Riding the international success of Bruce Lee’s ENTER THE DRAGON, director Robert Clouse followed with two lesser action films featuring Lee’s co-star Jim Kelly, the first of which was this oddball crime thriller starring Joe Don Baker (WALKING TALL – 1973), Roy Chiao (INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM) and the great Burgess Meredith (ROCKY).
GOLDEN NEEDLES is a Hollywood production largely set in Hong Kong. Although this had been done before, most notably with Steve McQueen’s war drama THE SAND PEBBLES (1966), it was a rarity and still is today. The movie itself is low on fighting action and suffers largely from a poorly written script that bumbles through a sluggish and silly international caper. Yet fans of Hong Kong cinema get to see some great location shooting in the now virtually extinct underbelly of Hong Kong circa 1974, as well as “guest” roles from a few familiar faces including prolific character actor Ho Li-jen and future POM POM star Richard Ng, making his big screen debut.
The plot centers on an ancient golden statuette that pinpoints where acupuncture needles may be inserted into the body in order to revitalize health and sexuality. Ho Li-jen has the procedure successfully applied to his body but doesn’t get to enjoy its rejuvenating effects for long. Flame-throwing attackers barge in, roast everyone in sight and swipe the statue. An American brawler with a shady past (and horrible fashion sense) named Dan (Baker) is hired to bring the statue back to its rightful owner. In the process, he gets mixed up with other parties interested in getting their hands on the artifact including a double-crossing female (Elizabeth Ashley) and her criminal employers, as well as agents working for the Chinese government.
Roy Chiao portrays a slightly crazed Hong Kong mobster with a large facial scar working for an eccentric American millionaire (Meredith) to get the statue. Meredith eats up the screen with a colorful performance that is far better than this movie deserves. He manages to balance being sinister and endearing, not unlike his Penguin role in the old BATMAN series. Unfortunately his character is ultimately far tamer than he should be.
Jim Kelly with a killer fro enters the fray midway through as one of Dan’s old associates. He delivers more awful acting and a couple karate moves, much less than we saw in ENTER THE DRAGON. Clouse saved most of Kelly’s moves for his second follow up to ENTER THE DRAGON, the blaxploitation actioner BLACK BELT JONES (1974). Despite some of the misleading bootleg cover art floating around the web, Kelly is not the main star and I would even suggest it’s more of an extended cameo given that his character has no real purpose.
Joe Don Baker is the complete opposite of Bruce Lee in this movie which makes me wonder if his casting was a conscious decision on the part of Clouse in the wake of Lee’s untimely death and irreplaceable presence. Unlike Baker’s WALKING TALL role, he appears here as a shiftless, slovenly expatriate without drive or ambition apart from wanting to get Ashley into the sack. Other motivators that come into play include potential profit, revenge for the death of his partner and moral obligation to Chinese authorities attempting to recover a priceless artifact but none of these seem sufficiently important to Dan who finds himself casually reacting to events around him rather than being a driving force. Clouse does throw in one nod to WALKING TALL with a scene where Baker knocks in a car windshield with a hefty object.
For the most part, Baker relies on tried and true bar brawling tactics for his screen fighting technique. The best of it is a rooftop tussle where he throws several opponents through glass skylights with satisfying results. The stunt work for the film is quite good with lots of painful-looking falls and tumbles. Some of the scenes, such as a mahjong house fight appears to have been choreographed by local stuntmen although I didn’t recognize any noteworthy Hong Kong stunt veterans either in the credits or onscreen.
The film’s action high point is a foot chase through the backstreets of Hong Kong where Baker ends up running from an angry mob of locales who mistake him for a child killer. Even without the American actors, it’s the kind of scene you would rarely see in a Hong Kong action movie and the filmmakers involved deserve credit for pulling it off quite successfully. Had the rest of the movie contained the fast pace and scale of this sequence, it would have been a lot better.
Baker’s brutish fighting style is contrasted by token kung fu fighting moves exhibited by Chinese-American actress Frances Fong who portrays a Chinese agent tailing Dan and his associates. Fong is an actress who mostly had guest appearances on various TV series including KUNG FU: THE SERIES. GOLDEN NEEDLES provided one of her few supporting film roles. She’s an attractive actress with passable screen fighting skills but it would have been nice if Clouse had teamed up with Golden Harvest and used their experienced fighting female talents, specifically Polly Shang-Kwan or Angela Mao. of course, had that happened then he would have had to find a leading man with more impressive fighting skill.
Production quality for the film is above average for a genre movie, which is no surprise given that Clouse had scored such a hit with ENTER THE DRAGON, even though much of the reason for that success died in 1973. I think GOLDEN NEEDLES and BLACK BELT JONES quickly established the limits of Clouse’s ability as a director. He never made another martial arts movie as good as ENTER THE DRAGON despite working with screen fighting talents such as Yuen Biao, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Richard Norton, and Cynthia Rothrock.
by Mark PollardRelated Topics:
Acupuncture • Golden Needles (1974) • Jim Kelly • Robert Clouse
- SharoKham
