Chan's Noodle Western

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 26, 2000 | by S.T. Karnick

Just like Jackie Chan's career, Shanghai Noon starts out in the Far East and ends up in the United States, the adopted home of this Asian actor who portrays quintessential American heroes.

Now in his mid-forties, Jackie Chan has been starring in his special brand of action-comedy film since the early 1970s. The Hong Kong-born martial-arts champion began directing in the mid-seventies and screenwriting in the eighties. Although the budgets on his Asian films were minuscule -- and the production values showed it -- Chan became a huge worldwide attraction. He is immensely popular in the United States as well, in large measure because he is a classic American hero, and an appealingly old-fashioned one at that.

Chan's characters, like their traditional American counterparts, display stolidity, self-sufficiency, physical courage, chivalry, diligence, humility and a sense of honor, as the wonderfully titled Shanghai Noon makes clearer than ever. Chan plays Chon Wang (comically pronounced John Wayne), an inept member of the Chinese emperor's imperial guards in the (beautifully photographed) Forbidden City in 1881. When Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) is kidnapped and taken to Carson City, Nev., Chon sallies forth on a rescue mission. Interspersed among the ensuing action sequences is much culture-clash humor involving Chinese, Caucasians and American Indians, and some serious moments regarding racial prejudice during the settling of the American West.

Everything turns out well, of course, and like all real American heroes, Chon bests his opponents through superior skill, ingenuity and persistence. In a pine forest, for example, he employs evergreen branches to fend off his attackers' blows, then traps an assailant's head between two tree trunks. In a saloon brawl, he wields a set of moose antlers. During the course of the movie, he subdues various well-armed foes with little more than a horseshoe and knowledge of the laws of gravity.

Such ingenuity is typical of Chan's films. His 1980 directorial debut, The 36 Crazy Fists, was the first martial-arts film to combine action and comedy effectively, and Chaffs incredible inventiveness with action scenes long ago earned him the nickname "the Buster Keaton of martial arts." Chan will use an umbrella to hook himself onto the side of a speeding bus, leap off a cliff onto a hot-air balloon or even slide unaided down an angled high-rise. Like Keaton, he performs all stunts himself without camera tricks or special effects -- and has endured numerous injuries, often serious.

Chan also resembles Keaton and other American film heroes, from Douglas Fairbanks to Alan Ladd, in being the quintessential little guy -- short and slight though quick and strong. Like Shanghai Noon's Chon, his characters hail from decidedly humble origins, and he usually joins the fight not for personal gain but out of sense of moral obligation and duty. This altruism is made more impressive by the fact that Chan is vulnerable -- when he gets hit, he gets hurt.

Despite their travails, Chan's characters nearly always are polite and amiable. They are chivalrous toward women and surprisingly chaste, traits comically displayed in the look of astonishment on Chon's face when he discovers a beautiful Indian woman (Brandon Merrill) sleeping beside him, having become married to her while under the influence of the peace pipe. His equanimity is repaid later when she helps him break out of jail.

Chan's characters display a classic American sense of honor and fair play as well; he almost always tries to talk his way out of a fight and refrains from striking the first blow, unless it's clear there's no other way out. Their devotion to duty is equally commendable, especially as they understand the higher objectives behind their actions. When Chon, who wishes only to rescue the princess and return her to her home, understands that she wants to remain in America to help indentured railway workers, he intervenes to prevent his fellow guards from taking her back to China.

Chan the producer-star is equally generous -- and astute -- in allotting screen time and laugh lines to his costars. Shanghai Noon reflects this egalitarianism in its genial resolution, with Chinese, Indians, whites and others intermarrying and establishing multicultural harmony. The end may be politically correct, but it's appealingly unpretentious, too. Chan has given his writers and director, Tom Dey, freedom to play with the material, and they oblige by including numerous comical allusions to American Westerns, including a reenactment of the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- with a characteristically optimistic twist.

Chan has been making films in the United States since 1996, taking the elements of his Hong Kong pictures and adding better production values and strengthening the story lines, but he has not had to change the essence of his approach. Shanghai Noon makes clear what we really should have known all along: Jackie Chan is a great American film hero who just happened to be born in Asia and has created a body of work that celebrates what is best in the American character and the human spirit.