Dirty Ho (1979)

Original title: 爛頭何

“Dirty” Ho Ching (Wong Yu) is a pretty enthusiastic thief with a certain penchant for self-taught kung fu. He’s just managed a great jewel heist and is in the process of spending some of his ill-gotten gains on some high class courtesans (one of whom is played by house favourite Kara Hui Ying-Hung) in a brothel situated on a river boat when a man in a neighbouring pavilion we’ll soon enough learn is named Wang Chin Chen (played by yet another house favourite, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui), is starting to get in a not terribly subtle bidding contest for the ladies’ interests. The size of jewel chests is compared and Ho’s found wanting, until the latter clearly wants to start a more physical kind of fight. The brothel owner calls the police who arrests Ho. However, Wang secretly shows the police a seal that identifies him as part of the Imperial Court, and orders them to let Ho go as soon as possible, while he himself takes care of the thief’s jewels.

Obviously, once released, Ho wants to get back at Wang, but loses a fight against Crimson, whom Wang declares to be his new bodyguard. Well actually, Ho loses against Wang who puppets Crimson while pretending to hide behind her back, but Ho not being terribly bright he’s not going to notice subtleties like this.

Ho does go on to further attempts at getting back at Wang, but the latter needs little effort to have things go his way. Eventually, Ho finds himself poisoned and blackmailed into the role of Wang’s martial arts student.

Unlike Ho, the audience at this point knows what’s going on: Wang is the eleventh son of the Emperor, spending his time on art, fine wine, women and martial arts training while roaming the country, and shows little interest in becoming the next Emperor. However, one of his brothers believes exactly this will undoubtedly make Wang the Emperor’s candidate of choice, and has set in motion various plans to kill this most unwilling of rivals.

Which leads to a couple of incredible scenes during which Wang is invited to sessions with other friends of the arts who try to murder him while both sides pretend to only be interested in wine or paintings. Ho, as usually not getting it, blithely pokes around the edges of these scenes.

Eventually, Wang is hurt badly enough in one of those fights that he needs to intensify Ho’s training as his body guard.

Dirty Ho is a particularly fun example of director and martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung’s ability to make deeply physical kung fu comedies that still don’t have as much of an affinity to slapstick as the Golden Harvest model (which I have grown to love over the years) shows. Instead, his Shaw Brothers comedies have a certain restraint in their physical comedy that can express uproarious humour through the incredible precision of Lau’s brilliant choreography given life through a fine cast of martial artists and actors, but that feels more like Fred Astaire than Buster Keaton (who I both love, as regular readers will know).

There’s a great sense of invention in the film’s fights, even when Lau uses ideas you will also have seen in earlier films of the genre (and that will be repeated ad nauseam in the future). There’s just such a perfection of comical timing and elegance in something like the the puppetting sequence with Liu and Hui, it can leave this viewer quite breathless. Not only from laughter but also in admiration for the intelligence of choreography, visual staging and performance on display. Liu never repeats a trick in the movie, and so every fight scene is of equal brilliance but also absolutely distinctive from the next.

The wine and arts assassin sequences are particularly fine as well, with the mix of physical violence and verbal politeness making for some poignant bits of humour.

This being a Hongkong comedy, there are also moments of outrageous weirdness – some of which might be seen as problematic for some contemporary tastes – as well as a transition to some more serious – and still incredible – fights in the climax, all of which Lau and his cast and crew handle with the same aplomb, elegance and off-handed visual class.