In the late 1970s, stuntman and actor Jackie Chan quickly become the biggest Hong Kong action brand since Bruce Lee. Having trained in Peking opera and plugged away in the margins of local film for years, Chan made his breakthrough in 1978 with a pair of kung fu pictures helmed by leading action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping: Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. Chan brought to the screen a rough-and-tumble flavour of martial arts action marked not just by potentially life-threatening stunts but also a charming, bumbling-comic demeanour. Those screen qualities are much in evidence in The Young Master, the second work by Chan as actor-director and his first film after signing with the major Golden Harvest studio.
Chan stars as Brother Lung, a young man who restores honour to the kung fu school that took him in as an orphan and brought him up. Trouble rears its head early in the film, when Lung takes part in a lion dance against a rival school, only to find out mid-fight that the lead opponent is actually his schoolmate Jing Keung (Wei Pai) taking a secret freelance gig. When Keung later on invites a prostitute back to his and Lung’s martial arts school and details of the lion dance betrayal emerge, head Master Tien (Tien Feng) is outraged and Keung is sent away. But as the chain of events heaps humiliation on Master Tien and the school, Lung hits the road to bring back Keung.
Even at this early stage of his career as filmmaker, key approaches of the Jackie Chan brand are already in place. Chan was famously trained in Peking opera and part of the “Seven Little Fortunes” troupe, and in The Young Master’s opener he draws on heritage and tradition. Chan’s lion-dance fight combines daring stunts and sheer strength, and uses the event to produce a thrilling fight without violence (which would have been unsuitable for the film’s eventual Chinese New Year release). Chan’s decision to ditch brutality continues as the plot moves forward: in fight scenes Chan plays up comic devices like mistaken identity, and his adversaries are injured or knocked out, but not killed – a key Chan approach that continues this year, 2015, in his performance in Dragon Blade.
The Young Master carries a loose structure and rambles at times, but its purely comic moments can shine – especially those with screen veteran Shek Kin playing a federal marshal. The heavy lifting, however, comes in the action work that doubtless propelled the film to its local box office record. After the initial lion dance, fight scenes range from deadly serious when Keung gets mixed up with bandits through to delightfully playful. The latter clicks in when Chan runs into fellow “Seven Little Fortunes” alumnus Yuen Biao for a series of outdoor bouts using only benches as props, as well as nimble scenes with Chan wielding a large white fan.
The climax of The Young Master arrives in a showdown between Chan and tough guy Brother Kim (Korean hapkido master and Hong Kong film regular Hwang In-shik) – a vicious character who emerges in the margins of the search for Jing Keung, then comes to the fore as a major adversary. For the closer, Chan strips back the action to its absolute basics, staging the bout on a bare hilltop and keeping weapons and props out of the picture. As the pair pummel each other into the ground, one can only marvel at how the actors could complete the shoot without ruinous injury, and how Chan in particular could move on to ever more extreme scenes in the years to come.