It starts in Amsterdam with some street scenes then some guy gets killed. Back to Hong Kong and cops raid a slum for drugs. Josephine sings folk songs in a bar and the cop goes with her to her apartment. They get friendly but not too friendly. He leaves and another guy rings her bell, says a name, and leaves. Chan Sing enters and he looks terrible with his receding hair line.
This movie is a crime movie that is filmed like a documentary. The fights are few and not good. I'll be generous and rate it just average for the year and genre. Personally, the fast forward button got me through it.
Josephine Siao Fong-Fong was the top female martial arts star of the 1950s and 1960s. That was only one of her many accomplishments. I'll just add she has over 200 movie credits. Anyone can easily find out more about her amazing life. There is a problem. Finding her movies these days is like hunting unicorns. I have only a handful of her pre-1993 movies. Maybe if I lived in Hong Kong I could find more. That still would be difficult. I have been to Hong Kong. I met many people in today's movie business. Everyone is oblivious of the golden age of martial arts movies. Those who are at least aware of it don't care.
My copy is a digital file that plays on a HDTV as widescreen. It has © 1983 Ocean Shores. Since it is wide screen I suspect a laser disk as the source. (The Hong Kong theatrical release was 1976.) So many of these old movies came to America as Ocean Shores VHS tapes. That format in itself has problems plus poor quality of the source film often made it worse. Yet, in Hong Kong, laser disks were the big thing even before that. The laser disk was a higher quality video format and did not have the sides of the video cropped. Few of these came to America or anywhere else. When I say laser disks were the big thing they were still expensive. Hong Kong has a lot of rich people. I suspect that even today there is mansion in Hong Kong with hundreds of laser disks in the back of a walk in closet. These have some of the best movies of the golden age of martial arts movies in the best possible quality. I just hope if that closet ever gets cleaned out the disks do not get trashed but somehow get into the hands of a fan like me.
