-ho, who made the first worldwide hit. His Mandarin-language Five Fingers of Death (1972), starring Lo Lieh as the fellow with lightning feet and infernally glowing hands, was picked up by Warner Bros. and pulled in a robust $9 million in the U.S. The next year, Warner made even more--in real-dollar terms, a higher U.S. gross than any Hong Kong film, including the Jackie Chans, has earned since--with a Cantonese-language revenge drama made by Shaw's onetime studio boss and now chief rival, Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest. The film was Enter the Dragon, and its star was a 32-year-old actor born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong: Bruce Lee.

In Hollywood home movies shot eight years earlier, Lee explains his style: "A karate punch is like an iron bar--whack! A kung fu punch is like an iron chain with an iron bar attached to the end, and it go Wang! and it hurt inside." He stands in a living room wearing a dark suit and narrow tie, yet his charisma shines through. Here is a man with skill, speed, grace and, not least, beauty, who could have been the Asian-American Elvis. Instead, he went to Hong Kong and wowed the world in The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and Return of the Dragon. His death, of a brain edema at 32, threw the colony into a frenzy of grief and, after the mourning subsided, imitation. Bruce Li! Bruce Le! Bruce Lei! Jackie Chan! Send in the clones; exit the Dragon.

"Becoming the Dragon": that's the meaning of Sing Lung, Jackie Chan's Cantonese name, and it took a long time for the little guy to achieve Lee's superstar status. It wasn't until in 1978, when he hooked up with novice auteur Yuen Woo-ping for Snake in Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (1979), that Chan's boyish charm had a chance to radiate. With the Hui brothers, whose Benny Hill-style Mr. Boo comedies were huge '70s hits, Chan also helped make Golden Harvest the top Hong Kong studio. In 1985 the Shaws shifted focus from movie production and concentrated on the huge tvb TV network.

Jackie was no Lee-like monosyllabic superhero. His character was a cute chatterbox, a little brother backing into a big brawl, and during it he might tiptoe into a closet and whine like a fraidy-cat. The "real" Jackie--the star seen in closing-credit outtakes being treated for all manner of injuries by anxious crew members--was of course madly, masochistically courageous. That was part of his appeal; the rest was a sunny, fan-friendly nature far different from the remote surliness of some Hollywood stars. Jackie would do anything for his audience, because he was them, on the screen--their cheerful, indefatigable stunt double.

Like Lee before him, Chan created an international appetite for Hong Kong films. And this time, in the mid-'80s, the industry had the three requisites for international appeal: stories, stars, directors. Besides Chan's action comedies, in modern and period dress, Woo had his gun-fu "heroic bloodshed" dramas, usually with Chow Yun-fat as a dapper, twisted samurai in a suit. The director-producer Tsui Hark lent his astonishing vigor to mythic fables (Green Snake), the Wong Fei-hung saga (Once Upon a Time in China) and luscious cross-dressing epics (Swordsman II). His all-time-great Peking Opera Blues is a mix of many genres--political, theatrical, comic--played fortissimo and furioso. This brilliant action film starred three strong women, led by the beautifully butch Brigitte Lin, whom Tsui Hark often cast in androgynous roles. Shades of Yam Kin-fai!

Seductive actresses like Lin, Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, Joey Wong and Carina Lau--all of whom co-starred with Jackie Chan--eventually led Hong Kong film fans beyond the action genre. These women could do more than kick butt; they could break hearts. Mui did it as the prostitute ghost pining across the years in Stanley Kwan's Rouge; Cheung as Ruan Ling Yu, China's first film star and proto-tragic diva, in Kwan's Actress; Lau as another suffering-goddess type, the kept woman, in Tony Au's I Am Sorry; Wong as the restless spirit with the beguiling eyebrows in Ching Siu-tung's A Chinese Ghost Story, produced by Tsui Hark; and Lin as the bitter man-woman (what else?) in Wong Kar-wai's artful Ashes of Time. If Hollywood was basically a fraternity that bore the sign "No Girls Allowed," Hong Kong was an equal-opportunity entrancer.

Still, it was the guys who brought in the big crowds. Last year's top-ten Hong Kong grossers had Jackie Chan's Police Story IV: First Strike at the top. Stephen Chow, the deadpan comic with the moleitau (no-brain) wordplay, secured the next two spots. Leslie Cheung--pouty, defiant, a mesmerizing actor--was represented by three films; his only flop, the mainland Temptress Moon, contained his best work. And Dior Cheng, the dreamy street rebel and the only new face on the list, had four films (the three Young and Dangerous dramas and Feel 100%).

Beneath and beyond: that's where the fun and excitement has been. Yikes, another legendary martial artist? Yes, when the approach is as blithe and original as in Corey Yuen's 1993 Fong Sai-yuk, with Jet Li and Josephine Siao. Or take a 1988 cop film, The Big Heat, with no big star, a pair of young directors (Andrew Kam and Johnny To) and a plot about some emigrating bad guys getting a jump on '97--voila! a little classic that could be remade, frame by frame, into a terrific Hollywood thriller of the ultra-violent stripe. But not as bizarre as Billy Tang's 1993 Run and Kill, about a fat guy (Kent Cheng, who nabbed Best Actor at this year's Hong Kong Film Awards for The Log) getting his child charred and playing corpse-and-robbers with a deranged Vietnam vet (Simon Yam). Nothing mellow about this melodrama!

All these films, and hundreds more, have the energy, the craft, the addiction to entertain that reminds one happily of Hollywood in its burly prime. They were made in earned assurance of the audience's approval. So popular were Hong Kong films that they lured foreign directors (Enter the Dragon's Robert Clouse), cinematographers (the Australian camera stylist Christopher Doyle) and actors (Cynthia Rothrock from the U.S., Joyce Godenzi from Australia, Yukari Oshima from Japan). At home and abroad, Hong Kong was the cinema that worked.

Now the workers are fretful. The only two directors making handover movies are the South African-born Lawrence Ah Mon and Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club), whose English-language romance, Chinese Box, stars Jeremy Irons and Gong Li. You can't blame the rest of the industry for their caution. Folks on that little island don't want to upset their big brother with his mercurial moods; the approach of July 1 sounds like a giant's heavy tread to a population 1/200th that of China's. Or perhaps the strictures of the Hong Kong marketplace are every bit as limiting as those of a communist dictatorship. We can hear a sour-faced producer telling a director with high social aspirations, "Who wants to see a searing indictment of Maoism? Just make me a flying ghost movie!"

In the new Mabel Cheung epic The Soong Sisters, the eldest Soong, Ai-ling (played by Yeoh), emigrates with her husband to Hong Kong. "There," she notes, "people don't care about politics, only finance." No, people in Hong Kong also care about movies, and are happy to see good ones still being made. Comrades, Almost a Love Story, which swept the Hong Kong Film Awards--nine prizes, including film, direction (Peter Chan), actress (Maggie Cheung), supporting actor (Eric Tsang) and script--is a lovely, low-key drama about a ten-year friendship of two mainlanders. They emigrate to Hong Kong, fall in love, fall apart and are last seen in New York City.

Hong Kong's cinema has been one of movement--in the flash of Jimmy Wang's fists, the trajectory of a Jackie Chan jump, the majestically menacing course of a Chow Yun-fat rifleblast, the tears coursing down Maggie Cheung's radiant face. Now the industry's makers and audience are on the move, away from the glorious past. We can hope many will stay, some return, still others emerge. We know for sure that Hong Kong movies will stay in one place: the fond and grateful memories of all those who have been enriched, enthralled, giddified by those grand images and beautiful people.