The Odd Couple (1979)

The Odd Couple (1979)
Aka: Eternal Conflict; Shaolin Sabre vs. Wu Tang Spear
Chinese Title: 搏命單刀奪命搶
Translation: Fight for One’s Life

 

Starring: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Lau Kar-Wing, Mars, Leung Kar-Yan, Dean Shek Tin, Ho Pak-Kwong, Lee Hoi-Sang, Huang Ha, Peter Chan Lung, Karl Maka, Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, Lam Ching-Ying, Yuen Miu, Chung Fat
Director: Lau Kar-Wing
Action Director: Lau Kar-Wing, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, Yuen Biao, Lam Ching-Ying, Billy Chan, Chung Fat

 

The Odd Couple stands out among kung fu movies in the post-Drunken Master era. Most copycats were content to simply borrow the entire plot from Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow or Drunken Master and simply do a switcheroo with the styles on display. So, Crystal Fist was mainly Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, but with the hero performing the Eagle’s Claw technique. Or Ol’ Dirty Kung Fu with Cliff Lok was just Drunken Master, but with no reason to actually enjoy it. This film, however, is a bit more ambitious in the story department. It isn’t to say that the story is particularly well told, but Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Wing put enough kinks in the formula to make it more than simply “Drunken Master, but with weapons.”

The movie centers around a pair of aged, eccentric kung fu masters. One of them refers to himself as the King of Swords (Sammo Hung), and is a blizzard with the dao, or saber (or broadsword, depending on how you want to translate it). His long-time rival and former friend is the King of Spears (Lau Kar-Wing). Every few years, the men have a duel to the death to see who the best martial artist is. Thing is, every single duel has ended in a tie. Both men are getting old and have come to the conclusion that their former friendship keeps either of them from dealing the death blow, even if they are bitter rivals. The best solution to this, they decide, is to take up students and pass their skills along to them, as those students won’t have any of the emotional baggage that might get in the way of a fair duel.

The King of Swords finds his student in the form of a hot-headed fellow nicknamed Stubborn Wing (Lau Kar-Wing, again). Wing runs a watermelon stand in some town and gets the elder master’s attention when he (stupidly) faces off with the local extortion gang, led by a knife-wielding Lee Hoi-Sang. The King of Swords saves him from what might end in a fatal beating and invites him to study kung fu under him. Wing initially refuses out of pride. The King of Swords responds by burning the man’s house down and telling him, “I’ll train you so you can get revenge on me later.”

Meanwhile, the King of Spears comes across a boatman, Ah Yo (Sammo Hung, again), who knows his way around the oar quite handily. And what are spears and oars but long sticks with specially-designed ends for performing their jobs? Unlike Stubborn Wing, Ah Yo jumps at the opportunity to learn kung fu, although not before his potential master convinces him to sink his own boat as a sign of his commitment to the task.

An unspecified amount of time passes—the subtitles in my version suggest 10 years, but I think it was less than that—and both students have more or less mastered their respective techniques. Their masters take leave and ask them to go around challenging people to get experience, although the King of Spears assistant, Potato (Mars), is sneaking around making sure that the two students will eventually meet up for a real fight. Little do they know, however, that a former rival of their teachers’, Laughing Bandit (Leung Kar-Yan), is keeping tabs of them with a score to settle.

The innovative gimmick here is that the film revolves around two separate masters and their respective pupils, played by two actors in dual roles. Most kung fu comedies content themselves with one lead protagonist, or sometimes two protagonists who train under the same master. This film builds much of its conflict from the rivalry between the two old masters, but then turns it on its head by having one actor play the other’s student (and vice-versa). What is especially neat about it is that said approach allow both stars to show off their talents with the same two weapons, so that neither actor feels underserved by the film’s fights.

The third-act conflict does feel a bit perfunctory, as if they needed an outside villain for things to get serious. I suppose it highlights the silliness of the masters’ rivalry: if they weren’t too busy bickering with each other, they could have saved their own lives. The problem is that both Laughing Bandit and his motivation are completely unrelated to anything that has happened earlier in the film. Had he been introduced as a vengeful brother of any other character that showed up earlier in the film, like Peter Chan’s “Cloud Sabre” or Che Ming-Wing’s “Swordsman Wu”, it would have felt a little less out of the blue.

While the third act suffers slightly from a storytelling point of view, it certainly excels on the action front. Likewise, the second act does feature some great martial arts, but the training sequences are surprisingly unimaginative, considering the quality of what Sammo and his team had done earlier in both The Incredible Kung Fu Master and Knockabout. Sammo and Lau mainly perform sets (or forms) with their respective weapons while occasionally sparring with their teacher. Sadly, those training sequences are truncated in favor of prolonged “comic” segments revolving around Dean Shek, the man to whom all humor goes to die. Shek shows up as the local rich asshole, Mr. Rocking, who sticks his pelvis outward with every step he takes. Kill me! Kill me now!

As expected from a late 1970s Sammo Hung film, the fighting itself is as good as it gets. The Odd Couple is frequently mentioned in the same breaths of Legendary Weapons of China when people talk about the best weapons-oriented kung fu movies of all time. The choreography is as complex and fast as anything Sammo has ever done. Too fast at times—there are some fights that are undercranked way too much for comic effect. The best fights are the one-on-one duels between Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Wing, of which there are three: one in the opening credits, one at the end of the first act, and the final fight of the film. Those two men complement each other like few other martial artists have ever done. The Odd Couple is their third team up, following Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog and Knockabout. While Lau Kar-Wing would occasionally show up in Sammo’s action comedies throughout the 80s, it would be another decade before the two had a proper rematch in Skinny Tiger, Fatty Dragon.

While the action is largely based around the spear and saber, other weapons pop up here and there. Leung Kar-Yan, playing the main villain, wields a kwan do, or long-handled broadsword against our heroes at the end. Frequent Sammo Hung collaborator Peter Chan shows up wielding a nine-ring broadsword, a variation on the saber. Comic actor Karl Maka, who produced the film, wields a sickle in an early fight, while an assassin challenging Lau Kar-Wing fights with an exceptionally rare weapon: the San Jian Liang Ren Dao, or Three-Point Two-Edged Blade. There is also a bit of open-handed combat, stemming from a quartet of assassins (who include choreographers Lam Ching-Ying and Chung Fat) working for Laughing Bandit and an ingenious scene where the two students use their hands as extensions of their weapons when facing off against Leung Kar-Yan unarmed.

As a writer, it is often tempting to write about what I (the viewer) wanted the film to be instead, as opposed to judging the film on its own merits. This temptation is especially strong here, owing to the opening sequence that explains the Eighteen Traditional Weapons of Kung Fu[1]. Several of the weapons mentioned have gotten little-to-no coverage in martial arts films made over the past five decades, like the trident-halberd and the Chinese mace. I would have liked to have seen those weapons get some attention here, but alas, that was not the case. But that does not count as a flaw, just a personal preference. What we do get in the action department is top-notch, more than enough to make up for the deficiencies in the story department

---

[1] - According to this film, they are: the pole, spear, halberd, hook spear, rake, pole pick, trident (or hunting fork), trident-halberd, wolf teeth’s club, saber (dao), sword (jian), claw, crutch (tonfa or nightstick), melon hammer, mace, hard whip, axe, and hook swords.