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MR CANTON AND LADY ROSE (1989) Jackie Chan always wanted to make a straight romance. Apart from producing the strikingly tragic Rouge (1987), Mr Canton and Lady Rose is as close as Jackie came until 1999's Gorgeous. Hong Kong humour is often disorientating for Anglophones, but Lady Rose is absolutely hysterical. The comedy is pure slapstick farce. Even the radiant Anita Mui (who Chan was rumoured to have been romancing at this period) gets into the act, her dress tearing erratically, or being caught in rickety furniture, as Jackie helplessly and hopelessly struggles to repair the damage he accidentally visits upon her. Richard Ng as the dull police-officer is also wonderful, adding to the general Buster Keaton / Marx brothers ambience. Lady Rose also has some of Jackie’s best, jaw-droppingly painful, crazy, prop-orientated fights. Memorable is an extended sequence where Chan balances precariously on giant spools, before rolling through them in a series of bone-crushing pratfalls, or where Jackie fights off a thousand enemies while jumping around the outside of a balustrade. Tables and rickshaws become manicly mobile instruments wielded by the incomparable Chan in a hyper-effective version of the fencing technique of the hero from Prisoner of Zenda (1937). Although Lady Rose is comparable to Capra’s A Pocketful of Miracles (1961; from which Chan takes the plot), Jackie’s script and direction owe at least as much to the earlier Ealing comedies. Chan is the leader of a group of rogues who - for all their criminal involvements - are generous, lovable, salt-of-the-earth types. Lady Rose is Jackie’s most overtly comic film which (together with his Project A, Part 2; 1983) acts a fitting homage to Keaton. JONATHAN MARSHALL Jonathan Marshall is a Melbourne arts critic writing on cult-film, dance, theatre, avant-garde music & general weirdness. He teaches at the University of Melbourne & is working on a PhD on the public presentation of insanity & hypnosis in late 19th century France. His Hong Kong film reviews appear in Melbourne street newspaper INPress, and are archived here. His Top Ten marked his Heroic Cinema debut, from which this review has been taken.
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