With The Private Eyes, writer, director and actor Michael Hui rewrote the book on crafting Hong Kong’s big-screen entertainment. Fresh from topping the charts with Games Gamblers Play in 1974 and The Last Message the following year, Hui was on a roll in mining Cantonese comedy gold.
The Private Eyes (1976) showed that Hui and brothers Sam and Ricky had their comic formula down pat. Outrageous gags and social satire accompanied high production values previously unseen in Hong Kong comedy. The film’s hugely entertaining string of action mini-spectaculars, catchy lyrics and compelling personal dramas sealed the deal with the movie going masses and proved influential for future generations of filmmakers.
Hui stars as Wong Yeuk-sze, the stingy and arrogant boss of the Mannix Private Detective Agency. We first meet Wong on the job, in a marvelous dialogue-free surveillance sequence set to song and staged amid busy streets and construction sites. Wong is no marvel as a sleuth and is soon joined by unemployed kung fu ace Lee Kwok-kit (Sam Hui) who presses him for a sidekick job. Soon the pair teams up, along with office lackey Puffy (Ricky Hui) and are quickly up to their necks investigating petty fraud, shoplifting and infidelity cases, plus a hush-hush cinema bomb plot that could just propel them into the big league.
From the outset Hui and his collaborators cram as many gags as possible into the film’s 94 minute running time. The emphasis is on a breathless parade of set pieces: Kwok-kit seizing unexpected chances to show off his martial arts, creative bouts of kitchen humor, a super-destructive car chase and stakeouts gone wrong. The anything-goes formula also brings in thrilling stunts and fight scenes, expertly choreographed by Sammo Hung for maximum laughs in what was an action-cinema breakthrough, and key jokes and songs center on working-class hardships that resonated with Hongkongers in the mid-‘70s.
Several key narrative links sneak in from the periphery: there’s the oddly wealthy, Porsche-driving cop (Richard Ng) with whom the detectives keep crossing paths, as well as the gang of thieves (headed by top screen villain Shek Kin) who muddle along from suburban stickups to daring heists.
Also holding The Private Eyes together is the way the Hui brothers skillfully play off each other. Michael Hui’s mean boss takes a local cinema standard and updates it with deadpan style and exaggerated miserliness, setting himself up for a crowd-pleasing humbling. Sam Hui is the fresh-faced foil, his martial arts coming in handy for rescues while his songs (performed with his band The Lotus) for the soundtrack have become classics, revived whenever Hong Kong hits hard times.
Meanwhile, Ricky Hui’s stammering, shuffling Puffy is a charming character geared toward winning audience sympathy, quietly key in the comedy trio that makes The Private Eyes not just pivotal among comedies, but in Hong Kong cinema as a whole.
Tim Youngs