Knockabout (1979)
Here we introduce an archetypal type of character played by Sammo Hung, the kung fu beggar, very similar actually in style to the one played by the kung fu action director Lau Kar Leung in „Mad Monkey Kung Fu”, which was made the same year. So again, two great masters following similar tracks in the same year. The introduction of our leading man, Yuen Biao. Yuen Biao of course
already had an amazing career as an acrobatic stuntman. Gone to the same Opera School as Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and had been working in stunts kind of behind the scenes, he was a double for Bruce Lee in „Game of Death”. Everytime basically you saw someone do amazing flipping and kicking techniques in a film, it was Yuen Biao doubling for them. And finally he gets a chance to take a lead role of his own and Sammo Hung bringing him firmly into the limelight.
I should’ve mentioned a moment ago, we had a scene when Sammo approaches Peter Chan and tries to get some money from him, and there’s a thing in Chinese superstition, you don’t want to see a beggar first thing in the morning ’cause they’re meant to bring bad luck.
Here’s our other leading man, Leung Kar Yan, and he’s like a great kung fu player, one of the great discoverees of Sammo Hung. He’d been working at Shaw Brothers before Sammo, who made him a star. Never really felt that Leung Kar Yan was completely comfortable with this kind of goofy youthful humour, he’s always had a very ... nature to his character as you see in Warriors Two, which is a movie where Sammo really put him on the map as a leading man, as star. But here he does a good job and matched very well with Yuen Biao.
Peter Chan, nickname is Mogu, which means Unfortunate, he was a member of the Bruce Lee stunt team in Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and then Enter the Dragon and also would work very closely with Yuen Biao in the film Prodigal Son, and playing almost the same character he plays in Prodigal Son, this kind of goofy sidekick, he turns up in Jet Li’s film Fon Sai Yuk (The Legend) and now semi-retired from the industry but somebody who had long, vary career both as a stunt performer and as a character actor. So you see him here as a money changer.
Yuen Biao, born 26th July, 1957, you can see him actually, his earliest performances in Shaw Brothers movies like Jade Tiger, Swordman and Enchantress, and much like Leung Kar Yan he’d also had to start … at Shaws, he never had his chance in that studio but he came over to Golden Harvest, really following Sammo and doing works on films like Hapkido, he was as I meantioned a Bruce Lee double in Game of Death, and Tower of Death, and he kind of has the Bruce Lee fringe haircut in this film as well. And this film has really put him on the map and after this he also became a huge star in Japan as Jackie had. In his cantonese name he’s Yuen Biao, his English name is Bill, Biao being translated as Bill, Bill Yuen. But they decided, Golden Harvest wanted to launche him as a Jackie Chan style action hero so he became Jimmy Yuen Biao. I don’t know why wasn’t he just Jimmy Yuen but he was Jimmy Yuen Biao and that was something that started off in the Japanese market.
Leung Kar Yan also started as Shaw Brothers, working with the venerable Chang Cheh, and you’d seen him in films like Shaolin Martial
Arts, Five Shaolin Masters, Marco Polo, Shaolin Avengers, Box Rebellion. For some reason he never really came to the forefront of the kung fu heroes at Shaw Brothers, it was only Sammo Hung who somehow saw attributes in him that other directors had not, and cast him in Warriors Two and he became the star, went on to work with Sammo on films like Enter the Fat Dragon, where they have this great kung fu fight. In that film Sammo’s playing this Bruce Lee crazy pork butcher and he has like a kung fu fight with Leung Kar Yan towards the end of the film. In Odd Couple he’s this scar-faced bad guy, he’s with Sammo in The Victim, and years years later they’re both in the cast of the Jet Li film Kung Fu Cult Master and Sammo’s last great Hong Kong picture Don’t Give a Damn , and then he would work later with Lau Kar Wing, the bad guy in this movie, he would work with him on the Tsui Hark produced tv series Wong Fei Hung Suspicios Temple. The next thing you gonna see him in television is the TV version of Seven Swords. As I mentioned, I never felt Leung Kar Yan really was that comfortable with this kind of goofy comedy, but both of them as relatively inexperienced actors carrying their parts well, particularly Yuen Biao, he’d never acted in major roles but he’d always been around great actors and I think it’s true what John Carradine said about acting, „Nothing can be taught but everything can be learnt”, so he kind of learnt the trade by being on the set and seing other fine actors at work.
You see in this sequence coming up unusually Yuen Biao showing off these Southern Style movements, ’cause he is known primarily as a Norther Stylist with all the flips and kicks, but for the opening he’s doing more Souther stuff. This is pretty acrobatic moves for Leung Kar Yan who had not really had a background as and opera guy or even as a kung fu player, but just a naturally athletic young guy and so him xxx back over the table like that is really quite something, I mean for Yuen Biao they’d be easy, but it’s really a complicated movement for somebody who’s come in as an actor and is just picking up martial arts on the set, which is what he had to do starting with his days at Shaw Brothers.
The film came out in April 1979 playing in the cinemas for several weeks then, and grossed 2.7 million which was in those days very good money, and finished No. 17 out of the year of films released that year. 344 films were released in 1979 in Hong Kong and it finished No 17 which is a pretty good placing for the film. It was not a film with major existing stars, it was actually bringing out a new star in the person of Yuen Biao. Sammo somebody who became by this stage, was kind of a brand, and whenever you saw a Sammo Hung film whether he was directing, producing, co-starring or starring, the audience knew there was a certain quality of action, and comedy and story telling that they were gonna see and certainly this film delivers.
There was another version of this scene shot ’cause I’ve seen the stills from it, and there was a sequence showing Lau Kar Wing with a much more exaggarated white head of hair, he had a big wig, a really unwieldy white wig and more extreme make up and looked kind of freaky.
Just saw Lau Kar Wing in action for the first time in the film. He’s a master of kung fu and came in film from a very early age learning Hung Kuen or Hung Gar from his father who was Lau Cham, who was a comic actor in the Cantonese movies, played the part of Lam Sai Wing in the old black and white Wong Fei Hung films opposite Kwan Tak Hing and so Lau Cham brought both of his sons, Lau Kar Leung and Lau
Kar Wing onto the set of these films and they kind of cut their teeth to stuntmen and kung fu players. Lau Kar Wing particularly an expert in the Chinese Lion dancing and very good at playing the drums for Chinese Lion dancing so pretty much every time you saw a lion dancing sequence in those films, in the old Wong Fei Hung movies, the black and white ones, Lau Kar Wing was gonna be responsible for that. Up until years years later, he was in the film Once Upon A Time in China and in America and he was assistant director on the film which was directed in America by Sammo Hung and he was actually on the set as assistant action director and then you can see him playing in a small role drumming ’cause there’s a lion dance at the end of the movie and he was actually drumming for that, because they found he was the only guy on the set who was actually an expert in lion dance drumming. As well as being an action choraographer had a great career himself as a director, directing movies like He Has Nothing But Kung Fu, Dirty Kung Fu, The Odd Couple, Fists and Guts, Carry on Wise Guy, and at Shaw Brothers the epic movie The Treasure Hunters which just came out on Celestial DVD, it was like a comedy kung fu movie with Alexander Fu Sheng, the late great comic kung fu star. He later worked with Yuen Biao also at Golden Harvest, he directed Yuen Biao in Those Merry Souls and then at Cinema City in Skinny Tiger Fatty Dragon.
Normally Sammo is the guy who gives himself two black eyes like that but instead you have Leung Kar Yan with two black eyes, he looks like a panda, like a „hung mao”. Sammo always liked to disfigure himself but this time I guess it’s Leung Kar Yan’s turn to get this particular treatmeant. Sammo always likes to do that to himself, it’s one of his trademarks. One trademark is Sammo with big bruises on his face, the other is women getting abused, those are the two unfortunate trademarks of Sammo’s films. The other ones of course fantastic drama, martial arts, cinematography, editing, and all the other great stuff.Now you can see in this sequence really why Yuen Biao was chosen as a double for Bruce Lee. ’Cause when you actually see him doing
his normal stuff you think „OK, well here’s a guy who’s kind of a tricky flippy stuntman, but when you see him doing kicks and stuff like that, particularly in the wide shots with that kind of particular Bruce Lee bangs you can kind of see why he would be a good Bruce Lee double and if you watch Game of Death carefully in freeze frame when those specific acrobatic kung fu movements being done, you can very clearly see that it’s Yuen Biao doubling for him. Actually doubling for the guy who’s doubling for Bruce Lee, so it’s a double for a double. The actual Bruce Lee double is Kim Tai Chung.
This is another really cool thing you see coming up. If you ’ve seen so many kung fu movies, and Sammo is still manages to find little tricky bits of business that you haven’t seen too many times before. Like when Yuen Biao is watching, the way he actually kind of keeps these two guys in frame. You see there’s Mars, and then they’re swapping positions, it’s all in a tight shot, when Mars comes out with a flip, and then Lau Kar Wing comes in. And it’s cool the way he does that cutting, and something you notice after you’ve seen the film a bunch of times. All this little very grace notes that Sammo brings in to everything he does. He never does things in a traditional and established way if there’s an innovative way to do it, and I really admire him hugely as a kung fu filmmaker because he’s always brought something new to every film and kind of moved the industry forward.
I love watching Sammo performing forms. He is very heavy set but very graceful and very powerful. You really feel when he performs kung fu, that if he actually had somebody in the end of his technique, they would feel it if he hit them, because he has real power behind his kicks and punches.
Yuen Biao is really known as an acrobatic kung fu player and I think he’s been kind of underrated as an actor. Certainly at this stage in his career he wasn’t bringing much sophistication to his screen performance. He had this very happy-go-lucky light persona, which made him very appealing particulary to the Japanese audience, he had a big Japanese, still has, fan following. But I think he is underrated as an actor, and an example of that I’ll put up something like „On the run”, which is a very dark thriller, a typical film from Alfred Cheung (Cheung Kin-Ting) and produced by Sammo, but Yuen Biao’s really showing what he can do as an actor in „On the run”. Also there’s a film called „Hero”, which is one of the latter day movies at Shaw Brothers, a remake of „The Boxer from Shandong”. If you see that film, it actually stars Takeshi Kaneshiro (Gum Sing-Mo) and there’s a great supporting role by Yuen Biao and he’s kind of cast against type as a Shanghainese gang boss but he is great in that film. That movie probably hasn’t been seen by enough of and audience, it really needs to get reissued.
This is very opera-style flipping that you see him performing here, these kind of rapid flips. This training, a lot of it much more opera-style then kung fu. Kung fu is really a stance work, it’s kind of
conditioning, all the stuff you normally see in these kind of films. But here they making a transition from the beginning when he’s doing choi le fat and very Southern style to him being a much more acrobatic fighter in doing the Northern movements for which Yuen Biao is justly famous. So the training is kind of modified accordingly. There’s another movie called „The Incredible Kung Fu Master” in which Sammo plays a very similar character and he is putting Stephen Tung Wai through his paces, but these kind of training sequence again, is one of the standard stock aspects of kung fu comedy and all the more enjoyable for all that, you’ve seen it in a bunch of films, but it’s still fun to watch this kind of comedic relationship between teacher and student. None of these films make any excuses for the characters being enourmously broad and colourful, there’s not much suttlety this is really what you see is what you get, but it works really well.
This concept of a rubbish style, lap sap kuen, they take all the movements that the other styles throw away, they collect out of a trash, and put into their own vagabond style, the skill of the vagabonds.
Yuen Biao looks great, he would’ve been a fantastic athlete in any discipline, whether he was doing olympic gymnastics, opera, he’s a superb natural athlete and can adapt his physicality to any kind of movements. So wheather it’s this southern fist movements, these kind of distinctive punching and hand techniques, or these acrobatics in kicks, he is just a fantastic athlete and combines wonderfully well Northern and Southern kung fu. He actually had done proper taekwondo training, and he had this classic taekwondo style kicks. Here we again see him show off all different movements you see from classical kung fu, mantis kung fu, and now coming into the monkey boxing.
The music in this film is by Frankie Chan, Chan Fan Kei, a close and good friend of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, who had a fantastic role as the kung fu fighting bad guy in Prodigal Son and also had his own career doing action pictures directed by and starring by himself like „Burning Ambition”, and „Outlaw Brothers”, another Hong Kong Legends release, and he co-starred with Sammo in the movie „Carry on Pickpocket” which is like a… wacky, contemporary comedy… but… he worked in every aspect to the film industry, as an actor, as a writer, as a producer, as a director, you name it, Frankie’s done it.
There’s only a certain number of ways that you could shoot something like this and Sammo’s like, OK, fine, here we are, we got these two guys in open field and they just gonna slam and bang and that’s it. Double there for the kicking techniques for Lau Kar Wing. Hung Gar has really strong kicking techniques, „shadowless kick”, mo jing geuk, which is its famous kicking technique, but they’re not known doing high kicks, these kinda high continuous kicks. Now of course in the West a lot of people cross train, so they do do kicking techniques as well as classical Hung Gar, but in the day when Lau Kar Wing and Lau Kar Leung were learning from their father, they would just really learn what they were taught in that specific school. So because they came from a traditional kung fu background they had great depths in their particular field of expertise, which is the classical hand techniques and weapons, but didn’t really had the gymnastic moves or the kung fu kicking, taekwondo style kicking techniques. So if you’re in a film where they need these specific skills, they would actually be doubled for that. But nonetheless they’re extraordinary martial arts masters. It’s a great balance here, it’s really kinda North against South. There’s many movies which were focused on Northern styles against Southern styles, this is kinda what we see in microcosm here. Yuen Biao coming in for very flippy, light, agile Northern style and Lau Kar Wing coming in from the South (with) the stances and hand techniques. It’s a great opportunity to show the versatility of Yuen Biao because he’s using techniques from wing chun, choi le fat, the whole premiss of the style that Sammo’s character come up with, it’s like a composit of all different elements thrown together.
So there you have it folks, Knockabout, huge fun I think from start to finish. In terms of its structure maybe it kind of runs out of steam, in terms of the plot developing in the last section, but it’s just for pure visual action, enormous fun and great to see the arrival of a new star in the filmhood of Hong Kong Action Cinema, which was Yuen Biao, thanks to Sammo he really got to take his place as one of the great cult heroes of action cinema.