YOUNG MASTER (Hong Kong, 1980)
Directed by: Jackie Chan
Starring: Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Ting Feng, Shih Kien, Hwang In-Shik, Mars

If Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow was the start of Jackie Chan’s career as an action star, YOUNG MASTER is the start of his career as a director. Leaving behind Lo Wei, this was the first film of many he directed for Golden Harvest, and they made him two promises: he could have total control over his movies, and his schedule and budget could be as big as he wanted. After the string of kung fu comedies for Seasonal (Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Drunken Master, and Fearless Hyena for Lo Wei) he wanted to try a more traditional kung fu film. The result is a movie that purists recognize as one of his best attempts to put true martial arts onscreen.

Jackie plays Ah Lung, a student at a martial arts school. When his sworn brother, Jing Keung (Wei Pei) throws a lion dance to let a rival school win, his master finds out and Jing storms away from the school rather than face punishment. Jackie begs his master to go find his brother and bring him back into the fold and he reluctantly receives permission. But Jing has fallen in with a bunch of truly evil bad guys while he’s been away, and when Jackie gets framed in a case of mistaken identity he winds up having to take them all on.

Unfettered by budgets, Jackie was free to shoot up to 500 takes to get a simple shot like a fan being flipped up into the air and caught perfectly. He was also able to work with people like his opera school brother, Yuen Biao, who takes him on in a breathtaking scene with a bench. The action flows fast and furious, but the highlight of the movie is his climactic duel with Hwang In-Shik, the Korean master of hapkido. A grueling 18-minute scene, all shot from wide angles so there’s no room for faking, this sequence took three months to film and is one of the most amazing fights ever put on film. Hwang is a physical genius and he uses painful-looking wrist locks to flip and flop Chan all over the ground like a boneless puppet, before switching to his feet and dealing out some lightning kicks that look like they could take down an oak. But Chan shows us how a fighter thinks on his feet, using his brains to learn Hwang’s weaknesses and then taking him down by absorbing more punishment than one would think is humanly possible.

While Jackie was shooting YOUNG MASTER, Lo Wei had enlisted Hong Kong’s triads to force him to leave Golden Harvest, and so he was finishing this movie while being stalked by thugs, forced into sit-down, late-night meetings with Lo Wei, and forced to shoot a second movie while under the watchful eyes of some triad leg-breakers. But none of that strain shows in the final product. This movie was a massive hit when it was released, and Chan cites it as containing some of his favorite action. He should be proud. As the first movie that started his long and lucrative career at Golden Harvest, it’s a bravura farewell to the traditional kung fu movie, leaving it behind him in pieces, some of them still smoking.