Cunning Stunts Men
For those who have the patience to wait through the closing credits, the Kung Fu Stuntmen documentary saved the best till last with a mid-credits collage of footage showing Lam Ching-Ying in action, and people talking about him. Here is what the talking heads had to say…
Sammo Hung: “Lam Ching-Ying was the best of the best.”
Stephen Tung: “Every member of Hung’s Stunt Team was proficient, but Lam Ching-Ying was nearly perfect.”
Chin Ka-Lok (executive producer of this 2020 doc): “When we filmed Paper Marriage, he did it without any rubber mattresses. Action 1, 2, 3. Bang. Cut. We worried: “Master Lam.” He said “Leave me alone.” Lam couldn’t stop rolling for more than three minutes because of the pain. We heard nothing but humping. His remuneration was over one million while starring in the Mr. Vampire series. Despite his respected status, Lam Ching-Yung had remained fully dedicated to the Hung Stunt Team. He always completed actions himself. He was definitely my role model.”
Bruce Lee also regarded Lam highly. When Bruce wanted to form a team of stuntmen to take with him to Hollywood, Lam was one of the main candidates but the top one was Bruce’s stunt double - Yuen Wah. Naturally, I will focus on what was said about Bruce in this Hong Kong doc. Yuen Bun talked about Bruce’s final day of living: “It happened during the shooting period of Game of Death in 1973. We were practicing under his guidance in the morning. Bruce went back home at noon while we were still rehearsing. Later on, we got a phone call.”
Cheung Wing-Hon: “The person who called us was Wu Ngan, his butler. He said “Hello, Bruce just passed away.” Wow, are you kidding me? We were all lodged in the hotel. We thought it was a propaganda made by Golden Harvest. The shooting just began, how could they publicize a rumour like this? It must be some sort of joke made by the propaganda department.”
Yuen Bun: “We didn't believe a word until we arrived at the hospital one by one and found out the truth. We'd already signed contracts for his Hollywood plan.”
Billy Chan Wui-Ngai: “There were at least 6 or 7 folks. It was so miserable that I couldn't tell my feelings. The most impossible thing just happened and my brain went blank.”
During a black-and-white shot of the Bruce Lee statue in Hong Kong, a voice that sounds like Tsui Siu-Ming says: “After Bruce Lee passed away, no action movie was scheduled; no-one dared to shoot.”
The above photo intrigues me. It was taken in 1982 when Sammo Hung was working with Jackie Chan on Project A. Sammo worked on the film as an uncredited director and fight choreographer. However, that’s not Jackie who we see in the photo; it’s Conan Lee. In 1982, he was starring in Ninja in the Dragon’s Den for another film company - Seasonal. It doesn’t make sense for Conan to be socializing with Sammo and his stunt guys in this close of a proximity. It’s kind of unsettling given that Conan was being positioned by Seasonal as Jackie’s rival. There’s even a photo that I’ve seen of Jackie standing next to Conan.
Wilson Tong strangely didn’t have anything to say about Bruce Lee despite the amount of times that you can see him in Enter the Dragon. The Kung Fu Stuntmen documentary is only 93 minutes long, so it wouldn’t have hurt for the doc to be a few minutes longer. In the below photo, Wilson can be seen sitting while talking to Bruce’s assistant - Wu Ngan. Yue Tau-Wan (the stuntman who stands out for being cross-eyed) remembered Bruce drinking Vitasoy during the making of this Hollywood film. This is a Chinese soy milk drink, and it’s not good to drink soy milk if you have a thyroid problem. Director Robert Clouse claimed that no matter how much food that Bruce tried to consume, he couldn’t put on as much weight as he would have liked. It’s possible that Bruce had an overactive thyroid. If true, then this would make him one of a few stars of Hong Kong cinema who suffered from thyroid problems - Jet Li (an overactive thyroid) and Anthony Wong (an underactive thyroid).
Back to Yue Tau-Wan, he said: “After the death of Bruce Lee, I was unemployed around 3 to 4 months. I was even forced to sell blood, about HK$100 for 300CC.”
As for miscellaneous quotes fom the doc, Ching Siu-Tung talked about the going rate for being a stuntman: “We could earn HK$2000 to HK$3000 on average, when the common rate of salary was HK$100. So I could easily afford a new car less than a month.”
Referring to that time in the seventies when the future was uncertain for Kung Fu films, Ching said: “I had once driven the unlicensed taxi.”
When times are tough, a stuntman can turn to a life of crime as a last resort. It could be its own movie. Tsui Siu-Ming said: “Others might also take risks to be thieves.”
Contrary to what was said in Jackie Chan’s mostly ghost-written autobiography in 1998, Jackie doesn’t always volunteer to do the stunts first so as to assauge scared stuntmen. Eric Tsang make it clear who appeases who when he said: “If Mars didn’t die from doing it, then Jackie would do it himself.”
When talking about falling onto an ice rink from a high angle for Long Arm of the Law (1984), Yuen Mo said: “I kept telling the action director before filming the scene - I would never do it if the film wasn’t invested by Sammo Hung.”
The below still is from a 1985 Sammo Hung film called Heart of Dragon. I didn’t realize it in 1998 because of how Jeff Yang compiled his info for the pseudo-memoir, but this film was actually made at the same time as Sammo’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (featuring Jackie in a smaller role) and Jackie’s Police Story. More to the point, it would appear that Sammo was trying to rival Jackie in how Jackie could be portrayed as a C.I.D. detective in a stunt-laden yet serious film. Jackie’s film was slightly bigger at the Hong Kong box office despite being released considerably later.
When talking about Heart of Dragon, Chin Ka-Lok referred to the scaffolding stunt: “Some experienced stuntmen quit right after viewing the set.”
Moving on away from Jackie and Sammo, Stephen Tung said: “Reliving the past made us realize a sense of self-abusing vanity.”
Chin Ka-Lok proudly said: “Being a stuntman made me realize why HK action films could conquer Hollywood back then. Stuntmen are the reason that HK action cinema had earned its global status.”
Watching this doc made me realize on my own terms that the schedule conflict that Yuen Cheung-Yan had during the making of Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China was because he was concurrently working on Wong Jing’s God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai. Both films were released in August 1991. As Xiong Xin-Xin remembered, the ladder fight (in the Tsui Hark film starring Jet Li) took 16 hours to film per day of the 31 days that were allocated to filming the fight. It was the only fight scene that Yuen Woo-Ping choreographed because of how busy that his younger brother was.
The life of a HK stuntman was not so cushy, as Yuen Wah remembered: “We had no insurance. The maximum wage around HK$200,000.”
Tony Leung Siu-Hung: “Film companies would rather agree to settle in cash than pay for the insurance. I often wondered why.”
Yuen Wah: “Some people were paralyzed, and some died. There were ones who fell backward and died from pulling the wire.”
Back to the man who turned Hong Kong cinema into an international commodity, it’s only in good form to conclude with the beginning of the golden age for martial arts films. Tsui Siu-Ming said the following about Bruce Lee: “He demanded all our stuntmen to meet his requirements. How to react when your head is hit. How to react when your belly is attacked.”
Tony Leung Siu-Hung: “Bruce Lee improved our performance skills.”
Billy Chan: “Bruce was very fond of Yuen Wah. He would be p!ssed if Yuen Wah was hurt, as he had his own injury. Yuen Wah was like his better half. When Bruce saw Yuen Wah somersaulting, he would be overjoyed.”
Cheung Wing-Hon: “Bruce always invited us over when he found we were free at night. He tutored and encouraged us to exercise in his gym.”
Yuen Wah: “His daily routine was about electricity.”