Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978)

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Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) – W.-P. Yuen

Jackie Chan’s first big hit is a classic all-fighting kung-fu flick, spiked with humor which makes it all the greater.  Impossibly young Jackie (23 or 24 years old) is a poor dolt, serving as a janitor for the Hungwei School where he is terribly mistreated.  When he happens to meet Simon Yuen, a puckish old kung fu master disguised as a beggar, he is transformed into an expert in the Snake Fist style.  Comic training scenes included!  Unfortunately, the Snake Fist clan is being hunted down and killed by the Eagle’s Claw clan and Jackie and his old master are targeted.  In order to save the day, Jackie must invent a new style of fighting.  And he does.  Jackie’s abilities here are incredible and Simon Yuen (the father of director Wing-Poo Yuen who later worked on the Matrix) is similarly amazingly acrobatic.  The sequel, Drunken Master, is also a classic of early hand-to-hand fighting Jackie, before he graduated to larger-scale death-defying stunts in the 1980s.  Both have coherent plots so seek them out rather than some of the poorly edited schlock that also circulates under Jackie’s name.