rena's websight Master With Cracked Fingers
This is actually Jackie Chan’s first film, and he’s super young in it (most of the time).
The story behind Master With Cracked Fingers is interesting. For one we watched the blu-ray release which appears to be meticulously remastered, and it’s actually really high quality except the backgrounds seem to warp around at random due to some sort of stabilisation which caused us to burst out laughing multiple times. The title card of the movie calls it ‘Master with crack fingers’ which is hilarious too.
This movie is a re-edit of an earlier film, Little Tiger Of Canton, or Cub Tiger From Kwang Tung, and this version was thrown together hastily and with low production value after Jackie became famous from Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. They basically cut this together from Little Tiger Of Canton footage, some drunken master era footage, and some new footage with a child actor to produce a new framing and new final scene.
The story is honestly terrible and the action scenes aren’t very good but the bizarre production made us laugh a lot anyway, and it’s fun seeing Jackie as a teenager.
The movie uses close-up shots a lot which I’m pretty sure is because these were filmed for Master With Cracked Fingers and cut into the original footage to support the new story.
The actors are visibly older in some of these shots and not on the same backgrounds as the rest of the scene. A particularly funny instance is that Yuen Siu-Tien (the beggar from Drunken Master) shows up a lot hiding in bushes and stuff in the background so he can be added to scenes he wasn’t originally in, he’s just a pervert who follows Jackie around I guess and comments on his martial arts.
There’s also a kind of painful and badly produced mahjong-themed fight in the middle that seems to be unique to this version of the film so I’m not really sure why they bothered.
Overall it’s interesting and the first movie on our list so we watched it, but it probably isn’t worth watching unless you’re really interested in Jackie Chan’s history. It might be worth it as a ‘so bad it’s good’ type of movie, it’s probably right on the threshold.
