Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book (17 page)

A “discussion” of this turns into a barroom brawl where Chan shows off his sharpened skills as actor, choreographer, stuntman, and director. As a result of this fight, and the fact that their boats are sabotaged, the government assigns the sailors to the police force. It seems that the headquarters for illegal smuggling is in a swank nightclub that caters to foreigners and various criminal scum. After trying it the civilized way, only to be humiliated, Jackie and his crew attack in a breath-taking battle that brings home just how serious Jackie was about showing himself and his stuntmen hitting the floor.

But he’s not done … not by a long shot. The film’s center is an extended chase/fight scene that’s obviously inspired by the silent comedy films of Buster Keaton
and Harold Lloyd
— only with Jackie’s more extreme “damage-wish” — that climaxes with Chan’s fall from a clock tower through three cloth awnings that were supposed to split under his weight … but don’t always. The shot was so impressive that Jackie shows all three takes, one after the other, before carrying on with the breathless, elating film.

The climatic sequences take place in and on the pirate’s beautifully realized lair, incorporating a wonderful pure dialogue sequence where a disguised Jackie must fast-talk the pirate king (the masterful Dick Tei Wei
) that he is who he says he is, when faced with a pirate collaborator (Li Hai-sheng
) who knows he isn’t. Thankfully this cliffhanger is interrupted by the final battle, as Jackie’s few allies (Mars, Yuen Baio
, and Sammo Hung
) must take on the pirate army. But even after the film ended, Jackie left his audience happy by including outtakes during the end credits — but not outtakes of flubbed lines (as in
Cannonball Run
) … outtakes of flubbed stunts (including some painful shots of the bar room brawl and clock-tower fall that go horribly wrong)!

Project A
was Jackie’s first solo kung fu film revolution … with a little help from his friends. “At the beginning of filming
Project A
, I was only an actor,” Sammo, Jackie’s Peking Opera
School senior, told me. “But after a year, Jackie had only finished half the movie. Filming did not go very smoothly. So Golden Harvest
asked me to take care of the rest of the movie. It worked out okay because I’ve known Jackie since he was a little boy. If it wasn’t me, Jackie wouldn’t have allowed it. We finished, and it turned out well.”

That was an understatement. It turned out great, and the box office returns reflected it. Jackie was back on top, and had every intention of staying there. But, of course, he hadn’t counted on Golden Harvest
, Lo Wei
, and the rest of the film industry. Lo cobbled together some feeble outtakes and released the execrable
Fearless
Hyena
Part II
(1983). Another small company took that moment to release
Fantasy Mission
Force
(1983), a fun, silly adventure “Jacky” had done an extended cameo in (reportedly as a favor to Jimmy Wang Yu
, who supposedly served as Chan’s protector in his early cinema years). Then the studio pressed him into
Cannonball Run
II
(1984), which was a lesser, but still mildly entertaining, film on all counts.

As if that wasn’t enough, Jackie also co-starred with Yuen Baio
and Sammo Hung
in several Sammo-directed kung fu comedies as pay back for Hung’s help on
Project A
.
Winners and Sinners
(1983) and, especially,
Wheels on Meals
(1984) added to Jackie’s experience and reputation. Both featured great kung fu, although the latter showcased a classic — a climatic fight with real-life martial arts champ Benny “the Jet” Urquidez
that was even more effective and realistic than
Dragon
Lord
.

“We filmed it for forty-eight hours straight,” Benny told me, “and Sammo asked if I would take a punch on camera. After some thought, I agreed, but told him ‘you only get one shot at this.’ You can clearly see it in the finished film. That was a lot of work, but a lot of fun, and I think it shows.” Sammo concurred, remembering the collaboration with Benny and Jackie as very satisfying and rewarding. But then Golden Harvest
reared its head, and back to America Jackie went for another misconceived misfire.

The Protector
(1985) was supposed to correct all the missteps of
The Big Brawl
, but sadly it only replaced one mistake for another.
Brawl
was Jackie and Bruce Lee
lite. But
Protector
…? “I make you Clint Eastwood
,” Jackie told me the film’s director (James Glickenhaus
) whispered to him. This crude, lewd, stupid modern crime film fit Jackie like a tarp and is painful to watch. But Jackie dutifully slogged through it, establishing another unfortunate Chan American tradition. Rather than try to correct, or even influence, his U.S. directors and producers, Jackie will just do as he’s told. He will contribute his knowledge and expertise only if specifically asked to.

But there’s one other tradition that this unfortunate exercise cemented. Jackie is never more inspired on what to do right than when returning from an American misfire. First, he filmed additional scenes and recut
The Protector
for its Hong Kong release. Then he decided to do for the modern kung fu film what
Project A
did for the historical kung fu film. Prior to this, kung fu films set in the present were either extremely cheap thrillers in which traditional Peking Opera
drama were given polyester trappings (a la Chang Cheh
’s
The Chinatown Kid
)
,
or campy adventures which ignored the high-caliber realities of modern weaponry (ala Liu Chia-liang
’s
The Lady Is the Boss
)
.

This time Chan intended to take everything he had learned about moviemaking, and pour his heart and soul — and his alone — onto the screen. Jackie’s story of an obsessed cop trying to bring down a drug kingpin had a sophistication of approach that was light-years beyond anything else. As with
Project A
,
Jackie saw to it that much of the film’s success came from characterization and plot — two vastly underused ingredients in the Hong Kong film mix. He balanced inventive comedy with emotional drama, making the audience truly care about, and identify with, the characters — something else that had been in short supply in Hong Kong cinema.

Then there’s the action: one classic fight after another. First was the shantytown battle, ending with Jackie driving through a hillside village created especially for the film (a scene that was copied, shot for shot, in Michael Bay
’s 2003
Bad Boys II
). Then, the double-decker bus fight, starting with Jackie hanging off the back by an umbrella and ending with a scene Sylvester Stallone
“borrowed” (using it poorly) in the opening of
Tango and Cash
(1989), where crooks fly out of the braking bus to crash to the road below (sending them to the hospital in real life).

Finally, there’s the greatest shopping-mall fight ever filmed. Jackie battles from one side to the other of a real shopping mall (which the crew had from closing at night to opening in the morning), imaginatively using all the store displays in a virtuoso performance that not only rivaled anything that Chaplin or Keaton had done, but Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson
, and Bruce Willis
as well. Seeing a man drop off a balcony and hit the floor in 1900’s Hong Kong was one thing, but seeing someone (stuntman Fung Hak-on
) flip backward onto a shopping-mall’s real steel escalator in the present day was another.

Not surprisingly, Jackie didn’t spare himself either. He banged himself up regularly (as evidenced by the end credit outtakes), but also seriously burned his hands during the climatic stunt in which he slid down a three-story, lightbulb-strewn, pole to catch the villain (famed director, now actor, Chu Yuan
). “They were supposed to be low-watt bulbs,” Jackie revealed to me. “They weren’t.” Even without that oversight, it took hours for him to gather up the courage to actually jump off the mezzanine and onto the pole. “I want to film,” he said. “When we’re not filming, I worry. ‘Maybe I’ll get hurt…maybe I’ll die.’ But when I hear the cry from the camera crew ‘Rolling!’ I forget everything and just do it.”

The thrill of recognition seemed to shoot through Asian audiences, especially since everything was actually being done by the actors playing each role (even occasionally heroines Brigitte Lin
and Maggie Cheung
). If Jackie Chan
had been a superstar before, he was a screen deity now. In two words: game-changing. In another word: universal. Despite there being three different cuts of the film: a basic Chinese edition, a more emotionally complete Japanese version (with character development scenes added to the beginning and the end) and a shortened American edit (that was the hit of the 1988 New York Film Festival), the landmark, influential
Police Story
(1985) works brilliantly in any language.

Jackie, meanwhile, filled his workaholic schedule by appearing in three more Sammo-directed productions.
Heart of Dragon
(1985) was supposed to be their change-up — a straight-on drama of a conflicted young man (Chan) dealing with his mentally challenged brother (Hung). But self-doubt and studio pressure led to Sammo adding three out-of-place fight scenes — great though they were. The climatic fight, in fact, ranks as one of Sammo’s all-time greatest.

“I spent most of the movie working on that final fight scene,” Sammo told me. “I wanted it to be very different. I wanted it to have incredible style. From the very beginning to the very end of the final fight sequence I used a track camera to create a really exciting, thundering style.”

But after that unsure effort, the classmates now known as “the Three Brothers,” regrouped for
My Lucky Stars
(1985) — set in Japan
to please the burgeoning mass of Japanese Jackie fans — and
Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars
(1985), both featuring Sammo, Yuen Baio
, and Chan alongside a slightly shifting group of popular comic actors (Richard Ng
, Eric Tsang
, et al) who spent all their time between a few fight scenes trying to inappropriately touch or ogle girls. Jackie even found time to produce and/or cameo in a few comedies of his own (1984’s
Pom Pom
and 1986’s
Naughty Boys
).

But when all was said and done, he still had to confront the problem of topping himself.
Lucky Star
member Eric Tsang
had the answer: why do something completely new when he could gratify his Chinese audience by doing Indiana Jones one better? For decades, “Cantowood” had an inferiority complex about Hollywood. Rather than create their own soundtracks, independent kung fu film producers had been ripping off the James Bond
,
Star Wars
, and Spaghetti Western scores of John Barry
, John Williams
, and Ennio Morricone
for years. When I first visited Hong Kong, the usual reaction to my professed love of the genre was an incredulous “You
like
those things?!”

So the idea of giving
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981) a distinct Chan spin was attractive — especially with experienced writer/producer/actor Tsang as director (Jackie had been particularly impressed with his back-to-back direction for 1980’s
The Loot
and
The Challenger
— two lively, enjoyable independent kung fu comedies starring David Chiang
, Norman Chu
, Kao Fei
, and Lily Li
). Thus
Armour of God
(1986) was conceived, and Jackie threw himself into this anxiously awaited effort. He was riding high, so, naturally, the egomaniacal industry was waiting for him to fall … but no one thought he would do it literally.

Jackie ignored the nay-sayers, enjoying the worldwide locations where they were scheduled to film — starting with an action-packed prologue in Yugoslavia where the “Asian Hawk,” an international finder of rarities, had gone to secure an ancient tribe’s idol. “I had just flown in from a meeting,” Chan remembered. “Maybe I hadn’t had enough sleep.” The director was on another location (some say he was busy shopping), but that had never slowed Jackie down before. He and his handpicked team of stuntmen went to work realizing the sequence.