Later this week, the Logan Theatre presents a screening of Hong King action filmmaker Lau Kar-leung’s late-period breakout Drunk Master II, released stateside asThe Drunken Master. Lau, who passed away from complications related to lymphoma a couple years ago, was a fight choreographer and later director at Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio, helping create the look and tone of the popular kung-fu genre. He specialized in mixing traditional martial arts styles with old-school Hollywood showmanship and good-natured humor, and he experimented with staging, characterization, and genre, often bucking trends he helped create. Ironically enough, his most sustained run for Shaw Bros. coincided with its decline—just as studio head Run Run Shaw turned his attention to television—bridging the gap between more traditional wuxia films and the “gun fu” days of John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Wong Jing. In these directors, Lau instilled the notion that Hong Kong filmmaking sticks to rhythmic staging and editing. Even in scenes not centered on action and fighting, the director found ways to emphasize and dramatize motion. Movement becomes transmittable, with one characters’s motion followed by another’s corresponding gesture, be it a tilt of the head, a twist of the torso, or the force of a punch. You can see my five favorite Lau Kar-leung films after the jump.
- Dirty Ho (1979) Alright, back to the funny stuff. Lau utilizes a typical revenge plot—the kind seen in films throughout the Shaw Brothers canon—and flips into a kind of sex farce centered around a complicated love triangle, mistaken identities, and self-reflexive humor. It also features some of Lau’s most inspired set pieces. Sort of the inverse of Pole Fighter‘s first scene, the opening arrangement here is a riff on Busby Berkeley, a musical kung-fu sequence full of overhead shots and wide-angle tableaus that establish the film’s story without using dialogue or conventional exposition. There’s nothing else quite like it in the director’s filmography, but for all you purists, it does feature a mustachioed Gordon Liu.
