The Old Master (90 min; 1979)
Produced and Directed by: Joseph Kuo
Starring: Master Yu Jim-yuen, Superstar Bill Louie
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After Jackie Chan and Yuen Wo-ping cleaned up at the box office with their back-to-back hits Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master in 1978, kung fu comedy ruled the box office. But Joseph Kuo decided to make a wild card move and go weirdly Chan-adjacent by casting Chan’s Chinese opera teacher, Master Yu Jim-yuen, in the last movie he’d ever make, The Old Master. Then he set its controls on “Full Disco.”
The story of Master Yu Jim-yuen and his Seven Little Fortunes is one of the most famously dysfunctional master/student relationships in Chinese cinema. Master Yu ran the China Drama Academy, a tough Chinese Opera school whose most famous class of students included Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, Corey Yuen Kwai (7 Grandmasters), Yuen Tak, Yuen Tai, and Yuen Mo who performed collectively as “The Seven Little Fortunes.” Brutally beaten, forced to stand in horse stance for hours at a time, often starved, all of them would have long careers in the Hong Kong film business. To see Master Yu onscreen you wouldn’t know about his background as a culturally-approved child abuser since he comes across as a relatively chill dude, but his students still have the emotional scars. You can only imagine how weird it was for them to see this movie.
Shot in contemporary Los Angeles, Old Master revolves around one of Master Yu’s crappy students running up gambling debts with the local gang. They give him a tight three-month deadline to pay up or they’ll send men in polyester Japanese housecoats to his kung fu school and then there’ll be trouble. Suddenly, a lightbulb goes off over crappy student’s head! He’ll bring Master Yu over, tell him he has to fight off the bad guys to save his gym, but secretly he’ll take bets on the outcomes of the fights. Everyone will bet against Master because he’s 74, and his crappy student will clean up. Sounds straightforward, but as with everything Joseph Kuo directs, it’s the journey that matters.
Master Yu gets picked up at LAX and, to the sound of a weapons grade synth track set on repeat, we accompany him on every single twist, turn, and freeway off-ramp to his downtown destination, in what might be a cinematic forerunner to Google Maps. Master Yu fights everyone he’s supposed to fight but he also meets the kung fu gym’s doormat and designated toilet cleaner, Bill Louie, the American karate champion with a Tony Orlando hair helmet and ‘stache, and a background in karate, taekwondo, disco, and chainsaw. He also learns martial arts moves from his toy robot, and eventually tells Master Yu about the plot to exploit his kung fu skills. Master Yu storms out of his student’s gym and shacks up with Louie and then teaches him kung fu in a series of jaw-droppingly acrobatic scenes.
Louie gets Master Yu a job at the sleazy downtown hotel where he works (“This is an electric drill for making holes in wood. I’m an expert in this,” he happily explains) and on payday the two men celebrate by going to the disco. This leads to one of the most unbelievable sequences ever captured on film as Master gets drunk then disco dances with their plus-sized neighbor, Mary, to the disco version of “Popeye the Sailor Man.” Kuo always believes that longer is better when it comes to action scenes and this epic, improvised dance sequence between a woman in a curly blonde wig doing her best and an elderly Chinese man who clearly wishes he could die, is one of cult cinema’s secret treasures. It only becomes more excellent when a dancefloor brawl breaks out to the sound of Patrick Hernandez's international hit, “Born to be Alive.”
There are plenty of action scenes still to come, and Bill Louie wasn’t a karate champion for nothing. Every time Master Yu turns his back to the camera or puts on a hat he’s doubled (rumor has it, by his student Yuen Biao) and the movie manages to deliver some pleasingly athletic cheese-fu. But we’re all here for the inexplicable watermelon deliveries, a grumpy Chinese grandpa who has no clue what’s going on around him but wants to earn a paycheck, and random close-ups of ceramic tigers. The world hasn’t discovered this space oddity yet, but you can bet Jackie and all the rest of the Seven Little Fortunes got drunk when they ran it in their private screening room, then fell on the floor laughing and crying at the same time as they watched the man who got them to trade their childhoods for a lifetime of global fame do the Hustle.