From Riches to Rags

It's not easy being a middle child, especially when your eldest brother is the comic genius of his generation and younger brother a 'god' of pop music and top box-office draw. That Ricky Hui Koon-ying still managed to shine on screen is no small testament to his talent as singer and comic. Although subordinate in the films when acting opposite siblings Michael and Sam, Ricky was occasionally given his own spotlight during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A large percentage of these starring efforts were directed and scripted by a fledgling John Woo Yu-sum, then still unsure of his forte. As shown by the farces that emerged from the Woo-Hui partnership, the director's strength was clearly not comedy. From Riches to Rags (1980), their second collaboration after scoring a hit three years earlier with The Pilferer's Progress, is an uneven mixture of silly gags and eccentric action displaying a nascent hint of the unique stylistic sense that in time would come to define Woo.

As part of the Film Archive's upcoming four-film retrospective on Ricky Hui, Riches veers wildly from the rickety gags that comprise its first two-thirds (in which the hapless hero goes from penniless soft-drinks factory worker to lottery winner) to a strange finale taking place in the kind of insane asylum rarely seen outside of Grade Z productions.

Through it all, Ricky proves eminently watchable and, when he sings, engagingly listenable. All the more regrettable, then, that Woo's presentation didn't go far enough in capitalising on his special qualities to create the kind of celluloid persona that might have sustained his stardom. As many commentators noted upon his death last November at age 65, he never escaped his siblings' formidable shadows.

From Riches to Rags, Fri, 11am, Hong Kong Film Archive