Yes, Madam! 
皇家師姐 「Wong Gaa Si Ze」
Release Date: November 20th, 1985
Duration: 98 mins.
Director: Corey Yuen
Writer: Barry Wong (Screenplay),
Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Rothrock, Mang Hoi, Tsui Hark, John Sham, Dick Wei, Sammo Hung, Richard Ng, Fruit Chan, Corey Yuen,
In 1984, business entrepreneur Dickson Poon was looking for a way to get into movies and teamed up with Sammo Hung and John Sham to create D&B Films. There approach of making commercial genre pictures and the occasional arthouse release on the side meant experimentation was part of their approach to material.
In the highly trend-driven environment of Hong Kong film, looking for a way to make new content and create a new star, the studio pitched a fresh take on the tough cop genre by having the lead heroes played by a woman with Michelle Yeoh taking the lead role and becoming an action star.
Operating under the name Michelle Khan at the time, Yeoh had shot a watch commercial with Jackie Chan for Dickson Poon before taking on bit parts in D&B films such as The Owl vs Bumbo (1984). Yes, Madam! gave Yeoh, the former ballerina and Miss Malaysia winner, her breakout movie role. It also launched the career of American martial arts champion Cynthia Rothrock, who bagged her first movie role after a successful screen test, and initiated the Girls-with-Guns action genre.
Yeoh and Rothrock play Inspector Ng of the Hong Kong police and Inspector Carrie Morris of Scotland Yard respectively. They join forces to retrieve a microfilm that can be used as evidence against a crooked property developer/crime boss who has a musclebound henchman (Dick Wei) also on a wild search for the film. Said microfilm is a bit of a McGuffin as it falls into the hands of a trio of medicinally-named small-time crooks, Aspirin (Mang Hoi), Panadol (Tsui Hark), and Strepsil (John Shum). They provide the comic relief and a way to get the police and the gangsters into various fights as they try to make money/stay alive by playing both sides and bartering with the evidence.
Characterisation in this film is kept simple. The villains laugh and menace, the thieves bicker, and the lead fighters of Yeoh and Rothrock play good cop/bad cop and there’s a big throwdown for the showdown at the end. This is serviceable stuff to hang the action on and the action is where the film is most electric as it gives two female fighters the floor and lets them shine as it successfully puts a feminine spin on familiar genre fare.
While not feminist in intent, the filmmakers and the performers provide ample moments where they subvert the traditional roles of men and women.
Yeoh and Rothrock have to face misogyny on the job and they never resort to using their sex appeal to fight crime. Instead, wearing more masculine clothing and short hair, they act in ways that were normally reserved for male action stars as they rough up witnesses and throw their badges and guns at the chief before rushing into the villain’s lair and taking out dozens of sword-wielding men and the man-mountain that is Dick Wei (an ex-Taiwanese army officer and one of Hong Kong’s all-time great villains). Rothrock is especially aggressive, perfectly conveying a fiery persona.
If you had no idea who Yeoh and Rothrock are before the film, seeing their introductions here is incredible. The opening of the film is a riff on Dirty Harry as Yeoh takes out robbers hijacking an armoured car. The grace of her jumps and kicks, the sprightliness of her runs and dodges, and the intensity in her eyes as she wields a gun and blasts crooks into windshields was enough to get me to punch the air with glee. Rothrock has ferocious high-impact kicks that get the slo-mo treatment in a stunning airport chase scene that made me recoil from the screen at the sight of the impact.
There is something empowering in seeing them take on these roles and do such excellent fighting and the final ten minutes of the film features some of the best fight choreography in Hong Kong cinema as they send guys bouncing off architecture and through glass – the moment when Yeoh grabs two guys off a balcony has to be seen to be believed – and the dust-up with Dick Wei is intense stuff. They engage in full-contact fighting and we can clearly see that it is them.
Yeoh trained with Sammo Hung’s action troupe for eight months prior to shooting and she endured numerous injuries on set as she performed her own stunts. Likewise, Rothrock, already a skilled martial artist, also sustained serious injuries and pushed through the pain to complete filming. The action scenes they perform are superb and the highlight of a film. Holding things together are lots of “comedy” scenes provided by the thieves.
As the trio of thieves, Mang Hoi (an action-choreographer as well as actor), Tsui Hark (yes, the writer/director) and John Sham (a producer/writer/actor) showcase the sort of action-comedy seen in Winners and Sinners (1983). They further gender role subversion as they are chased, kidnapped, and imprisoned by the bad guys and need to be rescued by the ladies.
Mileage may vary at the sight of these small-time crooks try and fail at crime. At its most anarchic, such as when Hark uses an apartment full of traps to evade an angry criminal in a slapstick chase, the energy carries a scene but a lot of the material of bumbling about wears out its welcome. The constant histrionic tone of three characters and the sense that they are stealing the limelight from the ladies deflates the spectacle. However, there is something poignant in the final scenes where the friendship is put under its most strain and there are big declarations of loyalty. Perhaps the constant sight of them being bullied around evinces sympathy. This helps the film survive some tonal whiplash as the story enters very bleak territory. Throughout the film, the pursuit of money is shown as corrupting people and it allows the villain to walk all over the system and the little people. Justice only happens because the characters take the law into their own hands and act as vigilantes in a shock ending.
Other than that, the mixture of comedy and action doesn’t feel as good as, say, Jackie Chan’s Police Story (Yes, Madam! came out a month before that title). What cannot be denied is that the action scenes are EXCELLENT and the four featured in the film are worth watching for the choreography, performers, style, and more. Corey Yuen, a fellow alumnus of the Peking Opera School alongside Chan, Hung, and Yuen Biao, made a massive impact here with direction that features judicious use of fun camera movements, fast cuts, and slow motion in fights to make the action flow and it is all easy to follow and very visceral. He would go on to make other memorable female-fighter Hong Kong action movies like Righting Wrongs (1986) and (the more regressive) She Shoots Straight (1990).
Yes, Madam! grossed over 10 million HK dollars at the box office and has been reissued on DVD and Blu-Ray multiple times showing its strength. If you can make it through the comedy, the action is really something spectacular and you can see Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock at the beginning of their career. Its sequel, Royal Warriors, is an even better action experience.
My review of Royal Warriors will come out on Wednesday.
Listen to this episode of Heroic Purgatory podcast to hear John and myself discuss this film and Royal Warriors.