Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars (1985)
Introducing
here our star, director and producer, the great Sammo Hung, Hung Kam
Bo, and this kind of novel way of weighing himself (on two scales).Richard Ng, the Sammy Davies Jr of Hong Kong, great comic actor and his very broad "carry on" style humour that typifies these films, the Lucky Stars movies. It began with Winners and Sinners.
Charlie Chin has actually a cameo in this movie. He’s a former Taiwanese matinee idol, made many films in Taiwan and was a key member of the early draft of the Lucky Stars team. Here he really only has a cameo at the beginning of the movie, he was actually tied up on another film, so he came in to shoot a few days here. The whole lot of the house is actually a set at Golden Harvest Studios. So all the scenes that we see here are actually built up on a set, with different rooms to look like the home of these five lovable misfits.
Here is one of our two leading ladies of the movie, who is Sibelle Hu. She of course was known as a dramatic actress and broke into the action genre with these films and later there was a film called Ba Wong Fa which is known in the West as Top Squad or Inspectors Wear Skirts where she was teamed up with Cynthia Rothrock, the American Martial Art Champion and that kind of further established this women cop martial arts movie genre which begun with the film Yes Madam which was a film with Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock (produced by Sammo).
… in terms of the narrative there isn’t much connection between the first film of the series Winners and Sinners and My Lucky Stars and
Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars. But between My Lucky Stars and
this one there are some narrative, like through line, and here we see
the supposed romance between Ba Wong Fa and Sammo’s character that was
actually established in My Lucky Stars and here she has this long
speech telling him that she doesn’t really love him and she was just
tricking him then and he has this great reaction.Sammo was working at Golden Harvest Studios and over at Cinema City which was like a big rival Studio at the time, they had a huge success with Aces Go Places series, which starred a comic actor called Karl Maka, a famously bold headed guy and Sam Hui, the handsome brother of Michael Hui. Sam Hui was a singer, the first singer to really come out and sing in Cantonese and make a name for himself as a Cantonese performer rather than singing in the Mandarin dialect and they made him into kind of a very light hearted, comic character, little bit like the character Jackie Chan plays in City Hunter, this womenizing, kind of martial arts fighting guy, but the films themselves really didn’t have a lot of traditional martial arts fighting, they were more about James Bond style… So what Sammo thought, if you brought in 5 characters, kind of like the old days they used to have the Seven Little Fortunes which were the opera school performance troup that Sammo and Jackie and all his fellow opera school buddies performed with, and if you can actually transpose the idea of Seven Little Fortunes to being Five Lucky Stars… that would bring in the people who wanted to watch comedy and then at the same time you would have Jackie and Yuen Biao and all the action stars coming in, so you have the traditional Golden Harvest style of martial arts fights, and blend the two together and that became Winners and Sinners, which became a huge hit all over Asia and did also well in Japan. Japan at this time was a major market - less so now - but this time was a major market for Hong Kong films in general and Jackie Chan movies in particular. So there was this great pressure to have Jackie Chan (in) the film. There’s actually a spin off movie from the Lucky Stars series called Pom Pom, which stars two
of the
lucky stars, Richard Ng and John Shum and they’re actually on the
posters of the promotional… and that says "and special appearance
Jackie Chan". He literally rides into one shot on a motorbike in a
police uniform and that’s his moment. But that was so important at that
time for the Japanese market. So that was the evolution of the series.
(Klara: Sammo and Yuen Biao also have their great moments).
So having had the concept for this combination of action and comedy, Sammo turned to the late great scriptwriter Barry Wong to write the films… He wrote My Lucky Stars and Lucky Stars Go Places, also Barry Wong wrote films like Pedicab Driver, Hard Boiled for John Woo, also acted in films as well. Unfortunately passed away far too young from cancer. But he was actually a key figure I think in the development of the unique flavour of these films, which – as I said at the top of this – they really play better to a Cantonese speaking audience, because so much of the humour is really derive from the use of Cantonese language… So a lot of the humour is completely lost when you actually translate it, subtitle it, and even more so when you actually try to dub it into English. And most of the films actually came out initially in the UK for example on videotape in the English dub version so people would – including myself – after a while you’d be fastforwarding to the action scenes starring Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao and be less appreaciative of the comedy. But you can’t underestimate the appeal of these films like Chinese New Year releases in Hong Kong. People wanted to come and have a laugh and enjoy themselves, like a family entertainment, it was a family movie, so they would go and enjoy the comedy just as much they would enjoy the action scenes.
All the bad guys speak English, even in the Cantonese print of the
movie, when they speak their lines are in English and actually Richard
Norton dubbes his own lines in English, which is kind of unusual
because it was a normal practice that Cantonies movies of this period,
everybodies’ lines, no matter what their ethnic background, would be
dubbed into Cantonese for the local market. And in this movie everybody
kind of speaked their own language which was kind a plot point, that
Japanese don’t understand Chinese, that Thais don’t understand Chinese,
and that’s I think Sammo brought in, because you see that in his films
quite a bit, the idea of having people speak their own language.In terms of action directors actually you had the best of the best. You have the Hung Ga Ban, Sammo Hung’s Team. "Ga" means family, and "Ban" means team, so it’s like the Hung Family Team so at that is all the guys who normally work with Sammo Hung, who at this time included Chin Kar Lok, who’s doubling left right and center. You also had Yuen Biao who acts in the film working behind the camera as an action coordinator and also Lam Ching-ying who was the martial arts master in Prodigal Son and Yuen Wah who was the bad guy at the end of Eastern Condors and neither Lam Ching-ying nor Yuen Biao appear in the movie.
Jackie of course at the time this movie was made was already the biggest action star, the biggest star in Asia and just finished his American movie The Protector and was hot to start on Police Story… He had a briefer cameo in Winners and Sinners, more to do in My Lucky Stars and this role in Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars. After that he had no more to do with the Lucky Stars movies.
Yuen Biao, classmate of Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan at the Peking Opera School in Hong Kong and became a cult action star in his own right with Prodigal Son, he had a cameo in Winners and Sinners and a bigger role again as Jackie’s partner in My Lucky Stars and here he is kind of reprising that role. In the English version he’s called Ricky. And here he really gets to show his stuff, this scene has a trademark move from him.
I have to say, much as I appreciate Jackie’s other movies with other directors, I think he never looks quite as good as he does when he’s directed by Sammo. Sammo really brings out the best of him.
Sammo was born 7th January, 1952 into a theatrical family and obviously as everybody knows, went to the Opera School with Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and learnt all the tricks and flips and stunts of the Chinese Opera and later came into the movie industry, initially as a stuntman, then as an action director, th
en as an actor, and finally as
a one-man industry as a director, producer and really somebody who you
could not overestimate his influence on contemproraly martial arts
action films making in the late 70s and the 80s up to even the present
times. And the Lucky Stars are probably his most successful run of
films in terms of the box office consistancy in the Hong Kong market
place. And he complained once that if you had success in Hong Kong with My Lucky Stars, if you’re like in America, you had like Leathal
Weapon 1, 2 and 3, there’s a chance for Mel Gibson to do Hamlet
instead of Leathal Weapon 4, but if you are in Hong Kong, you did Lucky Stars 1, 2, 3, they don’t want to hear about Hamlet, they don’t
want to hear about Hong Kong Hamlet, they wanna hear about your 4th
film which should be a Lucky Stars film as well. The pressure on him
from Golden Harvest when he was making films there was that every film
would be a hit and they were not interested in pet projects or any
artistic projects. So that meant that in his own estimation he had to
move away from the company to do a broader range of films.Just for the record, the Lucky Stars films that he brought to Asia were Winners and Sinners, My Lucky Stars, Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars, he then produced the spin off movie starring Richard Ng and John Shum, which were three in fact: Pom Pom, Return of Pom Pom and Mr Boo Meets Pom Pom, which was again combining these two of the popular comedy film series at Golden Harvest: the Mr Boo series The Private Eyes which stars Michael Hui and the Pom Pom series with Richard Ng and John Shum. So that brought those two together in much the same way as Lucky Stars Go Places, which Sammo also produced, had brought together the Lucky Stars series and the Aces Go Places films. He also produced Ghost Punting in 1992, and in 1996 they made a film called How To Meet the Lucky Stars which was a benefit film for the family of the late Lo Wei. Lo Wei had been a prolific director who’d discovered Bruce Lee, directed Big Boss and Fist of Fury, had discovered Jackie Chan, directed a whole run of films with Jackie and who Sammo had also worked with, so this benefit film was felt that if there was any kind of no miss movie, it would be a Lucky Stars film, so they brought all the Lucky Stars back together and Sammo has a brief fight sequence in the film in 1996.
They would not shoot any of the dialog live on the set, it was all post-sync, which meant that if you came up with a funnier line after the event, you (could) actually dub that in. And it also made it very easy to shoot, it was very quick and easy to shoot comedy and dramatic scenes because you didn’t have to worry about the quality of sound, you didn’t have to worry about people getting their lines perfect, cause you gonna sync it later. I think it explains the sheer energy level of Hong Kong cinema. ’Cause whenever I worked on a more international film I found because of the fact you were recording sync sound you’d actually be sitting there and doing many-many takes of dramatic scenes and comedy scenes and mainly running out of time to do the action.
The film was released 15th August, 1985… and earned over 27 million at the local box office and of course performed very well in Asia and in
Japan as well. So it was a big hit and really led the way to all the
spin offs that followed, though it became increasingly hard to get the
exact same team together, because Sammo had his own projects and Jackie
had his projects and the different individual players had their own
projects, so you never really had the full team that you had on board
for the first three movies of the series.I think the first three movies had their influence far beyond the series itself… They kind of masterminded the idea that you could actually have this very broad slapstick humour side by side with cutting edge martial arts action…These films actually brought both sides of it together and provided entertainment for people who were fans of martial arts fights and people who’re into the more character comedy.
Ja
ckie’s sustaining an injury of the shoulder and that was actually
written in becasue he’d injured himself working on another film at the
same time so he couldn’t perform as much action at the ending as was
originally anticipated. That’s the official story anyway. So they
actually kind of put him out of action with the shoulder wound which
means that his fighting sequences could be taken over realistically by
Sammo.There are many operaesque flips. (Sammo vs Kurata). All the opera players learnt to flip weapons on the stage and Sammo is one of the greatest weapon fighters on screen that the industry has ever seen.