Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book (16 page)

This finale was perfectly designed for Chan’s skills, and set the tone for the rest of his career’s action scenes, because he is a kung fu sponge. In the Peking Opera
school, he had learned theatrical wushu techniques. From schoolmate Sammo’s productions, he acquired hung gar
. From Bruce Lee
’s sets, he synthesized wing chun
and jeet kune do
. Then, from Yuen Wo-ping
, he infused taichi
and Shaolin animal styles. Finally, he brought his own acrobatic, tradition-changing mentality to the mix, and developed a screen kung fu that was both constantly evolving but still clearly identifiable as his.

Ng Sze-yuen
served as shepherd to Chan and Yuen’s re-creation, revitalization, and resurrection of the kung fu comedy revolution.
Drunken Master
was an even bigger hit than
Eagle’s Shadow
, and Chan went from box office poison to superstar overnight. Simon Yuen
, at the tender age of sixty-six, achieved the stardom that had eluded him throughout his forty-five-year career. Ng was happy. Wo-ping was very happy. Chan was even happier. Lo Wei
was happiest. Suddenly he had Hong Kong’s biggest star under contract for at least one more iron-clad film, and bragging rights that he was the one who had “made” both Bruce Lee
and Jacky Chan
.

Ng Sze-yuen
saw the writing on the wall, and backed away. Willie Chan
, Jacky’s agent and manager, stepped up. Golden Harvest
, still smarting over the loss of Bruce Lee
and their fumbling of
Game of Death
, moved in. But while they and Lo Wei
haggled over details, the ever-honorable Jacky set to work on
Fearless
Hyena
, his final film for his “discoverer’s” Company. It followed, in form and function,
Eagle’s Shadow
and
Drunken Master
’s lead, with one major difference. This time, Chan called all the shots, proving to his growing group of fans that the previous two films weren’t just Ng and Yuen’s babies.

Here he plays Lung, the grandson of the last of the Hsin-yi fighters. Like the snake master before him, the head Hsin-yi man is being hunted down, this time by Ch’ing Dynasty General Yen and his trio of killers — all who carry a form of “switch spear,” a spear that folds like a switchblade. Crafty, opportunistic Lung sneaks away from his grandfather’s forest shack to perform as a martial artist for money. He takes on all comers, disguising himself as a buffoon and a girl, until he inadvertently leads Yen to his grandfather. The old man is killed, but Lung is prevented from interfering by a crippled old sifu (here played by Chan Wai-lau
). He takes Lung away to train him in “Emotional Kung Fu,” which involves crying and laughing to unleash untapped power.

When the smoke cleared, Lo Wei
’s bank accounts were considerably fuller, and Golden Harvest
had a newly-minted superstar — a “Jackie” of all trades who was always eager to please the new authority figure in his life … but not so eager that he’d ever let them completely
Game of Death
him. The arrangement was unprecedented: the man they slightly renamed “Jackie” (to differentiate him from the low-rent, box-office-poison “Jacky”) had full run of the studio as well as total control of his films — to the point that he could spend as much time and money as he wanted.

“To show respect,” Jackie told me, “they even gave me Bruce Lee
’s old dressing room. Everyone told me it was haunted, so I decided to sleep there to show I wasn’t afraid. In the middle of the night I heard a scratching at the door. Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, it took me three tries before I finally swung open the door. It was a stray puppy.” Not wanting to share the lost canine’s fate, Jackie immediately set about making his ultimate statement in new wave kung fu comedy:
The Young Master
(1980).

To do that, he needed his own team. On his previous films, he had watched with appreciation (and perhaps a little envy) as Yuen Wo-ping
worked with his brothers Cheung-yan
, Chun-yeung, Shun-yi, and Yat-cho. Having no siblings of his own (that he yet knew about [in later years he would discover that his father was a Chinese spy with a second family]), Jackie set out to create his own. As much as he admired many of his Peking Opera
schoolmates, they were otherwise occupied by Sammo, so he called upon stuntman friend Chiang Wing-fat
(otherwise known as Mars), and Lo Wai-kwong
, to serve as foundation for an ever-growing, ever-changing team of collaborators.

The Young Master
was Jackie’s “kitchen sink” film, in which he throws in characters and conflicts at will. The plot, such as it is, has him trying to rescue a friend from a life of crime. As he attempts to bring the chief thief down, he keeps bumping into the sheriff (Shih Kien
) and his two children (Peking Opera
schoolmate Yuen Baio
and Queen of Shaw Studio kung fu Lily Li
). But that was really just a thin line upon which to hang show-stopping kung fu and French farce-flavored sequences.

There’s a sword fight that becomes a complex juggling act, a lion dance, fights with elegant white fans, fights with furniture; and once more Chan dresses as a girl, this time to take out the main villain’s cronies (including Li Hai-sheng
). Here’s where he also cemented his new approach to choreography. As Mars pointed out, what more can you do with only two arms and two legs? So, inspired by another movie idol, Gene Kelly
, Jackie added props — not just as weapons, but as integral allies or enemies in the action scenes. Chan not only used his body as an encyclopedia of possibilities, but the environment his body finds itself in. This simple, seemingly obvious, idea led to audience involvement like never before.

Another
Young Master
swerve is that Chan’s character is not a good enough martial artist to defeat his enemy (the mighty Wang In-sik
). Throughout his last three films, Chan had made it quite clear that he liked torture/training scenes. The things he does to himself on-screen are scarcely believable. In the climactic fight of
The Young Master,
Chan is pummeled unmercifully but keeps coming back for more. He just keeps getting kicked and punched and hurled — sometimes in “dare-you-to-find-any fakery” slow motion — until he defeats the bad guy simply by surviving.

The last shot of the film shows every part of Chan’s body in traction except for two fingers of one hand. With those two bandaged fingers he waves “bye-bye” to the audience. They didn’t wave back. Instead they applauded wildly, and in record numbers. It seemed that Golden Harvest
’s gamble had paid off, and they immediately wanted to take advantage of that … by doing precisely the wrong thing. Seemingly cowed by Hollywood’s international power, they tossed Jackie to the tinseltown wolves with virtually no preparation. They stripped him of his creative power, and he could hardly speak English. Then they saddled him with director Robert Clouse
.

It was “new Bruce Lee
“ time, part two, with nearly the same result.
The Big Brawl
(aka
Battle Creek Brawl
, 1980) was written and directed by Clouse, and starred Chan as a 1930s Chicago resident who runs afoul of a mobster who runs bare-knuckled boxing competitions. Jackie — who had to learn the script phonetically, starting a life-long aversion to learning English — summed up the experience for me thusly: “The script says that I should walk out the door. So I say, ‘Look, I can cartwheel to the door, and somersault out.’ They say, ‘No, just walk out the door.’ I say, I can use the chairs and tables to climb and roll to the door, then dive out.’ They say, ‘no, just walk out.’ I was so frustrated. ‘No one pays to see Jackie walk!’ They said, ‘Here they will.’”

They didn’t. Jackie got much more mileage (all puns intended) by his appearance with Michael Hui
, Hong Kong’s top comedy star, in the Golden Harvest
-produced, star-studded car chase comedy
The Cannonball Run
(1981). Although he was again encouraged to do stiff-limbed, round-house moves, at least he was able to add the anti-Bruce character touches he had developed. Whether these films helped or hindered his international reputation, Jackie returned to Hong Kong as the crowned heir-apparent to Bruce. His Asian fans didn’t seem to care about the relative quality of the American movies — all they knew was that their Jackie was now a worldwide star. Naturally, Jackie immediately set about dismantling it all.

It was a teeth-gritting few years for Golden Harvest
. Rather than build upon his kung fu comedies, Jackie rightly decided that he had gone as far as he could in that direction. Only problem was that he wasn’t sure what to replace it with. So began a nearly two-year odyssey of trial and error in an attempt to create a new style of kung fu action. First Jackie and company laboriously developed new sports games to replace firecracker-vying and lion dances. One seemed to be a brutal combination of soccer and badminton (a variant of Jianzi), while the other was a truly insane mass race up a bamboo pyramid to secure a bun at the top. Yes, a bun.

Neither of these would ever replace football, which his crew painfully discovered as Jackie set a Guinness World Record for most takes of a single shot — a mind-boggling two thousand, nine hundred times up the effing pyramid. Originally designed to end the movie, the sequence was moved to the beginning to secure a memorable opening. But that left the finale open, and plagued by overspending and overshooting, Jackie finally succumbed to studio pleading and decided upon a fight scene. But Jackie being Jackie, it was no ordinary fight scene.

By then the meandering story had settled upon a simple device: when a love letter goes awry, Jackie’s character stumbles upon a gang of thieves who are selling Chinese antiques to gweilo collectors (a plot Chan would reuse constantly). Trapped in a barn with his friend (Mars) and his friend’s captive father, the kung fu-lite Jackie must face the kung fu-heavy lead villain (Wang In-sik
once more). What follows is the best street brawl-style, realistic kung fu fight thus far filmed, as Jackie is pummeled mercilessly while he goes manic on his opponent. Again, Jackie triumphs through sheer adrenalin, the ability to survive abuse, and his opponent’s arrogant inability to counter martial hysteria with concentrated, all-out devastation.

Golden Harvest
did the best it could with the unusual, unfocused, sprawling money pit of a movie Jackie handed them. Touting it throughout the long production as
Young Master in Love
, it was finally released as
Dragon
Lord
(1982). Not surprisingly, it didn’t do as well as they hoped, but, surprisingly, it did much better than they thought it would in Japan
— a considerably more profitable market than Hong Kong. For that reason alone, all was forgiven, and Jackie assured his agitated bosses that now he knew what he was doing.

And he did.
The Big Brawl
and
Dragon
Lord
experiences had brought into focus what Jackie always thought was wrong with Hong Kong action films. But now he was in a position to do something about it. And what he planned to do was drag the kung fu film, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. Precious few kung fu films had been made picturing that era, so Jackie set his new film in 1903. The fighting in
Big Brawl
looked mannered, while the fight in
Dragon
Lord
looked frenetic, so Jackie started developing a new, dangerous style of screen mayhem — one that would, for the first time, on purpose, show the fighters hitting the ground.

Finally, Jackie decided to also concentrate on the previously least important aspect of Hong Kong movies — the dialogue. Since all South Chinese movies were filmed silently so that the many languages and dialects could be dubbed in afterwards, what the characters were saying had slowly been reduced to such clichés as “You must be tired of living.” The glory of dialogue had been brought home to Jackie on
Drunken Master
where an entire scene consisted of Chan and his “Stick King” opponent (renowned choreographer Hsu Hsia
) taunted each other with witty, punny variations on classic kung fu technique descriptions (“Dragon
Flicks Its Tail at the Moon,” etc.). Ironically, when it was later subtitled and dubbed in English, all that was replaced with “Damn you,” and “Eat shit.”

Project A
(aka
Pirate Patrol
, 1983) also took a while to produce, but it was not from indecision. Instead, it was from the scope of what Jackie was successfully attempting. The title derived from the name of the plan that the Chinese Coast Guard had to clean the harbor of pirates who preyed on foreign ships. Chan played “Dragon
Ma,” one of the sailors who are constantly at odds with the Chinese police over who should get the bulk of the indecisive government’s pirate-busting budget.