The Man from Hong Kong rewatched – chopsocky fun at a cracking pace

The song jazzing up the opening credits of the director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s highly energetic 1975 action movie The Man from Hong Kong is British pop group Jigsaw’s disco tune Sky High. The chorus crescendos with the words “you’ve blown it all sky high,” which might as well be an anthem for the film-maker’s colourful career – forged in the fire of SFX-laden genre pics of the ’70s and ’80s, including Turkey Shoot, Dead End Drive-In and Stunt Rock.

The Man from Hong Kong recruited two big-name actors whose careers were nosediving: one a fading martial arts star, the other a former James Bond. Jimmy Wang Yu, whose fame across south-east Asia dipped upon the emergence of Bruce Lee, was paired with George Lazenby, who quit the 007 franchise after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and later claimed he was “basically blacklisted” from Hollywood as a result.

The film was the first Australia-Hong Kong co-production to be shot in both countries, and the first Australian martial arts movie. It starts big, with a punch-up on top of Uluru between a detective (the legendary Aussie alpha male Roger Ward) and a drug courier (the Hong Kong veteran Sammo Hung, also the film’s martial arts coordinator).

After failing to get him to cough up information, Ward – in a low-angle shot, which makes the hulking veteran feel so domineering that the screen near buckles under the strain – snarls that the police will fly someone in from Hong Kong to talk to him. Trenchard-Smith cuts to Yu firing a pistol in police training grounds, his name appearing in bright pulpy red and yellow letters.

Special agent Fang Sing Leng (Yu) – a badge-wielding hard arse, like a Chinese Dirty Harry – visits Australia and interrogates the man, who is connected to the powerful gangster Jack Wilton (Lazenby). The plot involves Leng infiltrating the criminal master’s network while romancing a couple of local women. The latter involves mildly revolting scenes with co-star Ros Spiers (playing a journalist), where the two slobber on each other and/or exchange dopey repartee (“This is nice.” “What did you expect, acupuncture?”).

The Man From Hong Kong was Yu’s first English-language film. His dialogue was given a voiceover by Roy Chiao, who appeared in several ’70s Hong Kong movies and is best known in the western world for playing Lao Che in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the slickly dressed crime lord who delivers the line “the poison you just drank!” with deliciously casual malevolence.

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Bill Hunter and Trenchard-Smith himself appear in cameos. Hugh Keays-Byrne plays an investigator from the Federal Narcotics Bureau, a very different character to his wastoid devil-worshipping biker in Stone or his more recent performance as the freaky Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Man From Hong Kong’s cracking pace tapers over less than stellar acting, and the film holds up well in the context of a chopsocky fun ride. The stunts are impressive, and the money shot, padded out in glorious slow-mo, depicts Lazenby stumbling around with his back covered in flames while Yu repeatedly punches him.

Lazenby agreed to do the shot without a stunt double after Trenchard-Smith set himself on fire to demonstrate it could be done safely. The actor was wearing a (temporarily) fire-retardant blazer but, to his horror, he had difficulty removing it when the camera was rolling.

“I’ve never seen anybody try to run away from his own arm so fast,” quipped the veteran stunt man Grant Page in the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood. The actor burned his arm and according to multiple accounts walked up to the director immediately after and punched him in the kisser.

An expertly staged eight-and-a-half-minute car chase towards the end is a highlight. In this sequence – whipped together with a hell-for-leather roadside energy that predates Mad Max – the movie legitimately achieves greatness. It hardly comes as a surprise that the scene culminates with fire and a big explosion: true to form, Trenchard-Smith blew it all sky high.