Old fashioned mallet-to-the-head, poke-in-the-eye slapstick comedy was alive and well in the 1970s via the much-abused body of Jackie Chan. Nobody mixed breakneck Kung Fu action and laughs better. In this ultra-breezy film—Chan’s biggest hit in the early days—he’s an unrepentant young cut-up whose father sends him off to get some discipline from a renown martial arts master. Turns out that this master is also a true blue alcoholic who’s developed an amazing fighting style that requires one to be drunk to do it. About 1,457 imaginative and graceful pratfalls later, Jackie Chan becomes a master of the form, too.
This is the movie on which Jackie Chan really found himself as a performer. Before this, producer Lo Wei spent years trying to sell him as the next Bruce Lee in flop after flop that didn’t touch on Chan’s comedic skills. It was only when Chan started working with fight choreographer-turned-director Yuen Woo-ping that he could pursue comedy and the results made him an international star (though it would take another fifteen years for him to break big in the United States).