Eight years before Sammo’s ‘Carry On Pickpocket’ there was Shaw Brothers’ director Kuei Chi-Hung’s ‘The Rat Catcher’, about a young pair of pickpocket/con artists.
More of a romantic comedy where the main character (Lau Luk-wa) consistently gets the bad end of the deal with fellow con artist (the young, hip, sexy Tanny Tien Ni) all while time after time getting caught by a chubby traffic cop who continues to get promoted. Finally, the ‘real’ bad guys are introduced, drug dealers, and they all team up to foil them.
Extremely light-hearted throughout (there is a fight scene late in the movie that tries to be comedic) with a more Western style of humor - sort of a Bennie Hill-esqe zany music as characters run around to under-cranked footage.
