Yes, Madam! (1985)

 

(this article was originally published in a fanzine, Xenorama #18, in the spring of 2015)

                The mustached maniac threw a barrage of blows at Inspector Ng, who blocked each every one of them, not flinching the least as he battered her forearms into oblivion. A quick duck on her part saved her head from being ripped clean off by a power spinning heel kick, although she wasn't fast enough to evade the killer-in-army-fatigue's leg sweep, which lifted her high into the air. Ng landed on the balustrade, narrowly missing what would have been a fatal fall.

                But Ng's troubles were far from over. The maniac's continued his martial onslaught, even as the Inspector lay on her back. She quickly got to her feet and, in an amazing display of poise, performed a cartwheel across the balustrade. Backed up against a post, she dodged the man's roundhouse kick, swinging around the bost and burying her foot into his face.

                His pride hurting more than his head, the mustached lunatic lunged for his knife, which was sticking out of the wall.

                Ng wagged her finger and said, “Hey, you said you didn't need a knife, you chicken.”

 

Introduction     

 

                Nineteen eighty-five was an extremely important year for Hong Kong action cinema, being arguably one of the most influential single since 1978, arguably unequaled by any single year since. You see, that year saw the release of the hugely-successful Police Story film, which not only lifted the bar for large-scale stunt-oriented action, but started a franchise that ran four films from 1985 to 1996 (six in some territories, which count Crime Story (1993) as an entry in the series), and that's not counting two more unrelated films, New Police Story (2004) and Police Story 2013, and a spin-off movie, Project S (1993). It wa also the year that the Sammo Hung-directed action comedy, My Lucky Stars, would become one of the biggest hits of the decade (a sequel, Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars, was released the same year and had even better action in it). And let us not forget the landmark hit Mr. Vampire, which spawned lots of sequels, spin-offs, reimaginings, and rip-offs, including one featuring Bushman actor Nixau of The Gods Must be Crazy fame.

                 But the movie that interests us now is Yes, Madam!, which like the films mentioned above, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. We live in a time where the red flag is constantly being raised by feminists and the politically-correct over the treatment of women in Hollywood. From controversies stemming over a woman running in high heels from a tyrannosaurus to a lack of female action figures accompanying a multi-billion-dollar franchise, women can't seem to get a break when it comes to action films in Hollywood. And that's to say nothing of the absurd difficulty that filmmakers have had in doing anything related to Wonder Woman, or giving Catwoman a solo project worth watching, or stuff like that. And even when women do take the forefront in Hollywood, more often than not it's done in a sexualized manner, as if an ass-kicking woman wasn't attractive in and of itself.

                 But while Hollywood has struggled for years to get over their own sexist mindsets, the Chinese have been extolling women in action roles for decades. The first modern (i.e. In terms of story mechanics, portrayal of violence, and the like) martial arts film is generally considered to be the 1966 King Hu masterpiece Come Drink With Me, which is at its best whenever Cheng Pei Pei is hacking the stuffing out of everyone who stands in her way. King Hu really liked the powerful swordswoman, since he cast a young and unknown Polly Shang Kuan in his next film, Dragon Gate Inn (1967), followed by Hsu Feng in two more masterpieces, A Touch of Zen (1970) and The Valiant Ones (1975). The 1970s were home to many a female fighter, from the intense, headkicking Angela Mao, to the powerful Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng, to the acrobatic and multi-talented Chia Ling. More female fighters popped up during the old school era, like the graceful Kara Hui Ying-Hung, the hyper-flexible Sharon Ng Pan-Pan, and lovely Hsia Kwan Li. These women beat down their male counterparts with little remorse, never needed to doff the duds in order to be sexy to us male fans. They let their martial skills and intense gazes speak for them.

                 Despite a few attempts during the seventies to place Chinese women in a modern action context, such as the highly-lucrative Shaw Brothers film Deadly Angels (1977), once Sammo and Jackie revolutionized the genre in 1983, it would be another two years before the quintessential female action film would be produced. That film would be Yes, Madam!, a movie that would jump-start the careers of Michelle Yeoh (once the highest-paid actress in Hong Kong) and Cynthia Rothrock (who in the 90s was known as Queen of the B-movies, a title not to be taken lightly). The film also started the Girls n' Guns genre, which has attracted dozens, if not hundreds of fans to Hong Kong cinema over the years. It is that movie and its immediate legacy that we would like to a look at.

 

The Film

                 The movie starts off with a bang as Inspector Ng (Yeoh) takes on a small of gang of robbers targeting an armored truck. In one of the earliest examples of the art of “gun fu”, Ng jumps and somersaults in, on, and around cars while exchanging bullets with the robbers. The violent sequence ends with Ng cooly blowing the hand off a robber with a 12-guage shotgun after he refuses to give up. At no point in this scene does Michelle Yeoh use her sex appeal to get the job done; she's a no-nonsense hard-hitter here and that alone is enough to make many a fan just want to drop down a single knee and ask for her hand.

                We then move on to the plot, such as it is. Inspector Ng is getting ready to visit an old mentor of hers, a police analyst from Scotland Yard (in the new dub, his name is Richard Norton, an amusing nod to Cynthia Rothrock's frequent co-star and American and Hong Kong action film veteran). Following their dinner, Ng plans on going on vacation in the UK, where she'll be staying with him. But that won't be happening any time soon. Norton is wasted in his room by a hitman, played by perennial movie heavy Dick Wei. Dick is looking for a microfilm that has evidence of some faulty contracting on the part of his boss, played by James Tien. Back in the 1980s, when you needed someone to play a crime boss, you hired James Tien, the same way you hired Roy Chiao whenever you needed a lawyer or a judge. The microfilm, which was hidden in a passport, is taken by two petty thieves, Aspirin and Strepsil (Meng Hoi and John Shum, respectively). They give the passport to their forger colleague, played by respected Hong Kong director Tsui Hark.

                This is where things get complicated. Tsui switches the photo on the passport and sells it to some shmo bail-skipper (another perennial HK movie heavy, Eddy Maher), and then turns him it when he gets worried that he'll be snitched on. This leads to a big chase/fight between the bail skipper, Inspector Ng, and the police at the airport. The guy tries to take a hostage, who happens to be Inspector Carrie Morris from England (Rothrock). Needless to say, Carrie doesn't take too kindly to being a hostage and beats the poor sucker to a pulp. Carrie and Ng become partners, but initially don't like the idea, mainly because Carrie thinks Ng is too soft and Ng thinks Carrie is too brutal. We've all seen this before.

                But the bail-skipper doesn't like being snitched on, só he tries to get back at Tsui for tattling on him. This gets Tsui in trouble with the police, who figure out that he's in cahoots with Aspirin and Strepsil. At about the same time, Dick finds out where they are, which leads to a chase sequence followed by a fight in a nightclub between Ng, Carrie and Dick. Now that they know they're in danger, Aspirin and Strepsil try to get police protection. Carrie and Ng, however, won't be so kind as to simply throw the men in an isolated cell and leave them there. They know that the microfilm has to be in their possession, whether they are aware of it or not. And when the microfilm is found, the only thing preventing Ng and the police from incarcerating Tien is sudden surfeit of greed on Tsui and Aspirin's part.

                While some may complain about the trivial nature of the plot and the overused microfilm macguffin, anybody who's familiar with 80s HK action cinema will know that plot was always a secondary concern in these movies. It's something to give the heroes some reason to be beating the snot out of each other and performing death-defying stunts. That's all. The problem with this movie is the lack of confidence that director Corey Yuen had in his two female protagonists. Too much time is spent with Aspirin, Strepsil and Tsui, including two extended celebrity cameo gags featuring Sammo Hung, Richard Ng and Wu Ma that really didn't need to be in the final film.While the two women to dominate the action portion of the film, the drama is mainly tied to the three petty criminal supporting characters.

                This being an early Corey Yuen directorial effort, it's fascinating to see just how many characteristics of his later films show up here. Overwrought death scene of one of the protagonists preceding the climax? Check. Powerful female fighters? Check. Blood spurting onto the camera lens? Check. Violent action punctuated by goofy comedy? Check.

                Where the film really made its mark was in the action (natch!). I mentioned the first set piece. The action comes in fits and spurts between the explosive opening and the unforgettable finale. The best mid-film fight scene is probably the airport chase with Eddy Maher, with Cynthia Rothrock showing off some excellent legwork against the surprised criminal. The two-on-one bathroom fight with Dick Wei is also solid.

                Nonetheless, most people will leave the film talking about the climax. For a good five whole minutes (closer to ten if you count John Shum's antics and a breather where the combatants exchange verbal barbs), Rothrock and Yeoh take on a mansion full of stuntmen armed with long, curved watermelon knives, making sure that each of them is dispatched in the most painful way possible. That usually involves the poor sucker being thrown or knocked through glass, wooden furniture or both. Rothrock does some traditional pole fighting for her fighting, while Michelle displays the nimbleness acquired from years of ballet training. Finally, Michelle Yeoh fights Sammo Hung stunt team member Chung Fat, who sports some crazy eyebrows and a mean dagger, while Cynthia Rothrock fights Dick Wei. Rothrock performs a great over-the-back kick against Wei, although during filming, Wei hit so hard that Rothrock refused to fight him in any other movie of hers (though they did co-star as villains in Sammo Hung's Millionaire's Express). The fight sequence equals the more famous mall fight from Jackie Chan's Police Story on every level, and shows us that women are just as physically capable of doing the sort of insane stunt-driven action that Jackie popularized during that decade. Action directors Corey Yuen and Meng Hoi received a nomination for Best Action Design at the 5th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards, but ended up losing to Jackie Chan's Stuntman Association for, well, Police Story.

                 For years, the film was not available in mainstream video stores in the USA. One might have found it at a video store specializing in Asian films, although it would not have been subtitled and may have been dubbed into a Southeast Asian language, like Vietnamese or Hmong. The alternative would have been to find a mail-order company and get a gray-market copy, which was what I did during the late 90s. My vendor was Advantage Video, which sent me the original International dub with Dutch subtitles(!). The international dub was interesting, since it eliminated about ten minutes of footage (including a lot of the actresses' bickering and the false arrest sequence leading up to the heroines turning in their badges and pursuing vigilante justice) and inexplicably tacked the opening action sequence to Sammo Hung's Where's Officer Tuba, where David Chiang's stunt double performs a flying kick through the windshield of a truck in movement, on to the beginning. It also featured a lot of profanity, especially the “F-bomb” and gave Cynthia Rothrock's character a British accent. The recent dub has restored the missing scenes and changed some of the profanity to something less offensive.

 

The Sequels

                Yes, Madam grossed about 10 million Hong Kong dollars at the local box office, which was a decent amount of money for what was probably a low-budget film (for purposes of comparison, Police Story grossed 26 million HKD; My Lucky Stars grossed 30 million HKD; and Heart of Dragon grossed 20 million HKD; all featured Jackie Chan in the cast). A follow-up was in short order. Yes Madam is generally considered to be the start of the In the Line of Duty franchise, which ran for six more films between 1986 and 1991.

                 The first “sequel” to Yes, Madam was In the Line of Duty, aka Royal Warriors. We'll discuss that one in a separate article. It is interesting that Royal Warriors is considered to be the first In the Line of Duty while Yes, Madam! was retitled In the Line of Duty 2 in some markets. 

                By 1988, Michelle Yeoh had married Dickson Poon, the executive producer of D&B Films, which produced these movies. At the time, an actress getting married meant retirement, which Michelle did until their divorce a few years later. So when the next sequel, In the Line of Duty III, was produced, a new actress was chosen to fill in Michelle's shoes. The role went to 20-year-old Taiwanese dancer/martial artist Cynthia Yang, whose stage name was Cynthia Khan, meant to cash in on Michelle Yeoh's then stage name, Michelle Khan. The film was extremely hardcore, with an astronomical body count, graphic deaths and even some explicit sex, a first for the series.

                 A third sequel came out the following year, with Cynthia Khan continuing in the role as Inspector Yeung. Directed by the legendary Yuen Woo-Ping, Yuen brought his protégé Donnie Yen onboard, who plays an arrogant CIA agent who teams up with Yeung to protect a witness from crooked CIA agents led by Michael Fitzgerald Wong. In the Line of Duty IV is 90 minutes of literal non-stop action, most of it being hand-to-hand combat, but with some vehicular stunts thrown in for variety. Most notable is a fight between Cynthia and some thugs atop a moving ambulance and the now-famous dirtbike jousting sequence between Donnie Yen and frequent collaborator Michael Woods. The finale features some the best fighting ever committed to film.

                 Most people tend to agree that the series suffered a steep drop in quality with the next entry, In the Line of Duty V: Middle Man (1990). I am not one of those people. Gone is Yuen Woo-Ping and his entourage, with Chris Lee, a former member of Jackie Chan's Stunt Team, filling in as action director. The plot is some mishmash about Inspector Yeung protecting a cousin from international assassins working for a spy ring based in Korea. The action highlights include an escrima duel between Cynthia Khan and Chris Lee, a fight with Billy Chow, and the big finale, which ends with a bloody katana showdown between Khan and Australian martial artist Kim Maree Penn.

                 The sixth entry in the series, subtitled The Forbidden Arsenal, is easily the most generic of the bunch. The film switched action directors yet again, with former Venom Mob alumni Kuo Chi stepping up to the plate. A pre-Mortal Kombat Robin Shou shows up as the main villain, but the action is uneven (i.e. Cynthia Khan and Robin Shou are as good as can be expected, everybody else is slow) and the film on the whole is forgettable.

                 The series ended on a higher note with the last official film of the series, Sea Wolves (1991). Inspector Yeung is back, once more played by Cynthia Khan, as is Philip Kwok as the action director. Khan teams up with Gary Chow, the survivor of a massacre by pirates who prey on Vietnamese refugees. The final duel on the ship features some nice combat with found objects and is the best moment of the last two films combined. It's not up to the standard of action set by the first five movies, but it's a solid way to end the series.

In Name Only

                It is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Unfortunately, it the case of Yes, Madam, the three unrelated films whose English titles bear the same name flatter the original in no way. In fact, two of them not only denigrate the image of Corey Yuen's classic and entered the author's “Worst Films Watched in 2015” list, but stand shamefully among the worst Chinese movies ever made.

                The first offender is Yes Madam '92: A Serious Shock. With a title like that and a cast that features the Girls n' Guns Trifecta: Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan, and Yukari Oshima, one would expect nothing more than pure HK action genius at work. That turns out to not be the case. The premise is certain solid, but the execution is severely lacking.      

                Moon Lee and Cynthia Khan play May and Wan Chin, fellow Hong Kong cops who went through the police academy together. Wan Chin is engaged to another cop, played by Sex and Zen's Lawrence Ng. The fellow once had an affair with May, but broke it off when he decided to get serious with Wan Chin. When May finds out that the couple will emigrate following the nuptials, she simply snaps.

                She kills the poor sap and manipulates another admirer on the force to help her put the blame on Wan Chin. But the drama doesn't end there. Wan Chin goes into hiding with a car thief named Coco (Yukari Oshima), but it doesn't take long before May finds out. May has her admirer do horrible things like kidnapping her friends and setting them on fire in order to force Coco to reveal where Wan Chin is. More horrible things happen before the two women confront an increasingly-deranged May in a warehouse.

                The major problem with the movie is the lack of decent action. The first act is promising, but once fiancé boy is out of the picture, the movie tones down the action and turns up the torment of Coco, which is not very exciting. The finale in the warehouse is especially a let-down, partly because Yukari Oshima doesn't contribute much to the fighting, but also because the choreography is sadly muted. I expected more from veteran Fung Hak-On—who cameos early on as a random perp in a scene that clashes tonally with everything that comes later. All three of the ladies have given much better performances in other films, and it's said to see them fight só generically here, that is, whenever the director decides that they should fight.

                Moreover, the absence of fisticuffs worthy of the first In the Line of Duty films is doubly disappointing when you consider just how many evil deeds Moon Lee's May has piled onto her résumé by the time the finale rolls around. I mean, she has her boytoy transform Coco's best friend (Waise Lee) into a drug addict for crying out loud! I was fully expecting Khan and Oshima to kick and spin kick Moon Lee's character into a broken, bloody mess. But I was denied that sort of consolation. As a result, we have a movie with three action queens whose titular “serious shock” is nothing more than the disappointment gleamed from how much their skills is wasted.

                Worse still was the Taiwanese action comedy Yes Madam (1995), a film só devoid of any sort of comic restraint that it makes Jackie Chan's City Hunter look like a Woody Allen film in comparison. Cynthia Khan plays Lydia Lee, the leader of a special crime-fighting squad called “The A-Team.” She dates her former fellow student and security guard, Dave, who one day finds a little black book belonging to Bryan, an evil supervillain who dresses like a bad guy from a cheap traditional chopsockey film. Boyfriend guy is marked for death by the Bryan, and only Lydia Lee can help him.

                The comedy is goofy and absurd, with characters breaking out into song and dance for no reason or acting like they're in a live-action cartoon. Bryan is flanked by a guy in Peking Opera make-up and a grill, not to mention two flunkies whose faces are painted green and white and who can kiss a person until they die. The boyfriend has a goofy family, including a perverted 8-year-old brother who can remove a person's pants with his mind and another younger brother who spends his time dressing like Goku and practicing drunken boxing. That's the level of film we're dealing with here.

                The action, choreographed by Christopher Chan, who plays Dave and whose biggest credit was Assistant Action Director on Stephen Tung's Extreme Challenge (2001), is too sparse to justify the time spent watching the movie. The action is frequently wire-assisted and sped-up, although the first random fight scene is pretty fun. The rest of it is too idiotic to be enjoyable, especially at the end when two villains start flying around and firing Chi blasts at Lydia Lee like an early 90s wuxia pan, despite the film's modern setting. I cannot in good conscience recommend the film to anyone, even Cynthia Khan completists. It's that bad.

                Less aggressively bad, but still an utter waste of the talent involved, was Yes Madam 5 (1996). Directed by Philip Ko, one could only imagine how the guy who participated in so many important movies, Shaw Brothers and otherwise, could direct and choreograph such tripe. Khan plays Inspector Yeung, a HK police officer on the trail of the Malaysian girlfriend of a murdered undercover cop. What she doesn't initially realize is that her crime boss boyfriend, played by Fist of Legend's Chin Siu-Ho is also involved in the case. Despite his wanting to go straight, Chin is dogged at every corner by another member of the gang, played by Philip Ko. Lots of drama occurs before the action begins, although when it finally does, it's directed só limply that once again I can't help buy wonder how a person could make such a bland film with só many talented people.

                The action is extremely stingy, not to mention badly filmed. Chin Siu-Ho performs a few nice aerial kicks, and Billy Chow shows up to show everybody that he's faster and more powerful than everybody else, but even then he only gets a single fight. Khan's fights are awkwardly photographed and do nothing to flatter her skills. Another Girls n' Guns hard hitter, Sharon Yeung Pan Pan, shows up in the first scene as a Mainland cop and gets a brief fight, but her scene really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It's a disparaging sight, this movie.

                So in closing, in honor of Yes, Madam's 30th birthday, all we can say is that, for all its flaws, it's still among the best of its kind.

This article is part of Fighting Female February '23: The Month of of Michelle