In 1960, Hong Kong film director Chung Kai Man planned and filmed the film "The Education of Love". At that time, Hong Jinbao, who was only 11 years old, first came into contact with the big screen and played the role of "He Shouquan" in the film.
The outstanding performance in "The Education of Love" laid the foundation for Hong Jinbao's path as a child star. Later, works such as "The Princess and the Seven Little Heroes" and "Big and Small Yellow Tianba" also allowed Hong Jinbao to accumulate a good audience.
In 1963, Hong Jinbao's film path changed somewhat because of an accident. This year, 14-year-old Hong Jinbao accidentally broke his leg during the performance.
As the saying goes: a hundred days of broken bones. After 3 months of recuperation, Hong Jinbao's weight increased rapidly. After becoming fat, Hong Jinbao began to be snubbed by the Hong Kong film director at that time, and his figure gradually faded out of the big screen.
However, in the action directing industry behind the scenes of the movie, Hong Jinbao still encountered new opportunities.
The flexible skills he has cultivated on the stage since he was a child have allowed Hong Jinbao to be successful in the action guidance industry.
In 1966's "Drunken Man", Hong Jinbao participated in the filming of film works for the first time as an action director, and later in "Dragon Gate Flying Sword", "Twelve Gold Medals", "Five Tigers Slaying Dragon" and other works, he laid his action guidance road step by step.
With the glow in the action direction post, Hong Jinbao once again went to the front of the screen, but because of his fat body and lower appearance, he has been circling between some small roles, and rarely has the opportunity to play the male lead.
If you don't have a chance, create opportunities for yourself! In 1977, Hong Jinbao transformed into a director and embarked on the road of self-directed and self-acting films.
In the wave of kung fu comedies in the late 1970s, works such as "Fat Dragon Crossing the River", "Mr. Zan and Finding Qianhua", and "Miscellaneous Family Boy" not only showed Hong Jinbao's talent for comedy performance, but also showed his outstanding directing ability.
Later, a series of works such as "Ghost Fighting Ghosts", "Beware of Small Hands", "Five Lucky Stars of Strange Tricks", "Fast Food Truck" and "Rich Train" also made Hong Jinbao step by step become the box office hegemon above the Hong Kong film market in the first and middle of the 80s.
However, no one has a thousand days, and no flowers have a hundred days of red. In the late 1980s, Hong Jinbao's path as a director began to suffer heavy setbacks.
In 1987, Hong Jinbao self-directed and self-acted in "Oriental Condor". The film cost a lot of money, and the big scenes came and went, but unfortunately it suffered a major setback at the box office. "Hong Jiaban" also suffered huge financial pressure because of the failure of this film.
In 1988, in order to recover the loss of "Oriental Vulture", Hong Jinbao led the "Hong Jia Ban" to create two works: "Electric Lights, Ghosts Kicking Feet" and "Dragons Playing Phoenix". However, after the release of these two works, they once again encountered market Waterloo. Among them, "The Dragon Play phoenix" is also a large-scale film work.
Successive market failures have brought Hong Jinbao's directing career into a downward spiral. The development of the "Hongjia class" has also fallen into a very embarrassing situation.
In order to save his own path as a director, but also to save the "Hong Jia Ban" who was in a worrying situation, Hong Jinbao in 1991 began to try to explore the film creation model in a new way. This year, he found Jacky Cheung and Zheng Yuling to shoot the action comedy "The Pillow Man with the Thread".
Unfortunately, this work did not become a turning point in Hong Jinbao's career on the road of directing.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="25" > Hong Jinbao's sudden work </h1>
The title of this "The Pillow Man with the Thread" is very characteristic of the local language. In Cantonese, "黐線" means nervous and malfunctional. And "pillow person", as the name suggests, is the meaning of lover and partner.
The title of this film is connected to "Nervous Lover", and the story of this movie revolves around a "nervous lover".
Hong Chenggong (played by Hong Jinbao) is an excellent salesman who becomes nervous and gibberish because of the pressure of work.
Zheng Lingling (played by Zheng Yuling) is also a salesman, and she is in the same company as Hong Chenggong. In order to prove her ability, Zheng Lingling successfully competed with Hong everywhere. However, while competing with each other, Zheng Lingling also has a subtle emotional change in Hong Chenggong.
Lisa (played by Yu Li) is Hong Chenggong's wife and a "police inspector". The husband's nervousness and gibberish caused cracks in Lisa's married life. The continuous pursuit of colleague "Ni Ke" (played by Zou Zhaolong) has also made Some changes in Lisa's emotions.
Dr. Gao (played by Gao Lihong) is a psychologist who runs a psychological clinic to make a living. Her clinic has two regular customers, one named Hong Chenggong and the other called Bat.
Bat (played by Jacky Cheung) is a professional killer, because of too many orders, too much work pressure, he is nervous all day, speech is confused, and sometimes even behaves madly.
A sudden accident has made the already unstable lives of these 5 people change dramatically.
One night, Hong Chenggong witnessed a murder in the underground parking lot, and he went to the "police station" to call the police, but in the process of telling the case, he did not say anything in the foreword.
His wife, Lisa, knows that Hong Chenggong is often gibberish because of his nervousness, so she does not believe his words. And Nick, the "police detective" who wants to pursue Lisa, also takes the opportunity to make Hong successfully have a problem, and also accuses him of "reporting a fake case" and obstructing official business.
"Calling the police" failed, but also misunderstood by his wife, depressed Hong Chenggong, to Dr. Gao's clinic to pour out his unhappiness, the result of encountering another patient of Dr. Gao "Bat".
It turned out that the murder that Hong had successfully witnessed before was exactly what the bat had done. Bats are originally emotionally unstable, and when they committed murder before, the escape of witnesses made bats even more irritable and behave madly.
In the psychological clinic, "eyewitnesses" and "murderers" meet unexpectedly. In order to calm his emotions, Bat decided to kill Hong Chenggong and Dr. Gao on the spot to avoid the consequences.
However, after a chaotic fight, Hong Chenggong and Dr. Gao escaped the scene and rushed to the "police station" to call the police.
Under Dr. Gao's certificate, the "police" believed Hong's successful "report". However, in Dr. Gao's testimony, Lisa found that her husband Hong Chenggong seemed to be ambiguous with Zheng Lingling and Dr. Gao, which further deteriorated the marital relationship between Hong Chenggong and Lisa.
Hong successfully escaped again and "called the police", which made the bat's spirit more unstable. The emotional bat decides to kill Hong at all costs. The "police" also sent Ni Ke and Lisa to protect Hong Chenggong for 24 hours.
Bat found his partner "Owl" (played by Lin Zhengying) to help, out of morality, Owl decided to help his old friend. The two infiltrate Hong Chenggong's residence and end up having an unexpected encounter with Ni Ke and Lisa.
Nike wants to borrow the hands of bats and owls to kill Hong Chenggong so that he can pursue Lisa himself. However, after a scuffle, the owl, the bat, and Nike were killed one after another.
After experiencing some life and death twists and turns, Hong Chenggong and Lisa both saw the direction of their lives, and the two chose to divorce. At the end of the film, Hong Chenggong and Zheng Lingling come together, and Lisa is also married to a wealthy businessman.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="61" > Hong Jinbao's breakthrough </h1>
In this "The Pillow Man with the Thread", Hong Jinbao made a breakthrough in his previous "police comedy" creative model.
In the early 1980s, with the birth of the "Beware of Little Hands" and the "Five Lucky Stars" trilogy, Hong Jinbao also began to gradually form his own "police comedy" shooting style. The multi-character group portrait story, the loose plot structure, the first half of the main characters rely on the protagonist's "gag jokes", "bubble girl oil" to pile up jokes, the second half of the end by dense action drama. These have become the consistent characteristics of Hong Jinbao's film works in the 80s.
However, in this "Thread Pillow Man", Hong Jinbao subverted the characteristics of his previous works.
Multi-character group portrait story has always been a major feature of Hong Jinbao's films, in the "Five Lucky Stars" series, there are 5 protagonists alone, in addition to Hu Huizhong's "Tyrannosaurus Flower", Jackie Chan's "Great Pill", Yuan Biao's "Vicki", and in "Rich Train" and "Oriental Condor", there are countless roles.
However, in this "Thread Pillow Man", Hong Jinbao deliberately cut the complicated character design, and the reduction of the story role also simplified the film structure, so that the story of the film got more performance space.
In Hong Jinbao's previous film works, the performance of the story plot is mostly very loose, and in the early stage, it relies on some sketch-style comedy bridges and gags of "driving drama" to attract the attention of the audience. In the later stages, it relies on action fighting to close the main story line.
However, in this Thread Pillow Man, Hong Jinbao began to work the structural design of the story.
At the beginning of the movie, Hong Chenggong talked about his relationship problems with his wife when facing Dr. Gao's psychotherapy. The contradiction of marital emotions has also become the key to promoting the development of the entire film plot.
Because of the marital conflict, his wife Lisa did not believe Hong's successful words, which led to his "failure to call the police"; because of the "failure of the alarm", Hong Chenggong began to have frequent contact with Zheng Lingling and Dr. Gao, trying to pour out his inner depression.
However, the frequent contact with the two opposite sexes further exacerbates the emotional contradiction between Hong Chenggong and Lisa. As the contradictions intensify step by step, the film enters the climax. The three women in the film also launched a fierce quarrel at the "police station".
Also because of the contradiction of marital emotions, Hong Chenggong's address was exposed, and bats rushed to hear the news and planned to cut the grass and remove the roots. In the end, Hong Chenggong and Lisa decided to solve each other's emotional conflicts in the form of "divorce". With the emotional problems being solved, the story of "The Pillow Man with the Thread" has also come to an end completely.
The plot of the whole movie from beginning to end revolves around the "marital emotional contradiction", the echo of the front and back bridges, and the compactness of the overall structure, which are extremely rare characteristics of Hong Jinbao's previous film works.
Of course, while breaking through innovation, this "Thread Pillow Man" also retains many of Hong Jinbao's characteristic film elements. For example, wonderful small scene action fights, comedy bridges with great language characteristics, etc.
It is worth mentioning that the "Hong Success" in this movie, although the name is "Success", but the career and life are not very successful. In his career, he was under the pressure of his colleagues in the company; in life, he encountered a marital crisis. This is exactly the epitome of Hong Jinbao's life in the late 80s and early 90s.
At the end of the 80s, Although Hong Jinbao was known as "Big Brother", his film works suffered box office setbacks one after another, and under the market pressure of Jackie Chan, his film road was getting lower and lower.
In terms of emotional life, Hong Jinbao in the late 80s was constantly in conflict with his first wife, Cao Enyu. In 1991, Hong Jinbao divorced Cao Enyu and later married Gao Lihong.
In "The Pillow Man with the Thread", although Hong Jinbao made many breakthroughs and attempts, and also invited Jacky Cheung and Zheng Yuling, two big coffees to help, the film failed to save Hong Jinbao's declining path of directorship.
After entering the 90s, Stephen Chow began to become the king of the small-cost comedy market with the style of "nonsense comedy". In 1991, Stephen Chow's works such as "Truant Weilong", "New Jingwumen", "Trick Expert", and "Shanghai Beach Gambling Saint" have achieved good word-of-mouth and box office results.
However, this year's "The Pillow Man with the Thread" only got more than 5.7 million Hong Kong dollars at the box office.
After "The Pillow Man with the Thread", Hong Jinbao's path to directing continued to decline. The "Baohe Film" and "Debao Film" under Hong Jinbao's name were also discontinued in 1992.