Hui Guanwen was the "king of comedy" in the Hong Kong film industry before Stephen Chow, and the two most profitable satellite companies in Jiahe in the 1970s were Bruce Lee's "Concordia Pictures" and the other was Hui Guanwen's "Hui Pictures". Hui's "Ghost Horse Double Star", "Genius and Idiot", "Half a Pound Eight Two", and "Contract of Sale" have all broken the highest box office record set by Bruce Lee films in Hong Kong, so in the 1980s, which movie was Xu's acclaim and popular? Today, let's talk about the company's 1981 box office film: "Modern Bodyguard", which has a high rating of 8.2 on Douban.
This "Modern Bodyguard" is still co-starred by Xu Guanwen, Xu Guanying and Xu Guanjie, while the second eldest, Xu Guanwu, is the executive director of the film and does not appear in front of the screen. It is worth mentioning that Xu Shichang, the father of the Xu brothers, also appears in the film, but it is Feng Quefan's father, and Xu Guanjie also participated in the script creation of the film, reflecting the versatility of the "God of Song".
The story takes place at the Wang's Guard Bureau, a company responsible for security and escort. However, the security brigade elder Zhou (Xu Guanwen) is a person who likes to bully his subordinates, loves to play small and clever, but is timid and cowardly. For the sake of "performance", he will let the team members pretend to be thieves and then arrest them, creating the illusion that the security team is doing their duty. And the parachute escape theory he taught the team members, as well as the self-defense theory of "hand blocking the barrel of the bullet after the bullet", is mostly on paper, even he himself has not tried, of course, he does not dare to try, so he uses the "three flowers" on his arm to let the team members act as "substitute ghosts".
In a bank robbery, Lao Zhou showed cringe, but relied on the wit and bravery of the squad leader Ah Sam (Xu Guanjie) to catch the thief. All this is seen by Ah Fan (Feng Quefan), the son of the boss who pretends to be a security guard, and as soon as he returns, Lao Zhou is demoted, and Ah Sam takes his place, which also allows Ah Sam and Xiaolong (Xu Guanying), who have been bullied by Lao Zhou, to seize the opportunity to retaliate.
As they get along with each other further, Sam and Xiaolong also discover the other side of Lao Zhou's harsh and mean-spirited morality: for example, at the yacht ball, Lao Zhou did not shake out the refugee thing on xiaolong's face, and when Xiaolong found out that his girlfriend had become a dance lady, he also stood up to help Xiaolong break the siege.
Later, they also relied on Lao Zhou's invention of the "horse call cipher" that looked like a joke, as well as the theory of "bullet rebound" and "parachuting", to repel the robbers twice, and Lao Zhou also resumed his original post and continued to teach at the Guard Bureau. At the end of the film, Lao Zhou also gave Xiaolong the 50,000 yuan provident fund that he had worked in the company for fifteen years to fill in the debt, proving that he not only had righteousness, but also compassion, and at the same time, this also fully explained a truth: to understand a person, you should look at all of him, and you should not deny everything because of one thing.
The film still continues the iconic characteristics of the 1970s Hsu comedy, the storyline is simple, but the laughs are dense and rich, and it can also play a good role in complementing the personality of the characters. Take Xu Guanwen, for example, at the beginning of the film, he went to the shipyard to catch the thieves, but he miscalculated the other side's manpower, he hurriedly used the toilet plug to climb up the steep hillside to escape, and the result was that the stopper fell apart and fell, and was beaten even more miserably; and at the jewelry exhibition, Lao Zhou's neck was injured and could not make a horse bark, and the password lock could not be opened. This kind of "smart but clever mistaken" drama arrangement also makes this role more brilliant.
There are also many wonderful jokes in the play that are created by the cooperation between several brothers: for example, the classic "shrimp shell poke hand", the mistaken use of the electric iron when answering the phone, etc., and Lao Zhou and Ah Sam pretend to be thousands of troops outside the room in order to catch the robbers, but the funny scenes that have actually been clearly seen by the people in the room are even more amazing, and people can't help but admire the Xu brothers for using the shadow play so funny.
In addition, the film also has some very interesting supporting role settings: for example, two who always want to cheat to win horse racing prizes will encounter the trouble brought by Xu Guanwen every time they appear. And the bandits played by Chen Xing, Li Haisheng and Yutou Yun are also only the whole share. "You can't sing songs, do you still learn to be a thief?" It has also become one of the classic lines of this film.
What is particularly important here is that the "Ghost Horse Rhapsody" made by Wei Jiahui in 2004, which pays tribute to the ghost horse comedy in the 1970s, begins with a parody of Xu Guanwen and Xu Guanjie in "Modern Bodyguard" wearing a scene in which "golden jade clothes fight bandits". This is enough to prove the importance of "Modern Bodyguard" in The Hsu film sequence.
After the release of "Modern Bodyguard", the Box Office Hegemony of the Hui Brothers was shown, and finally won the 1981 Hong Kong film box office champion, not to mention, and also let Hui Guanwen win the first Academy Awards Film Emperor, in the history of Hong Kong films, this kind of "both can be obtained" situation is almost rare.
However, this film also brought great pressure to the Xu brothers, who once did not know how to make a film that could fully surpass this film, so the brothers decided to temporarily develop separately until 1990's "New Half Pounds Eight Two". This movie is the real sense of the three brothers "together" again (if not counting Xu Guanjie's "Chicken and Duck Talk" that debuted in a special performance), the irony is still very strong, but the box office ultimately failed to beat Xingye's "Gamble Saint", which also marks the "Xu Brothers Era", which has officially become the past, and with the death of Xu Guanying in 2011, people can no longer see the Xu brothers collectively acting on the same stage.
The small characters that can resonate with the audience, the clever laugh design and the beautiful melody are the attractive places of "Modern Bodyguard" and the unique charm of Xu's films. I wonder if your friends like this movie?