THE PRODIGAL SON (1981)
Directed by: Sammo Hung
Starring: Yuen Biao, Lam Ching-ying, Sammo Hung, Frankie Chan, Dick Wei, Wu Ma

Forget brawny. Bulk is out, thin is in and in The Prodigal Son, directed by famous brawny boy Sammo Hung, the beanpoles have their day. The star is lanky Yuen Biao, cute as a whippet and thin as a stick. He gets taught by reedy Lam Ching-ying, playing legendary wing chun teacher, Leung Yee-tai. The bad guy? None other than composer Frankie Chan who's yet another stick insect with nasty, be-ringed claws.

And where better to have all these fly-weights than in a movie about the "woman's martial art", wing chun? Developed by a Buddhist nun hiding from the Manchu government after the destruction of the Shaolin monastery, its first student was also a woman, the famous Wing Chun herself. Traveling underground from teacher to teacher it wound up being spread throughout the country via its practitioners in the Red Junk Opera — a slipshod floating armada of itinerant Chinese Opera companies that meandered along the southern rivers and coasts of China. Wing chun is elegant as origami, graceful as a crane. It uses its soft force to defeat larger opponents, and it don't get no respect because it's not as macho as the other martial arts. Sammo Hung was fascinated by wing chun, and after making Warriors Two (1978), he put wing chun front and center in The Prodigal Son.

What does wing chun look like? Well in Prodigal it's all about bony fingers delicately flicking aside elegant robes to reveal a silk slippered foot already rocketing at super-sonic speeds towards your jaw. It's all about two men of high culture squatting down into angular poses as they rip each other up with their fingertips on a floating restaurant. It's about double-jointed wrist locks, throat tears, and patches of your hair torn out by some jiveass turkey somersaulting over you.

The Prodigal Son is posh and epic in all the right places, lean and mean everywhere else. Yuen Biao plays a street-fighting young pup whose protective pa pays punks to throw their fights to artificially inflate his son's rep. Yuen's Godzilla-sized ego is on the rampage and it can only be stopped by...a man with no eyebrows? That's Lam Ching-ying, playing a Chinese Opera diva specializing in female roles who locks Yuen in the hurtin' room and throws away the key.

In this flick, world-weary isn't an attitude, it's a way of life. The true masters have retired to the farm, or hide their talents in a traveling opera company. The new kids with their just-add-water reputations are all swagger and pose and not much else. Where young bucks meet their grizzled elders and traumatically change from puffed-up puppies to hungry wolves is where Prodigal Son stakes its story.

Sammo Hung may be the director and Yuen Biao may be the star, but the movie's heart is Lam Ching-ying as wing chun master Leung Yee-tai. Giving a diva's turn as a Chinese opera diva, Lam exudes a lifetime of dignity and poise. Which is surprising seeing that this was his first real film role of any weight. The way he eats up the screen it looks like he's been doing it forever.

On November 8, 1997 Lam Ching-ying, the most decent man in Hong Kong showbiz, passed away of liver cancer. In his last days he sent his family away so they wouldn't see his suffering, and he barred his friends from visiting him so they wouldn't feel sorry for him as the disease took its fearsome toll on his body. It's cheap irony that one of Hong Kong's best-loved and most-respected actors died alone.

We're more than proud to be showing Lam Ching-ying's best performance in one of Hong Kong's best movies. For us, screening The Prodigal Son is a way to pay tribute to one of the greats: a man who devoted his life to entertaining crowds of strangers sitting together in the dark.

So we encourage you to buy a ticket, grab your popcorn and plonk down to see it all unspool before your eyes. It's the electric shadow show full of great acting, gorgeous scenery, fabulous costumes, and some of the best kung fu ever put on film. It's everything people scoff at kung fu movies for not being, all in one place, all moving at the speed of light, and its power, grace, and beauty cannot be denied.