Dirty Ho (1979), 1hr 43min, dir. Lau Ka-leung (whom we call Pops), starring Wong Yu, Gordon Liu, Johnny Wang Lung-wei, Lo Leih
This reckless youth story is arguably more Chinese than Sammo’s Prodigal Son, filmed two years later. Pops’ star vehicle for Wong Yu operates on a more local level, where the plot centers around an art collector and playboy Wang Chin Chen (Gordon Liu) who is also 11th in line for for the Qing throne. A plot of intrigue develops around him, after accusations of his heisting some government jewels, with another descendant jockeying to remove his head. A local southern upstart, Dirty Ho Ching (Wong Yu), gets tangled up in the Beijing intrigue, loses his fortune, ends up poisoned and is forced to be Wang’s student. The capital powers descend on the duo in the southern city, and after Wang teaches Ho the secret of the no shadow kick, through a short training montage and a surreal demonic encounter against the 7 Bitters, the two are ultimately overwhelmed by Beijing’s power (especially due to its alliance with the Mongols), so they head to the capital to kill off the evil ursurpers and put Wang back in the court.
Dirty Ho is really only known for its unique action scenes, which all take place under the guise of Confucian hospitality. Kicks are thrown while drinking tea and investigating art pieces. The aesthetic is amazing. I bet Pops just wanted to build an action movie entirely around the No Shadow Kick, which has so much great payoff. All the fights are phenomenal. Aesthetically, my favorite is the fight against the Foot Doctor, Wilson Tong, who has blades on his feet, but being a northerner, I assume Pops is telling us that even the best weapons, if you can see them coming, are useless. The action in this scene is just unbelievable. The tea fight, also amazing. All of the action has layers of commentary on the violence underlying polite, Chinese society. I believe Pops understood this better than anyone.
The finale is pretty grandiose: 2 vs 3 (Lo Leih as General Liang Jing Cheng, King Lee King-Chu, and a third I don’t know). I feel like I’m learning to appreciate Lo Leih, whose movement is more deliberate (he was 40 at the time of shooting) and has some aura farming moments that are just unbelievable.
My favorite action scene overall, though, is the surreal fight between Wong Yu and the 7 Bitters, which glues the movie together nicely. The combat is as creative as it gets here, with the villains including a biting guy, and Peter Chan as the “bitter face” Kumian. (I’m beginning to see that Peter Chan was really an action genius.)
I feel though that the story is a bit surface level compared to The Prodigal Son, which us far more personal. By contrast, Dirty Ho has a humdrum Manchurian court drama, which transports the problem to a faraway place with uninteresting officials pulling the strings. It just feels like a vehicle for Pops’ No Shadow Kick thesis. I wonder if Sammo wanted to one-up Pops with Prodigal, by making the story more universal and personal. Prodigal just works better as a movie. But I would say technically the fights in Dirty Ho are a notch above. Pops always invents amazing mythology in his films, and his mastery is on display here. I only wish the plot was as masterful.
I also wish Pops had paid off Kara Hui’s character. There are hints that she’s secretly an iron shirt master. Expanding on her would have made for a fascinating love interest for Wang or Ho, but she’s dropped suddenly from the plot. In 1979 Kara Hui somehow managed to appear in 9 films, so I imagine all the directors were jockying to get her into their films, and maybe Pops couldn’t keep her as long as he wanted. My Young Auntie and Lady Is the Boss must have been payback.
If I had to contextualize Dirty Ho… maybe it’s a stretch, but it might have been Pops’ polemic against the explosion of Korean-style kicking, which was a new aesthetic totally foreign to Chinese Kung Fu. Bruce Lee might have tinkered with the overlap between Korean kicks (which he learned in socal in the late 60s and early 70s), but mostly his kicking was for impact and flare. Pops might have looked at this phenomenon with disdain. Dirty Ho is his sophomoric treatise on kicking. Operation Scorpio (1990) was his master’s thesis. He’s obviously not behind the wheel in the finale of Drunken Master 2, because his solution to Korean (and Thai) kicking was nothing like Jackie’s. It was actually very Chinese and Confucian.