John Woo Yu-sum made his name internationally by directing classic action films, but few outside Hong Kong know that he had a successful career making comedies before shooting famed gangster movies such as A Better Tomorrow and The Killer . “One of Hong Kong’s latest and hottest show biz properties is a young director, John W.S. Woo,” wrote local critic Mel Tobias in 1977, in the Post book Memoirs of an Asian Moviegoer . “Typical of the genre of young directors, John struck gold for [the] Golden Harvest [film studio] with Money Crazy (aka Pilferer’s Progress ), a Cantonese comedy. Now he is walking tall and basking in the spotlight.” Woo, who started out as a lowly script boy at Cathay Studios before moving to Shaw Brothers to work as martial arts maestro Chang Cheh ’s assistant director, had already tasted success in 1976 with a remake of the Cantonese opera film Tragedy of the Emperor’s Daughter . Woo’s film, retitled Princess Chang Ping, was a conventional Cantonese opera movie and was static and stagy – it possessed nothing of his later kinetic style. But it proved a critical and commercial success for Golden Harvest, which consequently decided to capitalise on Woo’s new-found reputation and give him more work. Cantonese opera films were a moribund genre, and it was thought that the success of Princess Chang Ping was a one-off. The stellar movie career of Michelle Reis, ‘nice girl who can play nasty’ Hong Kong had become immersed in a comedy craze after the Hui brothers hit big with Games Gamblers Play in 1974, and Golden Harvest decided to see how the young Woo – who had helped out on some of the Hui brothers’ films – would fare in the genre. Between 1977 and 1984, Woo directed nine comedies while also finding time to make the wuxia film Last Hurrah for Chivalry and the action film Just Heroes . The comedies feature lowbrow humour and focus on slapstick and crude jokes. Although it would be tempting to say that Woo’s later action scenes are foreshadowed in the extended sequences of physical comedy in these films – both slapstick and action scenes rely on timing and well-designed camerawork – this is sadly not the case. There is nothing distinctive about the movement in Woo’s comedy films, with the exception of Laughing Times , which tries to replicate the physical antics of silent-film star Charlie Chaplin. “Like his heroes, Woo tended to be a loner, standing apart from current trends in artistic development,” writes academic Stephen Teo in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions . “The 1979 emergence of a New Wave passed him by. When the younger directors of the New Wave were making groundbreaking films, Woo was indulging in his fondness for silent comedians like Keaton and Chaplin in largely inane comedies.” Woo expressed strong opinions about the art of comedy in an interview in a 1978 edition of Golden Harvest’s fan magazine Golden Movie News , unearthed by critic Derek Elley for the Udine Far East Film Festival catalogue. “Comedies are becoming more and more difficult to make,” Woo said in the interview. “Because everyone is now making this type of film, it could become awkward as far as the material is concerned. If you want to take part in this general scrum, you have need to spend more time thinking and planning. “Very often you can get ideas from everyday life and speech. At the same time, you need to maintain your level of invention so that audiences feel as though they are getting something new.” There were too many comedies in cinemas, so a director must work hard to stand out, he said. “In the case of comedy, it is not enough to cluster around the genre like bees in a hive. “In the case of action comedies, there are already too many. Most of them just concentrate on the crazy goings-on and lose sight of the film’s content – because the results are so far-fetched, audiences lose interest.” Woo added: “In comedy, character creation is very important. If you can create a broad range of characters, the subject matter will receive a boost as a result. Regardless of the characters’ appearance, actions, expressions or costumes, the weirder they are, the more you can keep the audience’s attention. “But when I say weird, I’m not talking about something that is completely out of the scale of believability.” Although the films are lowbrow, they are at least all very different – Woo expressed a desire not to repeat himself, lest he bore his audience. Money Crazy is a contemporary comedy, Laughing Times is a homage to Chaplin, and To Hell With the Devil adds horror to the mix. Plain Jane to the Rescue , which benefited from a witty performance by Josephine Siao Fong-fong as an accident-prone girl who can’t get a job, doesn’t disguise its roots in the popular television comedy It’s So Simple . Money Crazy is the best regarded of Woo’s comedies. “ Money Crazy is a collage of humorous chaos, sight gags, witty colloquial gags, and puns, shot in just two months, with a standard budget of HK$1.2 million. The B-grade product surprisingly turned out to be the biggest summer hit this year,” wrote Tobias in 1977. ‘I am not a violent man’: John Woo on action films and working in Hollywood Ricky Hui Koon-ying, the oldest of the Hui brothers, plays an inept bodyguard, and comedy stalwart Richard Ng Yiu-hon plays a con man. The pair join forces to rob a sleazy jewellery dealer. Woo, who was well schooled in Western films, said he was influenced by American comic directors Mel Brooks and Blake Edwards, although he noted that Cantonese comedy was much more physical than modern American fare. “The two characters played by Richard and Ricky are very diverse. According to the director, Richard plays the Westernised Chinese while Ricky personifies the little guy from Hong Kong from the school of hard knocks,” Tobias wrote. “Their chemistry and timing are excellent.” Woo knows how to bring about humour, flair and warmth, and ‘Keystone Cops’ capers at the right moment Mel Tobias, film critic, writing in 1981 about Woo’s Laughing Times Woo’s second comedy, Follow the Star , was more of the same, according to Elley, writing in The International Film Guide . “Woo’s successful follow-up to his earlier box-office success Money Crazy serves up more of the same formula with increased expertise,” he said. “The rapid succession of brilliant comic set pieces is underscored by a warm, very human emotional undertow,” Elley wrote. “The wary friendship between the alcoholic ex-con/vicar/mechanic (Roy Chiao [Hung]) and bopper songstress Rowena Cortes (aka Lau Wan-nah), as they combat the attention of an incompetent band of crooks, parallels the fraternal mock-antagonism between the Hui brothers.” Laughing Times , the first comedy that Woo made outside Golden Harvest, had a very different look. “Not an original idea, but a refreshing one … a Chinese Charlie Chaplin,” Tobias wrote in 1981. “Dean Saki (Dean Shek Tin), star of countless embarrassing kung fu comedies, gets a chance to play the skinny Chaplin character who meets up with a poor orphan. “Woo knows how to bring about humour, flair and warmth, and ‘Keystone Cops’ capers at the right moment, while Saki, in Chaplin costume, has the right touches to localise his version of the ‘Little Tramp’ character that locals have learned to love.” Woo’s success in the genre had withered by 1984, when he was sent to Taiwan by production house Cinema City to make two final comedies. Cinema City boss Tsui Hark starred as a grandfather in one of these, a children’s film called Run, Tiger, Run . Tsui has said that working with Woo in Taiwan was one of the factors in his decision to pick Woo to direct the trendsetting 1986 gangster hit A Better Tomorrow . The rest is history. In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook