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).

Film review: Blue Murder at St. Trinian's (1957)

This should really be called "St. Trinian's Abroad" or something like that, because the main plot is a party from the school traveling through Europe to end up in Rome.  It does begin at the school, where, sadly, Alastair Sim's headmistress is "departed"... to prison for the duration of the film, so we just get shots of him at the beginning and end.  A suitably battle-hardened replacement is en route from Australia where she has been in charge of a borstal, 

but when she arrives she is quickly trussed up and stored in the belfry because they want to use her persona as a cover for one of the "girls'" (the older girls are quite clearly full-grown women, which, given the plot, is just as well) fathers, who is a jewel thief (played by Lionel Jeffries, whom I know mostly from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) who is the subject of a manhunt and needs to escape the country. This is facilitated by the girls "winning" a Unesco academic competition (by blackmailing an Oxford Don who is in hock to the bookies that Flash Harry (George Cole, his role expanded to replace the missing Sim) 

works for to provide the answers, which are then substituted for the actual, no doubt egregious, St. Trinian's attempt in a daring Rififi-esque heist on the Ministry of Education) the prize for which is said cross-Europe trip.  Reprising her role as the hapless policewoman is Joyce Grenfell (unrecognized by the girls, as this is supposed to be years later, but Flash Harry remembers her and is not fooled by her "interpreter" disguise) and newly on board is Terry-Thomas, who runs the only coach company disreputable enough to be prepared to rent to St. Trinians, who falls for Grenfell's copper.  

The real reason the girls want to go to Rome is explained in a pre-amble (that mirrors the one from the first film set in a fictional Middle Eastern country) where we see Flash Harry meeting with a rich eligible Italian bachelor with his "marriage service" where he arranges unions with the older girls in St. Trinian's.  

The Italian demands to meet with the girls in person, hence the need for the trip.  Subplots abound, like the jewel thief hiding his jewels in a water polo ball, and Michael Ripper 

as the Ministry of Education lift operator forced to go along on the trip because he's easiest to threaten, and the Army attempting to keep the girls in check in between headmistresses.  The new stock of girls includes 50's glamor it-girl Sabrina, who has nothing to do but look sultry, pretend to read Dostoyevsky in bed and pretend to be the "school swot," for which she gets near top-billing.  

And this time round the cops include a young Terry (of "and June") Scott.

Again directed by Frank Launder, of the storied Launder & Gilliat team, and of equivalent quality to the first, although Sim is sorely missed.  

Jami particularly liked the scene where a man at the ministry of education falls through the hole under the carpet left after the aforementioned reverse heist.

Film review: Warriors Two (1978)

I got Jami a trio of what are supposed to be the best Sammo Hung films, the portly childhood pal of Jacky Chan, who is a favorite of ours already in such collaborations as Wheels on Meals, Project A, and Dragons Forever.  First to be viewed was this one, which Sammo was making at the same time that Jacky was working on the immortal Drunken Master, and it can hold its head up in that exalted company.  Sammo (in a distractingly awful monk-like bald wig - why?) plays a somewhat buffoonish seller of rice cakes (that is, he is at the beginning, but gives it up after a pair of his "friends" manage to "scam" (or so the subtitles said, although it didn't seem to be a scam, more an unwise bet) him out of his entire stock.  He goes to the bank for advice from "Cashier Hua" (what was he called before he got the job, I wonder), who will be our other Warrior, and who is played in his debut by the delightfully named Korean actor/martial artist Casanova Wong, who (rather unkindly) points out that he would've eaten the stock anyway.  On Hua's advice Sammo's "Fatty" Chun takes up a job transporting literal shit, which will be safe both from scamming and eating.  This is just a preamble before the plot gets going: Sammo is a student of (famous, actual) Wing Chung teacher Leung Tsan, 

who is a noble and peace-loving man, who can also beat the shit out of anyone.  Early on we see that he has a regular table at restaurant that is taken by a group of soldiers who seem new to the area, and while his niece, who is with him, is ready to fight them, he calmly disengages and takes her away.  Meanwhile, Cashier comes back to the bank after work to return a banknote he accidentally had in his pocket (demonstrating his unimpeachable character) and overhears a plot to kill off the mayor by Mr. Mok and his band of henchmen, who include the rude soldiers from before.  Cashier runs to warn the mayor but is headed off by a man who works for him 

who listens to the news, asks the dreaded question "have you told anyone else about this?" and then takes Hua off to a remote location where, he says, the Mayor will meet him in private.  Of course, Mok and his henchmen show up instead (in broad daylight, so presumably this is the next day).  Hua puts up a good fight but is pretty badly beaten up by the time he runs off into the trees with them in hot pursuit.  He collapses in front of Fatty's house, and is whisked away by Fatty to be nursed back to health at Leung Tsan's school.  Meanwhile the bad guys, unable to find Hua, murder his mother (with whom he is said to be close) to flush him out.  As he recovers Hua sends Fatty to give her a message, but when he discovers her dead he tries to protect Hua as long as possible.  Fatty also tries to warn the mayor and his bodyguard that somebody's trying to kill the mayor, but they don't believe him until... they are surrounded in the middle of the countryside by the same group of baddies.  Realizing his fatal error, the bodyguard puts up a good fight (we've already had three great fight sequences and there are more to come!) but alas, he and the mayor meet a predictable fate.

Hua recovers and Fatty reveals his mother's death, and Hua is desperate to fight the baddies, but Fatty convinces him that first he needs to learn Wing Chung from Leung Tsan.  Leung doesn't want to take Hua on as a pupil (realizing that Hua will use the skills to take revenge) but Fatty more-or-less tricks Leung into taking on Hua as a pupil.  Then we get the usual montage of Hua learning to kick ass, including pole skills 

(smashing olive pits on the ground, hitting a pendulum through a small ring) and fighting those weird wooden-poles-with-chair-legs-coming-off-them that we've seen Jacky practicing his skills on in many a movie, only with the added wrinkle that there are two of them and they're on little rails and can come at you. Oh, and there's also blindfolded fighting that will come in useful later.

MEANWHILE, Mok and crew are worried that Leung might be a problem, so they ambush him in his favorite restaurant (his predictable routine is his undoing) and, while he puts up the most valiant fight (even with his foot in a bear trap) he is eventually dispatched, and his body bought to his school and dumped in front of his appalled pupils.  Then they are dispatched, mainly by Ho's three worst henchmen, one of whom has skin of iron, 

another of whom is called "Tiger" and is a spear expert.  Well, almost all are: Hua and the niece escape and Fatty feigns death by daubing the blood of a fellow student on his face.

Well, they regroup and basically the entire rest of the film is one fight sequence after another.  Standouts are when Fatty, who is supposed to be fighting one of the unarmed henchmen but gets the name wrong and ends up with Tiger, lures him into the dark bamboo and uses skills learned in the training sequence of reacting with his other senses than sight and manages to beat Tiger to death.  Yes, this one is definitely more violent than the contemporary Jacky Chan vehicles.  There's a significant amount of (incredibly lurid) blood spattered in the course of this movie and a very high body count.  Alas it will include the niece (whom we recognize from the Jacky film Young Master, and who wields dual blades very impressively) - after all, it's not Warriors Three - before the denouement, when we discover that the seemingly old Mr. Mok has been wearing a mask all along, and is actually young and looks like a vampire 

(and seems to be able to float like one).  It takes both Sammo and Hua teaming up to take him down 

(Sammo takes the punishment, Hua deals it out, including one incredibly impressive leap-across-a-table-while-turning-360-degrees kick that I would have sworn required wires, but (we saw in the accompanying documentary) was 100% real (Casanova was hired for his amazing kicking and jumping skills)).  NOW who's going to be mayor?

The documentary revealed that the fights really did use a style called Wing Chung that apparently was (a) comparatively simple and direct, (b) invented by a woman and considered "feminine" but that didn't seem to worry any of the men involved in the film, and (c) very cinematic.  So everyone involved took several months training to pick up the moves (and when interviewed, bemoaned the fact that nobody does their own stunts any more so action stars aren't really good at Kung Fu, but at the same time conceded that it's nice that you can use pads these days and don't have to spend weeks in the hospital after the film wraps!).  Overall, solid entertainment, and an excellent print, crystal clear and incredibly vibrant - Arrow is clearly the Criterion of pulp cinema.

Birthday Cakes for Jami

Jami is a known carrot cake fiend, so I got her one when I visited Whole Foods last week.  And then I thought, what the hell - why not make her one?  So she got two (the homemade one is GF - see if you can guess which one it is):

 

Film review: The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954)

If you're going to do an Alastair Sim binge, you can't really not watch a St. Trinian's film, but they aren't streaming anywhere, so I ordered the set to give Jami for her birthday.  And this is the first, where Sim plays the dual role of Millicent Fritton, headmistress of St. Trinian's, and her ne'er-do-well brother Clarence.  He doesn't have much to do as the latter, so it is as the former that he dominates this film.  He cannot help but be outsize in his performance (that face!) 

but he invest Millicent with an inner dignity that is rather endearing.  She is not a cartoon - not a Terry Jones-style performance.  However, the film itself is of dubious quality.  Perhaps because we'd just watched an Alexander Mackendrick film, this one seemed distinctly workmanlike.  It's not that there weren't excellent performances - besides Millicent there's George Cole (of course) 

as young spiv Flash Harry (was that where the name originated?) and Joyce Grenfell 

(who does rather go over the edge into cartoon character, but then you know what you're getting with Joyce Grenfell), Beryl Reid, 

and even Sid James in an early (although you wouldn't know it - did he come into the world looking like that?) small role (oh, and Joan Sims too 

- the Carry On films were in embryonic form in the British film industry of the 50s).  Oh, and this guy, last seen as the doctor in The Green Man.

Of course, it's hard to avoid being cartoonish when you're a live action adaptation of literal cartoons.  And it would be hard to capture the sheer seedy, macabre violence of the Ronald Searle originals, although the younger actors are very good.  

The plot is pretty much beside the point: an Arab Sheik (regrettable use of brownface on him and the girl playing his daughter Fatima) is happy to install his daughter in an English boarding school (clearly unaware, unlike the townspeople, local constabulary and indeed Ministry of Education, of its fearsome reputation) because his kingdom, as we see in a prologue, is being overrun by lusty American servicemen (not to mention nubile American reporters working on stories about life in a harem), particularly one that is so convenient for where his has his prize racehorse "Arab Boy" stabled.  Well, St. Trinian's is teetering on the edge of foreclosure before Millicent is convinced to put down the £400 she has at 10-1 on Arab Boy.  But Clarence needs his horse to win, so gets his daughter, 

whom he has re-installed (she was expelled for burning down an un-insured building) at St. Trinian's to get info about Arab Boy to attempt to nobble the horse.  Meanwhile the younger girls are also betting on Arab Boy so rival groups of schoolgirls compete to get the horse.  He ends up staying overnight in one of their dorms, 

and then barricaded in by the daughter and her pals, and Clarence shows up with his posse of undesirables (including Sid James) as reinforcements, coincidentally on Parents' Day at the school.  Will Arab Boy make it to the Gold Cup and save the school?  

Film review: The Man in the White Suit (1951)

Another classic Ealing re-watch.  It's a jolt to see the (not much, but seeming so) younger Alec Guinness playing a completely different character from the sinister professor of Ladykillers.  He manages to be completely convincing at both while at the same time being a bit alien.  Some actors wear their hearts on their sleeves or are the same in every film and he's the complete opposite - I feel I wouldn't know him at all if I met him.  Here he's Sidney Stratton, who has in common with the professor a kind of obsessive focus, but for Sidney it's on creating a super-molecule fibre that will be both indestructible (because to break it would require breaking a molecule) and never need cleaning (because of its static-electric properties).  As nobody will willingly give him the equipment and (expensive) chemicals he needs for his experiments, he has resorted to taking odd jobs at various textile mills (all oop North, naturally) and inserting himself into the R&D department, relying on his fellow scientists' absent-minded assumptions that that equipment belongs to one of their fellows.  

He is eventually found out by Daphne Birnley 

(not quite the "Birling" of An Inspector Calls) - played by the delightfully-voiced Joan Greenwood (think Glynis Johns), the daughter of one of the mills' owners, whose fiancé (Michael "Celestial Toymaker" Gough) 

is a bigwig at a rival mill, who convinces her father to give him a chance.  After much explosive destruction he succeeds, to the horror of every Birling rival in the textile industry and Sidney's former friends (including the loyal Bertha, who is even more loyal to the Union) among the workers, who immediately realize that indestructible clothes are the everlasting gobstoppers of the garment industry and will put them all out of business/work.  Sidney doesn't see it that way, thinking that this advance will be good for humanity, right up until the point at which his former landlady finally drives the point home, at which point he has been chased all over town be everyone in his glowing white suit.  

This is probably my third favorite Ealing (after Ladykillers and Kind Hearts), with Greenwood rivaling Guinness as the main reason to watch.  

It's another Alexander Mackendrick production, which means it's a comedy shot like a film noir, which is a good combination.  

It is also almost too bracingly cynical, which means no happy ending for Sidney and either woman who seems drawn to him.  

And also a hint of disaster to come.  Oh, another standout is the little girl who helps Sidney escape after Bertha has briefly imprisoned him, who went on to record a song that I know mainly because of the Toy Dolls.