Please Wait to Disembark Before Pummelling the Conductor

Hi, everybody! Sorry this week’s dispatch is arriving a little later in the week than usual; some stuff’s been going on that’s broken my usual routine. Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad. In fact, some of it is downright terrific, and I promise I’ll fill you in as soon as I’m able. But what with one thing and the other, I haven’t had any real time to write since the weekend.

I do have time now, though, so I want to tell you how much fun I had watching Sammo Hung’s goofball 1986 action extravaganza Millionaires’ Express, the latest in Arrow Video’s ongoing series of elaborate restorations of Hong Kong genre pictures. I hadn’t seen it in decades – probably not since its LaserDisc days, come to think of it – and I feel like think my memories of it were overwritten by Kim Jee-woon’s delirious The Good, the Bad, the Weird fifteen years ago. But it’s a joy from start to finish.

Even after two seasons of his own ABC action show, Sammo Hung has never enjoyed the visibility of his childhood pal Jackie Chan – despite being a stronger actor and (arguably) a more inventive action choreographer. Chan, Hung and Yuen Biao came out of the China Drama Academy as three of the “Seven Little Fortunes”, and have worked together in various capacities throughout their careers; Millionaires’ Express, which is also known as Shanghai Express and China Warriors around the world, finds Hung directing, writing and starring as Ching Fong-tin, an endlessly resourceful schemer with a heart of gold, and Yuen playing an upright civil servant – first a fire chief, then a sheriff – determined to stop his shenanigans until they both realize their real enemy are the gangsters and secret agents who’ve converged on their home town.

It sounds awfully busy, and it is. Millionaires’ Express was conceived as a Lunar New Year picture, a highly commercial all-star blowout designed to pull families into movie theaters for the holidays. Tonally, these projects are expected to be lighter and sillier, with low stakes and a sense that everything’s going to turn out just fine, and Hung used that expectation – and the attendant budget – to build a great big amusement park of a picture, casting himself as both protagonist and ringmaster.

Set in the early 20^th century, the premise is really just an excuse for action and foolishness. After many years away, Ching – accompanied by a half-dozen spirited sex workers, led by Rosamund Kwan – is returning home to Hon Sui Town with a remarkably literal plan to bring prosperity to his childhood home: Derail a train full of wealthy people as it passes by, thus forcing the passengers to spend their time, and money, in town. Maybe some of them will like it enough to stay, you never know.

Of course, everyone on the train has their own agenda: Several of the passengers are conducting affairs with one another – and several more would like to be – and there’s also the matter of the Japanese nationals aboard, carrying an invaluable treasure map borrowed from the Chinese government. And their presence has lured a coterie of gangsters setting up on the edge of town, waiting for their moment to roll in and take everything for themselves.

The derailment is about the only thing that goes off as planned, of course, because Millionaires’ Express is all about having these characters collide with one another, often literally. People leap in and out of windows, clamber up and down rooftops, run atop moving trains, jump onto each other’s horses and motorcars; even after the train stops, the movie is in constant motion. You need a murder board to figure out how all the rivalries and romances fit together, but at the same time it doesn’t really matter; it’s all just cheerfully chaotic, an excuse for a host of Hong Kong stars to run around a tiny Western town – actually Jasper, Alberta – yelling at each other and occasionally pulling off a jaw-dropping stunt or three.

Seriously, this movie has everything: Drunken Master’s Hwang Jang-lee as a bank robber, Shaw Brothers legend Jimmy Wang Yu as the serene father to a young Wong Fei-hung, producer and director filmmaker Peter Ho-sun Chan as a firefighter, and a baby-faced Cynthia Rothrock dropped into the finale just on the heels of her breakout role opposite Michelle Yeoh in Yes, Madam! Just watch the trailer, remember that literally everything you see was done practically, and get on board. Yuen Biao jumps out of a three-story building! That’s on fire! They just don’t make them like that any more, presumably for legal reasons.

Arrow’s Millionaires’ Express limited edition – which arrives this coming Tuesday, February 28^th – is for all intents and purposes the same special edition released in the UK by Eureka Entertainment in the summer of 2021, with four different cuts on two Blu-ray discs and a raft of new and archival special features. That edition, limited to 3000 copies, went out of print almost immediately, so if you’re a completist I’d suggest grabbing the Arrow release as soon as you can.

And yes, you read that right: There are four different cuts of Millionaires’ Express here – the original Hong Kong version (97 minutes); an “international version” (102 minutes) aimed at Asian markets that swaps out the first scene with Ching’s sex-worker sidekicks for a different sequence that introduces Rothrock’s and Richard Norton’s characters much earlier in the story; a shortened English dub (92 minutes) released in North America as Shanghai Express, and a new “hybrid” version (109 minutes) that harmonizes the footage from all existing cuts, Close Encounters-style. I lean towards the Hong Kong release, but feel free to experiment.

Extras are plentiful, most of them familiar from the Genius Products DVD release about a decade and a half ago – the 4:3 SD picture quality is a dead giveaway on the archival interviews with Hung, Rothrock, Yuen and Yukari Oshima– but there’s a new interview with Rothrock, who also provides scene-specific commentary during the feature with Frank Djeng – who recorded a full-length commentary of his own for the Hong Kong cut, while genre enthusiasts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema laid one down for the international version.

Really, though, the movie is the star – and as you can tell from the screen grabs, it looks just great. (If they’re asking us to watch four different versions of it, it had better be.) Arrow doesn’t provide any details on the 2K restoration beyond attributing it to Fortune Star, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this came from the original camera negative; it’s a splendid presentation without any evidence of print wear, and bright enough to really bring out the subtle pastels in the wardrobe that says “Yes, we shot this period piece in the mid-80s and didn’t really worry about accuracy, but if that’s what you’re getting hung up on you’re doing this wrong.”

So, yes. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Wince at a couple of the dated jokes, but take comfort in knowing there’s a lot less of them than you might expect.

Millionaires’ Express is available Tuesday, February 28^th from Arrow Video in the US and Unobstructed View in Canada, and pretty much everywhere else too.

In tomorrow's newsletter: The Saw roars anew. Prepare yourself.