Courtesy of Hong Kong Film Archive Leisure and Cultural Services Department
© Shaw Moviecity (HK) Limited
Although King Hu entered the film industry through the art and props department, his sustained involvement before turning to directing, was as an actor in the studio system (principally Shaw Brothers). From the mid-50s to mid-60s, King Hu acted in more than 36 films and as his physique matured from late teens to early 30s, his roles evolved. He was no mere bit player but a second lead who played against some of the big stars of the time – Linda Lin Dai, Betty Loh Ti, Grace Chang.
King Hu was featured in dramas such as Golden Phoenix (1956) and The Deformed (1960) where he plays characters with physical deformities (scabby headed in the former, and hunchbacked in the latter) in love with beautiful women. But it was his short height and expressive face that made him most suitable for comedy (the small man occupies the same status as the fat woman in films of the time). He excelled in films like Stranger than Fiction (1963) as part of a duo masquerading as bankers, and even in smaller roles as one of Peter Chen Ho’s flat-mates in the musical comedy, Love Parade (1963). My Lucky Star dates from 1963, a prolific year for King Hu the actor. One could argue that by the age of 30, he had reached a certain plateau in his career, embodying the persona of a flawed personality who becomes a victim seemingly of his own devices. In this black comedy, King Hu plays a bankrupt factory owner who escapes the picket line of his workers striking for their unpaid salaries. Adding personal misfortune to business catastrophe, he becomes suicidal when his wife appears to have run off with another man. Taking advantage of his frame of mind, a gang of con-artists enlist him to die in another man’s place and groom him to change his physique such as slimming down, doing stretch exercises to increase his height, growing a mustache, and getting a tattoo. Psychological depression and the perverse humour of physical contortion as a prelude to death and then redemption makes for a very Lewisian discourse in what – on the surface at least – seems to be a fairly typical comedy of the time. Director Ho Meng-hua would go on to make some of the classics of Hong Kong’s cinema maudit including the re-interpretation of King Kong in Mighty Peking Man and the mind-bending Oily Maniac, drawing on the form but not the morality of The Blob and surely one of the few films in the history of cinema with a liquid super-hero. My Lucky Star thus illuminates not only King Hu’s comic abilities, but also the cornerstone of Ho Meng-hua’s auteurship – physical transformation as a form of redemption if not transcendence.
Roger Garcia