Film review: Knockabout (1979)

The third of the Sammo Hung movies I bought Jami for her birthday and about in the middle.  It's also the debut of Yuen Biao, who stars in a role that was Sammo's until he decided to give it to Biao and create a new role (the mentor, who for once isn't the one who gets killed) for himself.  Actually he's sort of the second mentor to Biao's "Little Pao," because (in a twist) the first one turns out to be the principle antagonist of the film.  Let me explain.  Little Pao and his brother (Big Pao, of course) are a team of scam artists 

whom we meet (actually after meeting Sammo's beggar, who otherwise disappears for much of the first part of the film) as they pull off rather an ingenious scam on a banker and his son.  First Little Pao sells a tiny piece of gold to the banker's son (who has a distracting huge fake hairy wart), then, as he's standing just outside, is presented with a letter from a supposed emissary from his uncle (in fact Big Pao), which he gives to the banker to read to him, claiming to be illiterate.  The letter says that the accompanying package is 20 ounces of gold for him.  He then sells the gold to the banker, who is delighted, when he weighs it, to find that it's actually 28 ounces, so he thinks he's get a steal when he only pays for 20 ounces.  But, of course, the gold isn't really gold, as the banker discovers, and they follow the Pao's to the restaurant they said they were going to.  Surprisingly, the Paos are not only where they said they'd be, they are pleased to see the banker and son, and act surprised and indignant to be accused of being dishonest, and start a fight with the bankers' men which is disrupted by the (comedically cartoonish) "Colonel Baldy" of the local constabulary.  After the bankers have made their accusation, Pao retorts that yes, that lump is fake gold but that it's not the one he sold because it's bigger.  "My gold was 20 ounces, as revealed in this letter from my uncle and the receipt I got for it".  Of course the bakers are screwed because they can't admit they tried to get 8 ounces for free, and to add insult to injury, Pao produces the money the bankers gave him to find that it's also fake (painted rice wafers) so they have to pay up again.  The brothers retire to divide their loot in a local abandoned building in the woods, but get into a fight when Little tries to cheat Big that ends up with Sammo's beggar making off with both bags of money, replacing one of them with different fake money, a fact that they only discover after they try to make their money back at a local casino, which then becomes the scene of a massive brawl. So, now our pair has no money.  Their only collateral is Big's jade ring, a gift from their father 

(Little has already long since hocked his.) So they try to pull a scam on an "old" (clearly a younger man in a grey wig, although the character is in fact old) man in a restaurant, 

whereby they plant the ring inside his bag and then claim that he's stolen the bag.  Along comes Colonel Baldy again, but this time there's no trace of the ring in the pack.  They've been outfoxed!  So they wait to ambush the old guy in a field, but get the crap beaten out of them.  (Little knows some Kung Fu - enough to have done pretty well in the casino brawl, but Big just copies Little.)  Their response is to run after the old guy and beg for him to take them on as disciples.  He does, and seems to be a fairly benevolent figure, until, when set upon by two fighters ("Snow white" - a very effete figure with white pancake makeup - and "Seven Dwarves" who is in fact quite tall and bald (something that will be used to good effect when he acquires a profusion of Loony Tunesesque lumps on his head during the battle)) 

we see our old guy literally murder them.  This is still not enough to scare our Baos off until, having gone on ahead to a restaurant while the old guy stopped off at his house, Little gets tired of waiting and accidentally oversees the old guy be referred to as "Old Fox" by a detective who has been tracking him, and said Old Fox murdering him, too.  Little is about to sneak off, when Big arrives (having also got tired of waiting) and gives away to Old Fox that Little's been here a while, which means Old Fox has to kill both of them.  

Well, sadly he gets Big, but not before he's sacrificed himself in order that Little can escape.  While hiding in the woods, Little chances on Sammo's beggar, and, after a brief comedic interlude where he steals Sammo's chicken dinner and Sammo takes revenge by getting him to drink water that he's washed his feet in, Little gets Sammo to agree (by losing a bet) to take him on as a pupil.  Then we get the obligatory training montage, which in this case is very entertaining, as Sammo is a little bit sadistic towards Little (still mad about the chicken?) and has him do ridiculous things for a while, before training him in his bizarre "mish mash" and "monkey" styles.

And then that sets up the massive final battle between Sammo (who, it turns out, is also a detective in disguise, albeit a cowardly one) 

and Little, and Old Fox.

Isn't it amazing how many variations you can make on a very basic theme of Young Upstart Gets Comeuppance, Trains, Loses someone precious, Fights villain.  This one is certainly a very solid contribution to that tradition, and this particular transfer is gorgeous. And Yuen Biao, besides sporting an enviable huge seventies mop of hair, does some truly breathtaking flips, kicks and stunts, fully justifying Sammo's faith in him as star material.

Film review: Mickey 17 (2025)

This should be better than it is.  It's an adaptation by the director Bong Joon Ho, whose last film was the wonderful Parasite, of a very fun book I read a couple of years ago (called Mickey 7 - Mickey dies 10 fewer times in the book).  But somehow, while entertaining in parts, it falls well short of the greatness that might have been.  Perhaps this was predictable: while Bong's Korean-language films tend to be great, his previous Hollywood film was the similarly underwhelming Snowpiercer.  But at least that one knew what it was - a straightahead thriller.  This one seems torn between genres - and while that can occasionally work (see American Werewolf in London) it needs very careful handling.  Here the comedic elements undercut all the others, with the effect that it is impossible to take the serious stuff seriously.  But before I say more on that, let's sketch the plot.  The titular Mickey has to get off the planet in a hurry because he's pissed off a loan shark who likes to kill his debtors in excruciating ways.  However, berths on ships leaving Earth are in very short supply with massive competition for each one.  The only role for which there is no competition is for "expendable".  This is the aspect that makes the story interesting for fans of the English philosopher Derek Parfit.  Starting in the 70's Parfit introduced the Star Trek transporter into the stodgy world of Anglo-American analytic philosophy: Parfit was defending the idea first found in John Locke's work that we are not our bodies (or our souls, if such things exist) but rather what makes each of us us is the contents of our minds.  That is, very crudely, if I remember being X, then I am the future version of X, even if X had a different body.  Thus, contended Parfit, even if a teleporter destroyed our original body and created a new one from scratch at our destination (rather than somehow transport our atoms alone the beam), we would survive the trip so long as the new body had all the memories, personality et al. of the original.  The idea of Mickey 7/17 is the transporter without the transporting.  That is, an expendable is somebody whose complete body blueprint is on file, and who regularly records their mental contents, 

so that they can die often in the service of their mission and be "reborn" (reprinted) every time this happens.  This is Mickey's fate - he goes outside the spaceship and is exposed to lethal radiation, and has to die slowly so that the boffins inside can record everything that happens.  When they get to the planet, he is the first person to walk on the surface and breathe its air, and in so doing contract the local virus and die repeatedly in messy and painful ways until they can work out a retrovirus to make it safe for all the non-expendables.  As you can imagine, this idea is a fecund one, not just for metaphysics: Mickey's existence is a wonderful analogy for the lives of any oppressed person whose life is lived for the benefit of others.  And the book explores these ideas in, if not enough detail, at least more detail than the film.  Which is odd, because one imagines, given Parasite, that this was the aspect the drew Bong to the story.  But he rather bottles it by insisting on a comedic tone to the proceedings.  (And perhaps his leading man/men Robert Pattinson 

is also to blame, as he portrays Mickey 17 as a barely competent boob with a sub-Jerry Lewis way of speaking.  Oddly, while critics were lukewarm on the film, Pattinson is almost universally praised, perhaps because the critics thought the plot irredeemable and just wanted to laugh.)  Anyway, the film actually opens with Mickey falling through the ice of the planet, failing to be rescued by his no-good friend Timo, and apparently devoured by the largest alien life on the planet, the giant centipede-like creatures called "creepers" 

that live in tunnels below the ice on the frozen planet called Niflheim that the humans are attempting to colonize.  Just as he's about to be swallowed (or so it appears) we flash back to what brought him there (Timo was his partner in the failed venture that led to them fleeing the loanshark, but somehow he didn't need to become and expendable to come along.).  Oh, and there's a complicating factor: something Bong added to the book (or at least altered) is that the colony is being led by a failed Earth politician/religious cult-leader Kenneth Marshall (played, or should I say "overplayed" - although the part is an invitation to chew the scenery - by Mark Ruffalo) 

and his wife Ylfa (more effectively underplayed by Toni Collette).  There is an analogous figure in the book, but clearly Bong wanted a Trump figure to "satirize", and so we get the oafish-and-not-sinister-enough Marshall, again siding with silliness over horror.  Anyway, after the flashback we return to Mickey 17 not being eaten, and in fact being rescued by the creepers.  This is another complaint, although I'm not sure how it could be easily fixed: the film gives away what should be a twist, that the creepers are not the enemy.  In the book I remember a good portion when the humans are terrified that their base is going to be overrun by monsters, which I think this film could have used to ramp up the stakes and get some narrative tension going.  Anyway, when Mickey 17 gets back to base he (of course) finds out that he's been assumed dead and they've already printed out his replacement.  This makes them "multiples," which are illegal, owning to shenanigans with the psychopathic creator of the printing process.  (Another difference with the book: an effectively chilling episode therein is the inventor taking over an entire planet forcing Earth to take the drastic step of destroying the whole thing.  In the film, he just prints himself out twice more and the triplets take turns stabbing homeless people for kicks.)  Something the film retains from the book is Mickey's girlfriend Nasha being super-keen on a threesome, and in fact the film expands on this by having Mickey and Nasha being sex-positive to the extent of designing their own little animated Karma Sutra.  But again, this is played for laughs rather than eroticism, although in this case that's a relief.  In the book there's no indication that Mickeys 17 and 18 are fundamentally different, but the film wants 18 to be a rather violent badass, so it has somebody trip over a cable in the personality-implantation stage of the printing process to explain how they can be so different in personality (something Pattinson very effectively conveys).  I seem to recall the book containing a stretch where 17 and 18 manage to co-exist without their duplicate nature coming to light (all kinds of possibilities: one talks to X without the other knowing and so on) but the film dispenses with that - perhaps there will be a director's cut.  

Anyway, partly because Mickey is such a cartoonish figure, it's hard to take anything that happens to him (even when we know he won't ever be reprinted) too seriously.  The film does do a decent job of conveying what Parfit calls "the branch-line case" - which is where, even if we believe that the re-printing enables a single Mickey to be effectively immortal, this intuition is undercut if ever there is overlap in the time of existence of two Mickeys, because the experiences the duplicate gains while the original is still alive cannot be said to be those of the original, and, in fact, cases like this are used to attack the idea that teleportation actually does preserve identity.  But the weight of this conclusion is lost in the light froth that this film becomes.

So, overall, fun to look at but I am disappointed that the very serious ideas about personal identity and exploitation that are there to be amplified in the original story are trivialized by the rather farcical presentation.  It's as if Bong lacked the courage of his convictions and rather sneered at the material.  That's not to say that I think the film should have been humorless - it's certainly possible to include moments of hilarity in a very serious work (something I would argue Bong did himself very effectively in The Host and Parasite) - it's more that it's unserious.  And as Steve Martin said, comedy is a serious business.  And so is Philosophy.

Windstorm!

 We had a pretty massive thunderstorm last night.  We only seem to have lost one large branch but others were not so lucky:

Film review: The Bad News Bears (1976)

Paper Moon gave Jami a hankerin' for the other famous Tatum O'Neal film, and so here we are.  This is more Walter Matthau's film (O'Neal doesn't even show up until at least 20 minutes in, and doesn't get fully on board for some time after that), and no bad thing for that.  Matthau is more subdued than he can be, more rueful, less shyster-ish.  There's a lot of him just thinking, processing, and he does it beautifully.  Only a couple of times does he explode, and it's not explosions played for comedy, it's genuinely nasty outbursts, and all the more powerful for that.

The film is definitely a seventies film, or should I say, a pre-Spielberg film.  The kids all look like actual kids, not child actors.  There's no John Williams score - in fact I don't think there's any score at all.  Certainly you're not browbeaten into a certain mood.  And nothing is really explained.  We're just dropped into the action with Matthau's Coach Buttermaker, a former minor leaguer, who once (more than once!) struck out Ted Williams (spring training, 1948), but who now cleans pools, all the equipment sticking out of the back of his giant 70's boat of a car, whose windshield gets cracked by a baseball the first day with his team and never gets repaired the rest of the movie.  Also there is much casual use by the children of ethnic slurs (and "faggot," although, oddly, the foulest-mouthed boy in this regard, a little terrier of a blond kid, says "crud" more than anything else).  

We also see the bad kid (Kelly Leak - played by Jackie Earl Haley, who would go on to play Rorschach and Freddie Krueger) 

who is cajoled into joining the team by Tatum O'Neal's Amanda Wurlitzer (daughter of Buttermaker's ex-girlfriend, and his aptest pupil by far) by a date at a Rolling Stones gig (another sign of the age - what kids could afford a Rolling Stones gig these days?).  When Buttermaker expresses his disapproval of this plan, she informs him that she knows girls her age on the pill.  She also talks a fair amount about her developing chest, especially as she gets hit particularly hard in it by a baserunner, and this while she's 13 years old, playing a 12 year old.  

Anyway, the basic structure of the film is laughably simple: washed up ball player takes over terrible team and coaches them to the final.  In later years it would be A League of Our Own.  So it's the interactions that are the thing, and Matthau with a bunch of kids is magic.  He raises all their games, acting more than baseball.  The one black kid who is a disgrace to his more athletically gifted brothers and who idolizes Hank Aaron learns how to bunt and use his speed.  The fat kid who plays catcher becomes a reliable batsman.  The runtiest blond kid whose nose is always running finally has somebody stand up for him (the slightly bigger foul-mouthed blond kid) and makes a key catch.  Errors are cut down on.  Fielding tricks are learnt.  And Buttermaker has to regain his competitiveness only for it to consume him and the sight of the opposing coach driving his own kid away from him 

to teach him what really matters.  (He also has to get uniforms and a sponsor - the others have actual franchises like Denny's and Pizza Hut - he gets a Bail Bonds firm.)  

And that's about it.  Very small scale.  Buttermaker is not re-united with Amanda's mother, despite her machinations, and it's probably for the best.  And he goes back to his job cleaning pools (and her to her job selling maps to the stars' homes to hicks from Iowa).  But we get to hang out with them for one glorious Summer, on grounds with the mountains in the background, as Buttermaker drinks endless cans of Bud, the old kind, with the ring pulls that come off entirely.

 

Film review: Paper Moon (1973)

About every six months or so, Criterion.com has a 50% off sale on their blu-rays/DVDs and they must make a good 90% of their sales in that window, because it's definitely a thing online.  Anyway, I try to curtail my habit, especially as we have films that are years old and we've yet to watch them (not to mention those last 5 or 6 in the box set we've had for well over a decade), so I tend to buy things that I think we'll watch regularly.  This includes Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd films (Criterion only does one Buster Keaton - his final masterpiece before the studios ruined his life by taking away his creative control, The Cameraman, but we have all the others by the less-trendy but no less reputable Kino Lorber), and, in a similar black and white vein, this film, which I'm sure I saw once on telly as a child, but had very little memory of.  It's actually the 4K version, which is supposedly one step up from Blu Ray, but I don't notice the difference.  Anyway: verdict - very good indeed, and not sentimental as I feared.  And Ryan O'Neal, while of course overshadowed by Tatum (to her detriment, apparently - not a great father), is very good.  

It's funny, he's definitely a limited actor, but that didn't stop him being in truly excellent films (two of them - this and What's Up Doc? directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but probably the best being Barry Lyndon).  Shame about the alcoholism and general abuse.

Also a standout (and also nominated for best supporting actress, losing to Tatum) is the always great Madeline Kahn, playing a rather coarser and sadder character than her normal Mel Brooks fare, and only in the film for 17 minutes, although you'd never know it from her outsized footprint.

The film is pretty picaresque.  It begins with Tatam O'Neal's Addie attending the funeral of her mother (who seems to have been the local lady of the night) with a few neighbors at a desolate graveyard out in the middle of a very flat landscape, when we see a backfiring car approaching across the plains.  It's Ryan O'Neal's Moze, come to pay his respects.  He is immediately suspected of being Addie's real father, owing to a remarkable similarity in chin shape, noted by the neighbors.  They soon persuade him to take Addie to stay with her aunt in Missouri, and while he initially seems reluctant, we soon discover that he had plans all along to use Addie to extract money from the local plant owner whose relative (son?) it was that caused Addie to be orphaned.  He gets $200, and uses a fair chunk of it to fix up his car (all new tires) and a small chunk of it to buy Addie a train ticket.  But in a diner over a Nehi and coney island she rejects the idea of going by train and insists that the $200 (she was listening in) is hers.  

So begins their odyssey.  Very quickly Addie discovers (a) that Moze's business is a con job whereby he looks up recently widowed women in the newspaper and arrives at their door claiming to have a deluxe monogrammed bible for the husband that he bought to give as a gift to the wife.  Addie quickly works out that she is better at assessing how much each woman will pay (and, occasionally, that she shouldn't be swindled at all) than Moze and they make a pretty good team.  Until, that is, they stop off at a fair and Moze becomes besotted with Trixie Delight (Kahn) who, along with her teenage black "maid" Imogene (who is only still with Trixie (who hasn't paid her) because she can't afford to go home), joins their party.  

Addie soon becomes tired of Moze's infatuation (he doesn't work and he's blowing all their money on things like a new car) and works out a way to get Moze to dump Trixie by tempting her into an assignation when she thinks Moze is away for the day.  We then catch up with them weeks later, having hit a bit of a dry spell in the bible-selling business, when they oversee a bootlegger's operation and find out the shed where he's stored all his booze.  They steal a far quantity of it and sell it back to him, before making good their escape.  Well - not quite.  Turns out he's related to the local law (played by an actor (John Hillerman) I recognized from Magnum P.I., only doing a Southern accent rather than an English one) 

who arrests them and tries to find the $600+ that he knows they should have.  Fortunately Addie has it stashed in the lining of her hat, and they manage to do a runner.  As he is in hot pursuit, though, they have to go off road and try to swap out their car.  This they do by Moze winning a wrestling match (Ryan O'Neal actually was a wrestler) with a hulking hayseed played by a very young Randy Quaid, and in the ancient truck they get in exchange they manage to reach the safety of Missouri.  Addie is obviously scared that Moze intends to dump her with her aunt, but by this point he's clearly enamored of their partnership and they set up a big score involving duping the owner of a silver mine.  Alas, just as Moze is setting out to the arranged meeting, he runs into the corrupt cop, who, while he can't arrest him in Missouri, can still beat him viciously and take all their money.  

So it's off to Addie's aunt for Addie.  Fortunately, she seems a lovely woman who lives in a very nice house, with a piano, just like Addie has always wanted, and seems genuinely concerned with Addie.  All's well that ends well (except for the penniless, battered Moze) right?  Well... 

Tuesday night ritual

 Thai Food and a movie (or, lately, a couple of episodes of an old BBC Jane Austen adaptation).  Surprisingly, the food from this restaurant embedded in a gas station (off Belsay in Flint) is very palatable!

That's March for you

 Yesterday:

Sound up for this next video:

Today:

Super slo-mo to capture the snow:

Film review: The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950)

We've been on a Launder and Gilliat streak (starting with our Lady Vanishes re-watch) and an Alastair Sim streak (there's a lot of overlap) and this is definitely up there with the best of both.  According to one of the special features, this was Launder (who directed this, as with the St. Trinian's films)'s attempt to do an Ealing Comedy (it helped that he co-wrote it with John Dighton, whose play it was, but who also wrote Kind Hearts and Man in the White Suit) and it certainly delivers.  As Sim plays the harried headmaster of a school of not-great-repute, and as Rutherford shows up with a girl's school, you can see why this is seen as sort of a dry-run for the St. Trianian's films (also, there is a fair amount of cast overlap, including Joyce Grenfell and Richard "ubiquitous" Wattis, and of course George Cole crops up in a tiny uncredited role, a la An Inspector Calls, and to top it off, Ronald Searle drew the opening credits) 

but it is, in my opinion, not only quite different, it's considerably better.  So, the basic outline: it's the first day of term at Nutbourne College, a minor private boys' school, and we arrive on the train with the new English master (who looks like a knock-off Montgomery Clift) and the jaded Maths master (the aforementioned Wattis, who was born jaded).  

They are driven to the (very nice-looking - parts of the building are said to date back to Henry VIII's time) school by the harried general school dogsbody Rainbow and discover that it has been spruced up a bit over the holidays, something that makes Wattis's Billings suspicious.  It turns out that Sim's Wetherby Pond is up for a job at a more prestigious school, whose board are coming to look over Nutbourne to see if they think Pond is of the right calibre.  But sudden complications arise in the form of 100 more trunks and tuck-boxes than they are expecting arriving, along with news that the Ministry of Education (of which Wattis plays the head in the St. Trinian's films - clearly it Loomed Large for Launder) is billeting another school at Nutbourne.  Apparently in the postwar years this kind of thing was not uncommon, what with all the bombings.  Pond is momentarily discombobulated, but leads a charge of the masters to prepare to billet the children and (he presumes) masters, and is up in the attic doing this when Margaret Rutherford's Miss Whitchurch and a retinue of female teachers (one of whom is Grenfell's "Sausage" Gossage, an even-more overgrown schoolgirl than her undercover policewoman of the Trinian's films, this time a sports teacher).  

Nobody is there to meet them, so they troop inside and are very dismissive of what, to us, looked like the height of luxury (albeit coated in a layer of dust that "Sausage" absent-mindedly writes her name in).  They, of course, think that it is a girls' school, which makes them rather shocked by the school motto "Guard Your Honour," not to mention the vaguely smutty books (Casanova's biography) on the bookshelf in the teachers' common room, but are still ignorant of its true nature when they take up possession of Pond's office so that they can use his phone to call the ministry to complain.  Meanwhile, Pond is suddenly faced both with his staff leaving in protest at having to cook for 100 more pupils than they were prepared for, and a horde of girls suddenly arriving, the first one of which breaks it to him the true nature of "St. Swithin's".  And then he finds Miss Whitchurch on the phone, just finding out that the Ministry is closed for the day.  

Then it's a race to see who can commandeer the dorms first - a race that the women win by locking the men in their common room while they're getting the keys to lock the girls out of the dorms.  But then the boys show up and find the girls in their rooms...  

What I like more about this film than the St. Trinian's series is that the humor is more grounded and is more earned rather than relying on the shock value of the violence of the young girls and the hyper sexuality of the older girls.  In this film the children are actually very obedient, the boys get on fine with the girls (except for an initial pillow fight and a climactic brawl on the playing fields) and it's the adults that are the source of the comedy because of their various schemes.  Also, just as you're settling in for a prolonged war between Pond and Whitchurch, they form a friendly alliance in the face of (a) the knowledge that the Ministry is far too chaotic to correct the error they've made any time soon, (b) a group of St. Swithin's parents are coming to visit and mustn't see the boys (this is initially resolved by hiding the boys for the day off at the swimming pool but then...) and a shock moving-up of the visit from the board at the school Pond wants to be the next head of to that very day.  So the climax of the film is a glorious extended set piece where Whitchurch is guiding a tour of the parents around at the same time as Pond is showing the board of his dream school around, and to make it all work they have to time it so that the girls are in the classrooms when Whitchurch's party arrives, but trade places with the boys for Pond's party.  Lots of lovely touches like the children who are advance scouts 

using such tools as mirrors to see round corners, or rollerskates to get down the corridor fast, one particular girl being in every class that her increasingly bemused parents enter, Pond and Whitchurch having to think on their feet to explain things away (like Whitchurch explaining the bikini girl pics belonging to the randy games master Hyde Brown 

as being the champion swimmers of yore, or Pond explaining away the knickers that the girls' dress-making class left in the desks when replaced by the boys).  Will they pull it off?  Let's just say the film ends a bit suddenly with the Man from the Ministry arriving with a third school, as Pond and Whitchurch ponder the merits of vanishing off to the colonies.  A very breezy and effective farce that I found surprisingly progressive, all things considered.  Two thumbs up! (Bonus Trivia: the attractive love interest for the Clift-esque Mr. Farrell, his counterpart English teacher Miss Harper (Bernadette O'Farrell), ended up marrying Frank Launder the same year the film came out.  They were married 47 years until his death.)

Film review: The Prodigal Son (1981)

Second in our Sammo Hung series, and this one's a stone-cold classic.  Sammo's filmmaking skills seem to have improved by leaps and bounds since Warriors Two - not that that one was bad, but this one is just much more cinematic.  It also looks a lot more high budget, with great sets, but the camera movement and shot framing is just fantastic.  It also stars a very young-looking Yuen Biao (third of the "Three Dragons" along with his Peking Opera "brothers" Jackie Chan and Sammo) who is not just perhaps the most spectacular martial artist of the three but also a very appealing performer.  A slimmer-than-I've-ever-seen-him Sammo 

shows up halfway through the film and is his usual fun self, but perhaps the most intriguing presence is Ching-Ying Lam, supposedly a buddy of Bruce Lee's, who plays Yeun Biao's (very reluctant) master.  But let's set this up properly.  We begin with Yuen Biao's Leung Chang and some hangers-on visiting a restaurant where some people at a nearby table decide to take him on because he's known as the "street brawler" and beating him will enable the mouthiest of them to set up his own kung fu school.  Well, Leung dispatches them with ease, and all seems well until we see the most goofy-looking of his hangers on slip outside and pay off the men.  

It turns out that, while Leung isn't terrible, he's nowhere near as good as he thinks, because his wealthy parents have arranged for all of his combatants to be bribed to lose so that he doesn't get hurt.  Next we cut to the henchmen going for a night out at the opera, where one of them falls for the female lead.  

They all go to visit her backstage and get a bit insistent until she beats the crap out of them (painting the main one's face with clown makeup in the process).  This is all done with feminine grace, perhaps a nod to the fact that, as with Warriors Two, this is a showcase for Wing Chung (and in fact, Leung Chang is the master in that one, so this is a prequel of sorts), which is said to have been invented by a woman.  However, it is revealed that "she" is actually a man (which one would think would be pretty common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about Chinese opera), albeit one with permanently shaved eyebrows and who seems very comfortable with his feminine side.  

This is Lam's Leung Yee Tai (I don't there's any significance in the shared "Leung" because it is never commented on, but it's a tiny bit confusing).  The sidekicks come back that evening with our Leung and he confronts the Opera Leung.  To the sidekick's horror, he reveals to our Leung that he is known as "The Prodigal Son" behind his back because of all the bribing (which the sidekicks even attempt on him, to no avail). (Sidenote: I don't quite understand the usage of "prodigal" here.  As I now know, it just means spendthrift, and it's not actually him who's doing the spending.  (When I was little I thought prodigal meant "goes away and comes back again" because of the parable.  But that doesn't fit here, although it does predict what will happen with Leung Chang.))  And to prove it, Leung Yee Tai makes very short work of Leung Chang, causing him to realize that, indeed, he has been set up (and just to confirm it, he goads the teachers who had formerly been easy for him to beat into actually trying, and it does not go well for him).  

He then attempts to get Yee Tai to accept him as a pupil, but he keeps refusing, until Chang gets his father to buy the opera company, and for them to take him on as Yee Tai's valet (he brings along his goofiest servant 

as his valet, and instructs him, a la Kato in The Pink Panther, to attack him at random intervals).  The company sets off in a boat to travel to nearby towns, and next we see them arrive in what seems like a very prosperous one.  Also arriving in town is a Prince, 

who is a royal version of Leung Chang, both in that he travels from town to town seeking challenges and in that he too is a "Prodigal Son" - his two bodyguards also bribe (or otherwise nobble) his opponents (although not all of them - the prince is actually very good, and we see him challenged by somebody whose arm he crippled five years previously, who has spent the intervening years becoming very adept at one-arm fighting, but who ends up getting that arm paralyzed, and told to come back when he's worked on his legs).  Leung Yee Tai is not happy having Leung Chang along, and in fact sets him up: the main "male" actor in the company is a lothario and sleeps with the wife of the wrong man, so cannot go on in his usual role as a famous general.  Yee Tai sees a chance to prank Chang and says he should play the role.  There are some Macbeth-esque traditions around this role that complicate things: most notably that you cannot speak before going on stage, so when the angry husband and a band of thugs show up to castrate "the general" Chang cannot explain but has to try to fight them.  

This spills out on to the stage and Yee Tai is forced to intervene.  Thus it is that legend of his fighting skills reaches the Prince and he demands a fight.  They are neck and neck when Yee Tai is overcome with asthma, and the prince honorably stops the fight and says that they will resume when he recovers.  However, the prince's bodyguards relay to the prince's father that this opponent is a little too good and he instructs them to round up 20 assassins and slaughter the entire company.  Long story short, they do (and it's very upsetting - lots of innocent actors and actresses get their throats cut in bed) but Chang (who initially thinks the ninja-like assassins attacking him are his Kato in action) helps save the still-wheezy Yee Tai, in an amazing sequence set inside a giant flaming tent.  In the process it is Chang who gets his arm injured and he is taken by Yee Tai to recuperate with Yee Tai's brother on his farm.  The brother is Sammo, and he has an adorable plump daughter (called "Twiggy") whom he is trying to train in both calligraphy and kung fu.  

While here, the squabbling between the two brothers leads to Yee Tai realizing that he's fond enough of Chang to accept him as a pupil (as in the Warriors Two this involves being served tea by your prospective pupil on his knees and you accepting and drinking it), and there are some very fun training sequences of both brothers training Chang.  However, Yee Tai continues to be troubled by his asthma, and his "herbs" are cheap (according to his brother) so Chang insists that they head back to his home town where his father can pay for the best medicine.  This they do, and find the goofy servant both alive and astonished to see them alive, and proceed to start a school.  But the prince shows up demanding that the fight continue, leading to Yee Tai indignantly accusing him of the slaughter of his company and the bodyguards panicking and stabbing Yee Tai to get him to shut up.  He dies, the prince realizes the truth and is conscience-stricken, and gives up his wealth and status (and has the bodyguards beheaded!  This movie doesn't stint on the gore).  This sets up a rather non-standard final fight scene between the prince and Leung Chang.  Unusual in that the prince isn't really a villain, and has in fact recanted, so it's just for pride.  But duke it out they do, and it's an excellent final fight, leading to some non-fatal blood-spurting and painful-looking falling-on to-stone-steps.  

Very satisfying, positively pro-gender-experimentation, and worthy of standing alongside peak Jackie Chan films, which is the highest praise one can give.  And as with Warriors Two, the Arrow Blu Ray print is absolutely gorgeous and crystal clear (somewhat to the detriment of the slightly amateurish makeup).