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摩登二世祖 (1964)
Young and Idle


Reviewed by: dleedlee
Date: 09/30/2004

Cho and Ying meet at a party one night, each pretends to be more well off than they actually are. Cho is in fact an real estate agent(?) and Ying, the daughter of a laundry operator. Both believe that they have made a lucky catch. To extend their deceptions, Cho borrows cars from his mechanic roommates auto garage and Ying supplements her wardrobe from the laundry of her mother’s clients.

Sun Ma Sze Tsang’s Cho seems at times just a bit too old for Nam Hung’s Ying. She also towers in height over him too when she’s wearing heels. Cho’s roommates, Ko Lo Chuen, Yue Ming, Ko Chiu, Sai Gwa Pau and Tsang Choh Lam make a cheery band of pals. In one scene, posing as Cho’s staff of servantsm they borrow and furnish an apartment for half a day in order to impress Ying and her mother. One room is decorated with auto parts from their garage. Framed cow shit is displayed as art! During dinner, workmen start arriving to reclaim the loaned furnishings. Sai Gwa Pau comes up with a simple but direct and very hilarious solution so that Ying and her mother fail to discover their ruse. Eventually, of course, both Cho and Ying discover the other’s charade and in fact, they are neighbors living next door to each other. In a separate storyline, rich and fat Lau (You Guangzhou) woos Ying as a potential concubine when he desires a son that Yung Yuk Yi refuses to bear him. Lau speaks in a heavily Shanghai-accented Cantonese. The wedding / truck scene brings this tale of love to its proper and loopy happy conclusion, as we expected it must. The broomstick wielding gang of grannies having saved the day for Cho.

One special highlight in this film is Cho and the auto mechanics donning Beatle-wigs and performing to the Fab Four’s I Saw Her Standing There. It’s a three or four minute number that will flip your wig as it did theirs.

Sun Ma and Nam Hung also perform a few more traditional songs including solos and a duet. And listen for Some Enchanted Evening used as a music cue.

Reviewer Score: 8