by DAVID CHUTE

"In Hong Kong, the audience talks to you right on the screen. If they really enjoy it, they want to jump into the screen. You and the audience are very close. Ordinary people in Hong Kong treat me like a friend. I did TV for 14 years. They watched me every day. When I laugh, they laugh, when I cry, they cry. They never treat me like a movie star." - Chow Yun-fat, actor

Imagine the most appealing qualities of Jack Lemmon, Robert Taylor and Steve McQueen somehow magically co-mingled with a pinch of Al Pacino, only Chinese, and you may begin to get the drift of Chow Yun-fat, John Woo's favorite leading man.

In repose, Chow's casual magnetism recalls the glory days of Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, or Takakura Ken - great movie actors who can rivet your attention while seeming to do almost nothing.

And when he's stepping high, Chow is a unique, ebullient star-presence, a man who embraces life so unself-consciously that he becomes vulnerable to all kinds of suffering and heartache.

CHOW YUN-FAT: "In the West audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hit men or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero."

John Woo cast Chow in their first film together, "A Better Tomorrow", precisely because he is an actor with real depth and not a punch-drunk action star. Woo is not interested in the action for its own sake, but in action as an extension and expression of personality.

Playing a hot-blooded hick from the sticks in Alex Law's "Now You See Love, Now You Don't" (produced by Terence Chang), Chow used the accent and gangly expressiveness of his native Lantau Island to rich comic effect.

In 1973, still working multiple jobs to support his family, he answered a newspaper ad and was ushered right into a "free" training program offered by the Shaw Brothers' far flung TVB television operation - broadcasting at home, video distribution around the globe.

When the training program was over, the network owned Chow's services for three years at less than the princely rate of HK $500.00 per month. He toiled in the TVB salt mines for a year or so, before winning wide popularity in 1976 as the young hunk on a prime time soap called "Hotel". When he negotiated his next contract, this time for a more secure ten years, the terms were more in his favor.

Chow extended his popularity as a crime boss in a white tropical suit in the 1980 series "Shanghai Bund", which was a huge hit all over Asia - even in Shanghai, eventually, when restrictions on imported programming were lifted in the 1990s.

Chow is one of the few established "mainstream" actors in Hong Kong who has consistently been as popular with the art film wing of the business as with its commercial wing. Some of his performances over the years have been in small, serious movies like Stanley Kwan's "Love Unto Waste" (as a Columbo-like slob police detective) and Mabel Cheungs "An Autumn's Tale", as a short-tempered illegal alien can driver in New York.

In several of his more recent hits, including "Eight Happiness" and "Prison on Fire", Chow has played a wised-up winner, a crafty pleasure seeker, the lover who scores because he's so revved up and funny, the sarcastic jailhouse sage who goes to bat for a wimpy newcomer against the bullies.

But if Chow Yun-fat was "a member of the family" before "A Better Tomorrow" his Hong Kong movie screens in 1986, he became a different kind of entity thereafter: A superstar who could do no wrong.

Over the last couple of years Chow has been nudged from the top of the heap by an ingratiating limited comic actor named Stephen Chiao Sing-chi. Chow may still be the best actor in Asia, but "nonsense comedian" Chiao seems to have his finger squarely on the accelerated pulse of Hong Kong.

Chow Yun-fat has done a lot of his best work in the five pictures he's made for John Woo. But not all of it. The actor himself is partial to his performances in two Ann Hui films, "The Story of Woo Viet" (1981) and "Love in a Fallen City" (1984), and in Leong Poo-chi's "Hong Kong 1941" (1984).

And the Hong Kong audience has embraced him fervently in some fairly dreadful schlock, from the tear jerker "All About Ah Long" (1989) to any one of several dozen Better Tomorrow rip- offs of the late '80s. Here are a few that stand out.

1986 - THE SEVENTH CURSE (DR YUEN AND WISLEY) An outstanding "guilty pleasure," and action/horror thrill-o-rama, set in darkest Thailand, whose splatterific production numbers include flying killer alien-baby monsters, a spinal-cord-eating walking skeleton, a troupe of killer ninja Buddhist monks and an amazing wet naked Korean girl in a see through-smock. Chow has what amounts to a smug cameo as the pipe puffing occultist Wisely (the here of a hundred Hong Kong pulp novels by Ni Kuang) who gets to vaporize the biggest monster of them all with a handy rocket launcher.

1987 - CITY ON FIRE Ringo Lam directs Chow in his best non-Woo crime vehicle as an ex-crook turned police informer who is a bit too full hearted for the job: He just doesn't want to have to betray anybody. But he does the work anyway to please his uncle the cop, and bonds with the upright leader of the current gang targeted for infiltration, played by future "Killer" co-star Danny Lee. Chow can resolve his conflicted feelings only by turning his pal in and then staying behind to stand with him against the cops.

1987 - AN AUTUMN'S TALE Mabel Cheung's gentle autobiographical film is one of Chow's strongest vehicles. Filmed on a shoestring in New York, it co- stars Cherie Chung (Peking Opera Blues, Once a Thief) as a naive Hong Kong maiden who arrives in Manhattan to study acting. Chow is her city-mouse cousin, a can driver who drinks, brawls and gambles, and who takes the green girl under his wing. "Autumn's Tale" is an observant, involving story of cultural disorientation, and Chow's ingratiating star performance is a major asset.

1987 - SPIRITUAL LOVE A ghost romance with a spectacular final fight sequence in a discoteque. Chow mugs it up as a lovable loser who does collection work for a loan shark A sweetly re-incarnated spirit falls in love with him, and he with her. Meanwhile, his old floozy girlfriend plots revenge by committing suicide so that she can return as a nasty ghost to trash the opposition. The nice ghost's dead husband also turns up - as a purple, flying, disembodied head with a foot-long tongue.

1987 - PRISON ON FIRE This solid prison drama features Tony Leung Kar-fei ("The Lover") as a bespectacled innocent perhaps mentally impaired, who is unjustly imprisoned and befriended behind bars by the life-loving reprobate played by Chow. Director Ringo Lam ("City on Fire") jacks up the visceral tension effectively, and Chow is terrific, taking even more beatings than in "A Better Tomorrow" and rolling a lit cigarette over his knuckles in a risky variation on George Raft's similar trick with a silver dollar.

1988 - TIGER ON (THE) BEAT A Hong Kong "homage" to American comedy cop pictures like "Lethal Weapon". The crude farce in the foreground and the head-banging martial arts action around the edges never mesh comfortably. Chow's prancing, mugging, pants-wetting performance is a star turn on automatic pilot. His buddy partner is played by the muscular Chinese-American martial artist Conan Lee, who's convincingly ferocious, and the curvy starlet Nina Li Chi as a heroin smuggler who decides to go straight after Chow slaps he around a little.

1988 - EIGHTH HAPPINESS This boisterous farce owes most of its success to Chow's extravagant camping as an actor who pretends to be gay to ingratiate himself with women. But it also boasts an unusually rich mix of indigenous Hong Kong ingredients. The careers of several characters link them to the Cantonese opera stage, and the over-the-top characterizations are stylized in an intentionally "operatic" way. the mix may finally be too exotic for Western palettes, but the fun of watching chow cut-loose transcends cultural barriers.

1989 - THE GOD OF GAMBLERS Cheesy but highly enjoyable, and a huge hit that kicked off a wave of Hong Kong "gambler" films, making a major player out of ham-fisted director Wong Jing. Chow is a legendary gambler so adept that he can listen to the dice rattling in a cup, and deduce the outcome. Chow bangs his head on a rock and reverts to childhood, but as tutored by a rising young card sharp (Andy Lau) he becomes famous all over again - this time as "The Retarded King of Gamblers".

1992 - FULL CONTACT Another string vehicle by Ringo Lam ("City of Fire"), although it's also a rather brutal and cynical vehicle for a life-affirming star like Chow. He's a much less glamorous figure here than in his best John Woo projects, a vicious professional thief with tattoos and a crew cut who roars around on a big Harley. He is betrayed and left for dead by turncoat pals Simon Yam and Anthony Wong (the head bad guy in "Hard Boiled"), he and returns months later, Lee Marvin style, to exact revenge and to collect his share of the swag. Asian-American actress Ann Bridgewater is hot stuff as Chow's stripper girl friend.

1992 - NOW YOU SEE LOVE, NOW YOU DON'T Alex Law directed and co-wrote this heartfelt romantic comedy about a happily uncouth country kingpin (Chow) of a New Territories hamlet, whose girlfriend, Firefly Kwok (Dodo Cheng, from "Her Fatal Ways") returns from a sojourn in London hideously transformed into a punkoid hipster. Chow's Wu Shan-shui tags along when Firefly moves to Hong Kong desperately trying to class himself up in order to win her back. Eventually of course, he succeeds on both counts. with Anthony Wong, again, as Chow's pal, and producer Terence Chang in a cameo as Cheng's grumpy boss.

©David Chute. All rights reserved.