by Meyers, Ric
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.
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 Oper
a 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 t
he 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.
The stunt was relatively easy: jump from a thirty-foot-high wall to a branch, hold on to the tall, thin tree as it bent over from his weight, and drop safely behind a second wall. The scene went well the first time they filmed it — and was, in fact, the version that is seen in the actual movie — but Jackie thought he could do better. The second time the branch broke.
“If the cameraman had tried to cushion my fall, or even just pushed me a little, I would have been okay,” Jackie explained on the UK-TV series Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show. “But he grabbed the camera and ran away!” Jackie landed heavily, hitting his head on a rock. “At the time I didn’t think it was that bad. But when I looked up I saw my stunt guys and my father crying. Later, when I looked at the film, I saw the blood coming from my ear.”