Cindy in Cinders
Cynthia Rothrock has never done an interview where she talked about the making of a movie called City Cops. Before she returned to Hong Kong in 1990 to do Prince of the Sun, the 1988 production had the distinction of being her final Hong Kong movie. If something traumatic had happened during the making of City Cops then she probably only agreed to do Prince of the Sun so that City Cops would no longer get attention. Remember that she has said that she left Hong Kong for Hollywood because filming fight scenes in Hong Kong were too gruelling due to the complexity and higher risk of injury. If true, returning to do Prince of the Sun would seem like an about-turn.
City Cops only got released for 6 days in November 1989. Going by Cynthia’s hair length, City Cops was filmed after The Blonde Fury. The latter began in 1987 as Lady Reporter. It got shelved halfway through filming, and it only got completed with a new director after she did an English language movie in the summer of 1988 for a Hong Kong company called Golden Harvest. In Volume IV, Issue 3 of a magazine called Hong Kong Film Connection, she addressed the issue of Corey Yuen taking over from Meng Hoi: “Meng shot the movie, and then Golden Harvest found out that I had a contract with Sylvester Stallone. They thought that I was going to become this big international action star. After Meng wrapped up the initial shoot, I went to America, shot China O’Brien then they called me back over and I was petrified because I had this Stallone movie. I thought, What if I get hurt? There goes my career!”
Just to digress for a moment, Corey directing The Blonde Fury but not being asked to direct China O’Brien fascinates me since he had already proven that he could direct English language movies (albeit for Seasonal instead of Golden Harvest). In July 1988, Cynthia was acting in China O’Brien - the same month that marked the release of a Corey Yuen movie called In the Blood. This movie was first advertised in its complete form for the October 1987 issue of The Milky Way Pictorial. Sammo Hung complained that the film was pulled out of cinemas too early as it was only in H.K. cinemas for a week. It was produced by his companies, D&B and Bo Ho, so distributor Golden Harvest didn’t have any real skin in the game. What I’m getting at is that The Blonde Fury seems like a consolation prize for Corey and co-star Chin Siu-Ho.
City Cops was produced by a company called Movie Impact. Unlike Sammo Hung’s companies and Jackie Chan’s company, Movie Impact were not a subsidiary of Golden Harvest. Movie Impact were affiliated with a company called Win’s Film. The latter were run by a Triad gang called Sun Yee On. One example of the affiliation is Wong Jing’s Magic Crystal (1986). Win’s produced it, but the lighting and cinematographer are credited as Movie Impact Cinematographers Team. Cynthia Rothrock co-starred in this movie. In the case of City Cops, it would appear that Movie Impact were hoping to cash in on the success of her upcoming collaboration with Sylvester Stallone.
The Stallone project, The Executioner, would end up not getting made. As a consolation prize, City Cops could have been repositioned to piggyback on the success of Golden Harvest’s piggy bank. Even so, the gambit didn’t pay off because China O’Brien would end up being released in 1990. Even then, it was released straight to video despite the movie being made by Robert Clouse - the director of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. I don’t know what Golden Harvest were thinking. China O’Brien and its sequel were made back to back, yet there wasn’t much of a push from them in terms of the futures for the star and director. Cynthia and Clouse never worked with Golden Harvest again.
In the September 1992 issue of an American magazine called Black Belt, Cynthia Rothrock said she did six more films in H.K. after Yes, Madam (1985) before leaving for the States in 1988. Technically, The Blonde Fury and City Cops were filmed after China O’Brien but there is some truth in saying that 1988 was the cut-off point. As for City Cops, it’s not that embarrassing of a movie when you compare it to the likes of Magic Crystal and Prince of the Sun. In fact, I would go as far to say that City Cops was somewhat robbed of a respectable Western release. I’m not saying that it should have been released in mainstream cinemas, but the English title is so generic that even Chinese Magnum would have been much better since Shing Fui-On’s cap and moustache is meant to be reminiscent of Tom Selleck in the Magnum P.I. series (whose final episode had aired before City Cops was made).
In real life, Shing Fui-On was a member of the underworld. When he was 17, he was sentenced to four years in prison but he only served two years and eight months. The Chinese title of City Cops was Double Dragon Detectives. What makes City Cops a rather suspicious production from a Chinese mafia point of view is that Cynthia Rothrock had already wanted to leave Hong Kong before she filmed China O’Brien in the States. The original director of Lady Reporter, Meng Hoi, was her boyfriend. She wanted to marry him, but he didn’t want to leave Hong Kong for good. As such, they split up. One can only imagine how Meng must have felt when Lady Reporter was restructured by Corey Yuen as The Blonde Fury. I don’t know what Meng makes of City Cops.
This makes me wonder what Cynthia Rothrock has to say about the Triads. Christ, I’ve never even heard her address the issue of racism in the Hong Kong film industry. Sophia Crawford, for instance, got it really bad when she became Cynthia’s replacement as the go-to for casting a white warrior woman in H.K. cinema. Movie Impact’s interest in wanting to work with Cynthia for City Cops is fascinating because she wasn’t a particularly big draw at the local box office, so the desire to reunite with her had a lot to do with her making in-roads in foreign markets. For example, the Hong Kong box office take of The Inspector Wears Skirts (1987) was only 15 million dollars in Hong Kong currency despite the effort of shoehorning in Cynthia well after filming had begun.
There is a common denominator between The Inspector Wears Skirts, The Blonde Fury and Prince of the Sun. In each film, Cynthia Rothrock fights an American martial artist named Jeff Falcon. Strangely, he didn’t appear in City Cops despite the cast having Western martial artists in the form of Mark Houghton, Wayne Archer, John Ladalski and Ken Goodman. It’s unfortunate that these four men have yet to disclose, publicly anyway, about the making of City Cops. Strangely, Jeff Falcon never did any U.S. movies with Cynthia. As for Prince of the Sun, Ellen DeGeneres is clearly a fan because she screened fight scenes from the movie on more than one episode of her chat show.
In the summer 1995 issue of a magazine called Femme Fatales, it was claimed by Mike Leeder that Cynthia’s role in City Cops was added well into production. Despite being valued so much to be an afterthought, not everything that she did was incorporated into the final cuts of her movies. An entire fight sequence involving traditional martial arts weaponary was removed from Yes, Madam. When she wanted to screen some of her Hong Kong movies in America, Cynthia was told by Golden Harvest that the negatives to her films for them were destroyed in a fire. Referring to The Inspector Wears Skirts (1987), she said: “In one movie I did in Hong Kong, I was fighting on a ship with all these girls who were so bad that the scene looked really stupid, so they ended up cutting that out. I was glad they cut it, but I wasn’t very happy I had to shoot all that for nothing.”
