False Alarm

Among the Cantonese movies produced by Cathay/MP & GI, Tso Kea directed 17 films. Mok Hong-si came second with five pictures of genres ranging from comedy, tragedy, to melodrama, which can be seen as a proof of Cathay/MP & GI's trust in his directorial capabilities. False Alarm banks on the popular formula of The Greatest Civil War on Earth (1961), which involves the comedic conflict between fat comedians Leung Sing-po and Liu Enjia's respective Cantonese and Mandarin. The opening of the story recalls Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958): Fong Chi-hung's (Woo Fung) beautiful wife Cheung Mei-lan (Christine Pai Lu-ming) puts on make-up and goes out late at night. But when she returns home, she always denies what has happened previously. Alarmed by her strange behaviour, Fong hires a private detective to follow her. Unbeknown to Fong, the one he has hired is actual detective Chen Kui-bo's (Liu Enjia) foolish younger brother Chan Siu-po (Leung Sing-po), the former being in Macau conducting an investigation. The foolish and fake detective makes all possible blunders in the process of investigation. Mei-lan meets overseas Chinese Pao (Cheng Kwan-min) at the nightclub, who falls in love with her, cross-dresses as a maid to infiltrate her house, and discovers that Mei-lan's sleepwalking is inherited from her mother's "schizophrenia"…The plot gets more and more complicated, stretching plausibility. Mok Hong-si exhausted his trademark elements of masquerade, mistaken identities, surveillance (following, recording, spying) to maximise laughter.

Date	Time	Venue
9/6/2016 (Thu)	7:30pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

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