The Duke of Mount Deer Review
Once again big thanks are due to Colin Geddes for this review of the classic TVB television series The Duke of Mount Deer. Colin is the programmer of the Midnight Madness series of films at the Toronto International Film Festival and, until recently, curated the regular Kung Fu Fridays screening series here in Toronto. He knows his stuff.
Once again I find myself trying to boil down and make sense of a fifty episode TV serial that I have only been able to see twenty-five episodes of. I was in the middle of watching both The Legend of the Condor Heroes and The Return of the Condor (Seven Swords, you will have to wait your turn), but I shoved those aside and dove into the new TVB box set of The Duke of Mount Deer.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties I was watching as much HK cinema as I could, putting together the puzzle pieces of a cinema that had little English coverage at the time. It was an exciting, undiscovered territory and watched everything I could get my hands on. I'd rent a video based on who was on the cover (Chow Yun Fat, Lam Ching Ying, Sammo Hung) and that served as a jumping point into the works of other directors, writers, choreographers, actors, etc.
The big piece missing from the puzzle was the Hong Kong TV dramas, since many of these HK film folk started out in the serials made by TVB and others. Andy Lau and Chow Yun Fat were discovered in TVB acting classes. Johnnie To and Tsui Hark first started with TVB martial arts serials. Even art house heavyweights like Ann Hui (Song of the Exile), Yim Ho (Red Dust) and Patrick Tam (Final Victory, After This Our Exile) got their start here. For more information on the history of TVB, read my review of The Legend of the Condor Heroes.
Feature films were easy to access due to the English subtitles on the VHS tapes I'd rent in Toronto's Chinatown, but the dramas were another beast altogether. Where to start? Years later, I inadvertently found that the path to TV was via literature and the works of Louis Cha, when I borrowed a copy of the three part novel, The Deer and The Cauldron, from the public library.
Louis Cha is widely regarded as the finest Chinese wuxia ("martial arts and chivalry") writer, a reputation based on fifteen novels and short stories he wrote between 1955 and 1972. With a following in all Chinese-speaking areas of the world, his books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide (over 1 billion if one includes bootleg copies), making him by far the best-selling Chinese author still alive.
Published by Oxford Press, The Deer and The Cauldron is one of the few translations of the many pulp works by authors like Cha, Gu Long (whose books Shaw director Chu Yuan would adapt into films like The Magic Blade and The Sentimental Swordsman) and Ni Kuang (Chang Cheh's scriptwriter with credits including Five Venoms) that had been turned into movies, comics and TV serials. Described by Newsweek as, “Martial arts meets Monty Python,” this epic tale of martial arts intrigue, helped fill in gaps in my understanding of the martial arts film genre, explaining the structure, plotting, flamboyant heroes and villains, elements often lost in convoluted and clumsy cinematic adaptations.
The influence and popularity of this book, considered the best out of the fifteen novels that Cha wrote, is easily demonstrated by the number of adaptations and spin offs. Including the series being discussed here, it has been adapted for television six different times by both Hong Kong (1970, 1984, 1998, 2000), Taiwan (1984) and Mainland China (2007). Big screen versions include: the Shaw Brothers' A Tale of a Eunuch starring Wong Yu and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui in 1983; Wong Jing's two part satire starring Stephen Chow, Royal Tramp 1 & 2 (1992); Tony Leung's return to the role in the 1993 comedy Hero - Beyond the Boundary of Time; a Category 3 sex romp as Wai's Romance in 1994. It was also been turned into role playing games, a cell phone game and even a book series examining the office politic skills displayed by the characters and their modern day application!
Time to put down the book and turn on the television for the most beloved adaptation, the 1984 series by TVB, which, eighteen years before being cast together in Infernal Affairs, paired Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau as the leads in Duke of Mount Deer.
Unsure how a fifty episode series aired originally on television, I asked a friend in Hong Kong who explained that TVB dramas were broadcast Monday to Friday, one episode a night, five episodes a week and running one hour with commercials, around forty to forty-five minutes without commercials.
My friend further explained that a typical series structure was broken down into a “season” of twenty episodes and that twenty episode structure was further divided into four "rounds" of five episodes each. One director and one scriptwriter will be in charge of each "round" (i.e. one week of airing). The first round and last round were usually allocated to the top directors (such as Wong Tin-Lam, director turned actor in Johnnie To's Election 1 & 2 and father of Wong Jing) and scriptwriters, while the second unit directors (like the young Johnnie To) would fill in the middle rounds. For dramas with over forty episodes, the twenty episode structure simply repeats. This four round structure of writing - exposition, development, turn, closure - is evident in the works of Wong Jing, who got his start there and was further influenced by his father.
The story of Duke of Mount Deer plays out in China during the 17th century, at the start of the Qing dynasty (which succeeded the Ming when the Manchus conquered China), in the middle of unrest between the Ming and the ruling Manchus. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays Wai Siu Bo (called “Trinket” in the translation of the book), the son of a brothel prostitute, a real rascal, constantly getting into trouble and drawn to gambling or any form of betting. Hoping to learn some kung fu, he follows Brother Mau (Chung Wong, a TVB regular), an outlaw swordsman to the capital and inadvertently finds himself in the Forbidden Palace.
In order to avoid a nasty death he overpowers a eunuch and impersonates him, serving Hai, an old, blind eunuch (Wong Kam-Kong who was recently seen playing the old man in the Pang Brothers' Re-Cycle), who is a sly martial arts master loyal to the previous emperor. Following the mysterious death of the Royal Concubine Tung Han, the Emperor left the throne to secretly become a monk, leaving the crown to his young prince, Kang Xi (Andy Lau).
Old Eunuch Hai is investigating a plot that that involves the prince's mom, the Empress Dowger, possibily involved in the death of the Royal Concubine who has links to the evil Mystic Dragon Sect from Snake Island. How else does she know the powerful “Bone Crushing Palm?” At the root of this conspiracy are a series of mantras (books) that hide pieces of a map to the buried treasure that supports the Manchu rule. To keep Wai under his control, Hai laces his soup with a powerful and deadly drug and dispatches him to learn secrets from the other eunuchs while gambling.
One day Wai unwittingly befriends a young man who is practicing kung fu by himself and agrees to be his sparring partner. The man turns out to be the Prince (Lau), delighted to find someone who doesn't hold back on punches when practicing.
They develop an unlikely friendship and a strong bond between the two is formed between the two when they defeat Ngo Bye (Kwan Hoi-San who played the old gang boss Mr. Hoi in Hard-Boiled), an arrogant and ruthless Imperial Guard (with insanely wild eye brows, a regular make-up device used to portray treachery in TVB series) who has eyes on the throne. This act finds Wai promoted through the ranks of eunuchs to officer of the Imperial Court. With his new title he is brought into the corrupt world of the officials and is invited by fellow officers (including Hui Siu-Hung, who was one of the Seven Freaks in The Return of the Condor Heroes and is a Johnnie To regular, playing the Lau Ching-wan's superior in Running Out of Time) to help himself to items seized from Ngo Bye's estate including a vest impervious to blades and a dagger that cuts through anything.
On an excursion outside the Palace, Wai finds himself in an awkward situation (one of countless many in this series, I am pleased to report), but is recognized by Brother Mau, a member of the patriotic Heaven and Earth Society, which would later transform into one of the early Triad factions, but at the time was one of the anti-Qing resistance underground organizations. Wai meets Chen Jinnan (Kenneth Tsang, Danny Lee's partner in The Killer) the leader of the Society, and through his charm and quick thinking, he becomes a Lodge Master, serving as the society's "mole" inside the palace.
That is the basis of this plot that jumps in leaps and bounds, but in between all of it are the seeds of sub-plots that will yield a bountiful harvest of convolution in later episodes involving prostitutes, gamblers, beggars, Shaolin monks, Taoists, Cossacks, Jesuits, herbalists, dissident authors, corrupt magistrates, Manchu princes, Ming loyalists, and a one-armed Princess turned nun with the deadly 'flicking' style of kung fu…
The big shocker of Duke of Mount Deer is the performance of Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Most are familiar with his serious dramatic work, most recently with Wong Kar Wai for In The Mood For Love and in Andrew Lau's Infernal Affairs, but it is with this series that he got his start, finding his way into the hearts of Hong Kong audiences in a broad and crude slapstick role. His performance is based on the rapid fire delivery of profanities, bawdy humour and lots of mugging for the camera. I have been trying to find a comparison in Western cinema, but the closest I could come up with would be if you saw Bill Murray in Broken Flowers and thought he was a talented dramatist, unaware of his history with Saturday Night Live. Maybe another example would be Bruce Willis' start in the television series Moonlighting.
An example of the typical “high brow humour” found here is when Wai Siu Bo tricks a number of Shaolin monks into following him through a series of martial arts moves that he has mastered called, “The Scabby Dog Style,” including the techniques, “yellow dog pees” and “hungry dog eats shit”, where the monks crawl and grovel on floor.
Our anti-hero Wai Siu Bo is a greedy, lazy, foul mouthed, womanizing, and opportunistic juvenile delinquent, unlike any of Louis Cha's previous protagonists, who would laugh at death and fight for what they believe to be a noble cause. Wai Siu Bo's cause is his own advancement done in the interest of his survival, but his greed is always overpowered by his genuine loyalty and generosity towards his friends. And keep him away from the ladies, as his eye wanders and towards the end of the series, much humour is derived from the seven wives he has acquired over the course of the story.
Another factor that goes against the pattern of Cha's work is that the protagonist has very poor kung fu. Wai Siu Bo learns his martial arts skills over the course of the series and usually by accident. The humour and interplay between the characters in their places in society dominate the story, rather that the regular bouts of martial arts action that is found in other Louis Cha adaptations like The Legend of the Condor Heroes and The Return of the Condor. If you are looking for the same kind of wacky fighting sequences, Duke might make you restless, especially considering the amount of strife and characters covered in the first few episodes can be confusing. Sticking through it all does pay off, but has a rocky start.
The fact that TVB series are usually ignored in discussion of Hong Kong cinema would explain dismissals of Tony Leung's performance in online reviews of the movie Hero - Beyond the Boundary of Time, complaining that he was, “miscast” or that the film, “would have been twice as good if Tony Leung Chiu-wai had NOT played such an arrogant prick.” Not a valid criticism when he is simply sliding into the role that made him famous.
The pairing of Tony Leung and Andy Lau was the first of many that would develop later onscreen, eighteen years before Infernal Affairs. Fans of TVB series praise the chemistry between the two, matching it with the duo of Felix Wong and Barabara Yung in The Legend of the Condor Heroes. For contrast, check out the performances of Wong Yu and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui in the Shaw Brothers adaptation from 1983, A Tale of a Eunuch and also for the super condensed story line.
One of the other joys of watching TVB series from this period are the appearances by extras and secondary actors who would later develop into stars in later years. Francis Ng and Lau Ching Wan pop up in the series in a variety of roles ranging from Imperial guards to battling lamas. The chemistry that these actors have in the Johnnie To films stems from the friendships that were made while making these series. In the roles of Wai Siu Bo's wives and Carina Lau (Days of Being Wild), Sandra Ng (Golden Chicken), and Teresa Mo (Hard-Boiled), all who were destined for big screen fame. And the theme song? Done by the heavenly king of cantopop, Leslie Cheung!
Previously released on VCD, but without subtitles, this box set consists of two volumes of six discs each. The price tag is worth the investment considering the amount of content that you get compared to an average season of Sopranos or Deadwood and the fact that they are finally available with English subtitles. You'll want to listen to the Cantonese audio track (Audio Track 1) as that is the original language the series was recorded in and sometimes the music is different on the dubbed Mandarin track (Audio Track 2). As per usual, the subtitles translation is adequate and those used to the speed and common grammatical errors in HK subtitles, will settle into their rhythm
Review by Colin Geddes.
