The Lady Professional (1971)

Matsuo Akinori (as Mei Chi-Ho)

Hong Kong

80 min, color, Mandarin (English subtitles)

Roller coasters used to be so much fun! Gangsta rap

This minor masterpiece is helmed by the imported Japanese director Matsuo Akinori (credited as Mei Chi-Ho) although it's not exactly clear why a local hack could not have done the same job. There is really nothing much to recommend this film except that it has Lily Ho and she is lethal. Oh wait, this is 100% recommended!

Chan Shen: on the phone Wong Ching Shun & Ching Miao: just spoken on the phone

The story is really stupid. The film opens with Lily Ho murdering some guy in an amusement park. Given the title, one would expect her to be at least a killer for hire. But instead, she turns out to be a manager of a small respectable club. Oh wait, this is a couple of years after the initial murder, although no one bothered to tell us. Never mind, Chang Pei Shan is an almost witness to the original murder and has been blackmailing Lily into giving him a monthly allowance. Why this arrangement could last so long is not exactly clear. She has had to sell her apartment to pay him although it seems killing him would have been much cheaper. It's not like she hasn't done it before.

Chang Pei Shan making sleazy advances Lily Ho, the pro

Ah, but the point is that even though she is a killer, she is a nice one. The guy she killed, we are told in a flashback, was responsible for stabbing her father with a pool stick. So it was an act of understandable and totally excusable revenge. She is not a bad person at all, just a true Confucian whose sense of filial duty is overpowering. But then Chan Shen is let out of prison and he has the goods on Ching Miao, a respected businessman.

Chang Pei Shan hiring Lily Ho to be pro Fond memories

This begins the true story of the film, a marathon of phone calls and mayhem. Every character spends at least one scene on the phone. Either AT&T (or its Hong Kong subsidiary) financed this picture, or local calls were free, or phones were the symbols of the new era of prosperity. Anyway, Chan Shen phones Ching Miao and tells him in no uncertain terms that the price for him keeping his mouth shut (about something, we are never really sure what), which instantly marks him for death.

I break for rodents Lily Ho practicing girl scout skills

So Ching Miao tells Wong Chung Shun, who then calls the crime syndicate, which farms out the contract to some guy, who sells it to Chan Pei Shan, who finally recruits Lily Ho to do the deed by blackmailing her with the same trick. One would think that she, being the nice girl, would refuse to murder someone she does not know. After all, not everyone killed her dad. But she agrees, showing that she is not such a nice girl.

Yet another phone setup Phone + Gun = Chang Pei Shan screwed

She neatly dispatches Chan Shen who deserves his death for bowling so much but then she almost die herself because the bastard Chang Pei Shan has disabled her car breaks. She survives, of course, and after some preliminary training in the woods, has a friend make a call. Everyone who uses the phone will die in this film. So the hapless Chang is lured to a motel, then savagely tied to a post, and finally shot along with his criminal compadre. But Lily uncovers who's behind it all and decides to kill Wong Chung Shun, this time for free.

Wong Chung Shun: on the phone Lily Ho: on the phone

She (naturally) gives him a call. He sets a trap for her by farming out the murder contract to the same inept organization, which proceeds to hire three totally amateurish and incompetent killers, who get themselves killed as soon as they try to kill Lily. She was no professional but at this time she begins to deserve the title. Using her friend, who turns out to be Wong's kept woman, Lily also dispatches Wong but not before learning about the Big Boss Ching Miao. So she decides to target him next, still for free.

Dumb ass killer Three dumb ass killers, soon to be dead

She dresses up as a nun, if for no other reason than to give the audience cheap thrills. She tracks him to the airport and then... gives him a call. When he takes it in the phone booth, she kills him. Wow! No one would ever suspect a nun, for Krissake! In an unexpectedly tragic twist, she hails a cab and then goes to the police, presumably to surrender herself. Of course, one is left to wonder why not simply surrender after the first murder instead of killing so many other (admittedly worthless) people and ratcheting up high phone bills. The mystery remains, and the nod to decent moral values at the end is empty and stupid.

Just a cool shot of Lily Ho Your friend is a MURDERER

As I said before, they did not need an imported director to do this film. It is not clear that Matsuo has contributed anything that a Hong Kong regular could not have done. Perhaps the frenetically sped up shots with Chan Shen running from man-eating automobiles was his signature, but then it was not much. The villains are too inept throughout to be a good match for Lily, which sort of denigrates her character quite a bit. The teary melodrama about her losing her parents was entirely unnecessary because it could not fool anyone even for a second that she was a good human being forced into evil by circumstances.

Yep, and murderers MURDER Lily Ho as the naughty nun

For fans of Lily Ho, this film is probably required. The Celestial Pictures DVD has an anamorphic widescreen transfer at 2.35:1 with a Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack in Mandarin. The English subtitles are decent, but only the bare-bones extras are included: photo gallery, trailers, and talent files. Not likely to make cinematic history, but then again I will probably watch it again with pleasure. Lily Ho is just so damn adorable.

November 24, 2003


Chan Shen: on the phone	Wong Ching Shun & Ching Miao: just spoken on the phone