Big Boss of Shanghai (1979)

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

It begins with two guys walking in a canyon and that whistling song heard in many of these movies. They stop for noodles but have no payment. They meet the rich guy that wants to hire Chen Kuan-Tai for a bodyguard but he refuses on morality. Next he admonishes Cheng Kang- Yeh for stealing. They get in more trouble with the local big shot, so hop a train to Shanghai to seek fortune and fame. They start at the docks. They defeat the protection guy Chan Wai-Lau. The two friends soon have a problem between each other about how to manage their new success. The copy is a VHS to digital file transfer with English dubbing. Where is the high definition fully restored digital version? Nowhere, of course, we are lucky the VHS rental craze saved this film from turning to dust. Chen Kuan-Tai was made for the role of the title character. He played a similar character in many 1970s martial arts movies and nobody did it better. Besides Chen Kuan-Tai, the best part of the movie was the fights. There are a lot of fights and they could easily have been boring considering the restraints of the story. In 1979 so many of these movies were made and "anything goes" applied to the fights. There was the gymnastics of the Venoms, the wire work, the comedy, the kick masters and everything else. Yet this movie had a contemporary time frame, no fantasy, no over the top displays of inner power (telekinesis), it was all just street fights. The fights never got repetitive or unrealistic or boring from start to finish.I rate this above average and highly recommend it for fans of the genre. I also recommend it as an introductory movie for folks who would like to take a look at martial arts movies from the golden age 1967-1984 to see if you like them.

Chen Kuan Tai, in addition to being an outstanding martial artist (not to mention one of the better actors in martial arts movies), was also an exceptionally talented director; even dividing his attention between the 3 aforementioned disciplines, he was able to produce some very watchable movies- case in point, BIG BOSS OF SHANGHAI. While storywise it's fairly familiar, it's the filmmaker's approach to the material that makes it singular. And it's always fun to see Chen Sing as a villain: he had the kind of mug you couldn't help but want to see punched in (especially when he was sneering while at some underhandedness). BIG BOSS OF SHANGHAI is highly recommended for kung fu connoisseurs.