Hong Kong hero

Sammo Hung is a bigger-than-average star

by Ted Drozdowski

"ENTER THE FAT DRAGON: THE FILMS OF SAMMO HUNG." At the Museum of Fine Arts, August 15 through 29.

Now that Hong Kong action stars Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat have toeholds on Hollywood, it's Sammo Hung's turn to try to scale the golden gates of the Western film industry. For Hung, this could prove troublesome. The actor/director is a portly man with a soup-bowl haircut who mixes his martial-arts battles with generous comedy. Although Hung's a true talent and, like Chan, a super-agile graduate of the Peking Opera School, Hollywood likes its leading men -- even comedians -- lean-chiseled these days. More-soft-edged actors like Hung are relegated to character roles. But Hung has the kind of regular-guy charm that made Lou Costello such a beloved underdog.

Bostonians can get a take on Hung's craftsmanship at the Museum of Fine Arts this month, where 14 of the more than 100 films he's made since he began his career as a child actor will be shown in the partial retrospective "Enter the Fat Dragon: The Films of Sammo Hung." As in Chan's body of work, there are some uneven films and outright stinkers. But there's also inspired comedy and the kind of rich-flavored cheese that B-movie connoisseurs crave.

Hung and his wife, Joyce Godenzi, will be at the MFA this Friday for the opening-night screening of his self-directed 1989 romance/adventure Pedicab Driver (which also screens August 23 at 1:30 p.m.). It's the kind of unfortunate mix of savagery and comedy that's often found in Hong Kong films but may not play well with some Westerners. (For the record, it made me squeamish.) Hung, playing a good-natured bicycle-cab driver, and his friend Malted Candy get enmeshed with a gang led by an evil pimp. The trouble starts when Malted Candy falls for one of the pimp's prostitutes. After Hung leads the bad guys on a slapstick bicycle chase that culminates in a comic-but-inspiring hand-to-hand battle with a gambling-house operator, the romance takes over. The young lovers marry and a happy ending looms until the pimp's henchmen arrive to chop them to pieces with machetes. It's a hideous sequence. But the retribution, which this time more deftly dances the high wire of humor and extreme violence, is a grand capper.

The only outright loser in the series may be Project A (August 20 at 7:30 p.m. and August 24 at 4 p.m.), a 1983 Jackie-Chan-written-and-directed film that put Chan, Hung, and fellow Peking Opera-trained star Yuen Biao on screen together for the first time. Hung is limited to a supporting role as a lethal-handed gambler who comes through for his friend Chan. And Chan, playing a cop in turn-of-the-century Hong Kong, has a great combat scene in which he apprehends a murderer. But the film's sophomoric humor and absence of plot is intolerable. Its only saving graces are Chan's homages to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin: a ripping bicycle chase and a battle with baddies in a clock tower that pays tribute to Modern Times.

But enough about Chan. Hung's the star here, and in films like 1981's Encounters of the Spooky Kind, Part 2 (August 22 at 8 p.m.), he shows all his talents. This one's the stuff of cult classics: plenty of acrobatic fights, dueling sorcerers, ghosts, vampires, a sniveling bad guy, ghouls, even kung fu fighting mummies, all vividly photographed. The plot's meatier than one might think. It begins as a simple conflict over a maiden's hand but questions the character of humanity and takes a gaggle of comic turns (Hung's soul gets transferred into a pig, which he has to kiss to get it back, and he portrays a woman trapped in a man's body) before the climactic battle with hellhounds, mummies, and venom-breathing snake men.

Hung injects a wide emotional range into his brawling suitor; his expressive face bridges any cultural distances. That's even more the case in Mabel Cheung's 1988 heart-tugger Eight Taels of Gold (August 17 at 1:30 p.m.). Hung plays a New York City cabbie called Slim who returns home to China and becomes embroiled in a desperate conflict with the government. His sister, pregnant for the second time, is in violation of the notorious "One Family, One Child" policy. Hung delivers a compassionate performance as the film explores issues of love, family, and cultural identity. It's proof he doesn't need his fists to be convincing.