When I was a kid, I used to get beaten up from time to time. What would happen is, one kid would start a fight with me, I'd kick his ass, and then a couple days later he'd come back with five friends and proceed to kick mine. As much as, intellectually, I knew that not being able to beat five people at once wasn't necessarily a reflection on my testicular status, I'd still be sore. Being, as I was, not possessed of physical grace, and being also as I was rather larger than the average Napoleon-complex ravaged Brooklynite, I used to find myself in more fights than I found comfortable. Which sucked. What do you do when life sucks? I seek catharsis. Mine came in the form of Bruce Lee movies.
For some reason, in the mid 80s, they used to show Bruce Lee movies all the time on channel 9. I didn't question it. I watched anything with Bruce in it as many times as the universe would let me. Bruce could kick five dudes' asses at once, and do it with style, natch. He usually started the picture as a dork, like me. He was awkward with girls, like me. He'd inevitably run afoul of authority figures, like me. But at a certain point, Bruce would receive a shipment of whoop-ass, of which he would proceed to open a case. And any motherfucker who fucked with him got fucked the fuck up.
The greatest thing about Bruce movies was always the second-to-third act portion of the movie where he had to beat the shit out of twenty or thirty extras. Not just because this was the part of the movie with all the action in it, but because Bruce would frequently be blatantly fucking around. Like, “hmm, I'm gonna do this whole fight just kicking, no punching or blocking.” The effortlessly badass way Bruce navigated his way through the simplistic storyline of his movies gave me the strength to deal with shit in my own life (though it did lead to a couple embarrassing attempts to appropriate Bruce's moves in schoolyard fights).
Sadly, Bruce only finished four movies as the lead (the hilarious scene where he trashes James Garner's office in Marlowe doesn't count), leaving a fifth to be finished through stock footage and a double. His death was so mysterious and out of nowhere that there are nearly as many conspiracy theories about his death as there are with JFK (and, like JFK, his son also died too young). The Triads had him whacked. His wife had him killed for fucking around on her. The woman he was fucking around on his wife with killed him. He was a secret drug addict and OD'd. He faked his death, took a vow of silence, and is an anonymous Shaolin monk somewhere to this day. He faked his death and is chasing poontang with JFK, Elvis, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.
I'm not enough of an expert on Bruce's life to go too deep into the history, though I will say the man has a number of awesome stories about him, mainly starring dipshits who challenged him to street fights and woke up a couple days later to be told, “Bruce kind of flicked you in the chest with his wrist, you flew across the room, and were rushed to the hospital with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung. The doctors had to give you an orangutan heart to revive you.” There was one tournament story where Bruce won in eleven seconds and everyone there swears Bruce managed to kick the other guy 15 times and land 4 punches before the ref stopped the fight. Someone once asked Chuck Norris (“when Chuck Norris falls out of a boat, he doesn't get wet, the water gets Chuck Norris” etc etc) who would win in a fight to the death, him or Bruce, and Chuck turned green thinking about how Bruce would leave him alive and humiliated so no one would ever question who was best again and said, “Um, Bruce would win.” Bruce Lee was so badass, Steve McQueen learned shit from him (seriously, Bruce Lee was Steve McQueen's sifu).
Certain things are going to be skipped in this discussion, like the Hong Kong movies Bruce made when he was a little kid (I haven't seen them), The Green Hornet (ibid), the aforementioned trashing of James Garner's office, and the horrendous racist ass-fucking Bruce received re: inventing the TV show Kung Fu and never receiving any credit whatsoever (to be left to people who know more of the story than “Bruce got fucked”).
Let us commence. (Note, if I fuck up and call something by its US title, it's because that's what they were called when they were on channel 9 and on the tape case at Valdez Video in the Slope. Also, some narrative chronology/details might be a little off.)
The Big Boss aka Fists of Fury (1971)
Bruce stars as Cheng Chao-an, a dork—but with a propensity for violence; he's under a resultant vow to never fight again, and wears a locket to remind him of the vow—whose uncle brings him to Thailand to live with his cousins and work in an ice factory. The guy who runs the place is a real piece of shit rich guy, and his son is a goddamn reptile. Bruce's cousins are all right, though, and their unofficial leader Hsu Chien goes out of his way to embrace Bruce and make him feel comfortable.
One night when Hsu Chien brings Bruce along to perform a good deed—getting a crying woman's gambling-addicted husband out of a crooked casino—Bruce inadvertently breaks his vow by socking some douchebag in the jaw, and Hsu Chien is like, hey, nice moves. But Bruce re-dedicates himself to not fighting again.
The boss and his asshole son are smuggling heroin frozen in the middle of the ice—something I've always found hilarious: what, no one's gonna see a big bag o' smack in the middle of a clear block of ice?—and when a couple of Bruce's cousins find out, the boss and his kid have them whacked, and subsequently dismembered with a circular saw and frozen in their own blocks of ice. The boss promises, a la OJ, to get to the bottom of this dastardly deed. However, it takes a little long for our heroes' liking, and Hsu Chien ends up putting two and two together and realizing the cousins are dead, at which point the boss ambushes him and has him killed. The workers at the ice factory have had enough, and stage a sit-down strike, but the boss is having none of this Communism: he sends a couple busloads of Thai Teamsters to kick ass. Bruce is still trying to adhere to his vow not to fight, but his locket gets torn off, at which point . . . stand the fuck back.
Bruce fucks up about thirty guys all by himself, after which the strikebreakers decide, “Um . . . let's leave.” The boss comes up with the idea of making Bruce the foreman of the factory—bear in mind, this is three years before Michael Corleone's “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”—and they very generously give Bruce booze and hookers. His cousins get a little mad at him for hanging out with management, and Bruce finds himself shunned.
The boss' son has a bit of a hard-on for Chiao Mei, the servant girl at Bruce's cousins' place, and decides ya know what, let's kidnap her and kill everyone in the house, while Bruce is out chatting up the hooker he fucked in re: ice factory shenanigans (she's the one who tips him off about the boss smuggling smack in the ice). So Bruce finds the pile of corpses, as well as Hsu Chien's and the first two guys' in the ice factory.
And this is when Bruce changes his phaser setting from stun to kill. The boss' kid ambushes him at the ice factory, but Bruce stabs his dudes (scalping one of them with a saw) before beating Boss Jr. to death. Bruce stops off for a snack then heads to the boss' house, where he dispatches a bunch of henchmen.
Here's one of the first items of cinematic note in The Big Boss. The way the fight scenes are shot and edited was a bit radical for '71. Bruce, having a fair bit of creative control, insisted that the fights be a bit more cinematic than had heretofore been the case in HK cinema; fights had been a lot stagier, more presentational up to that point. So, the climactic fight in The Big Boss between Bruce—the New Wave cinema guy who uses camera moves and edits as part of the fight choreography—and Yin-Chieh Han—a veteran fight director in his own right, mainly in the “old,” more theatrical mode—is really a metaphor for the paradigm shift Bruce caused in martial arts cinema. Betcha weren't expecting cineaste-speak today, were ya?
Fist of Fury aka The Chinese Connection (1972)
(Side note: the reason why this movie, which has nothing to do with smack dealers, was called The Chinese Connection and the previous one, which did, was called Fists of Fury was because some retard put the wrong labels on the fucking film canisters. Seriously).
In which Bruce dabbles in historical drama: the very-loosely-fact-based tale of legendary Jingwu martial arts school. Bruce plays a hot-headed student who returns home for the funeral of teacher Huo Yuanjia, and freaks the fuck out upon the discovery that Master Huo was murdered by the Japanese. The Japanese aren't very nice to the Chinese protagonists; they pretty much openly gloat that they killed Huo, because what the fuck are you assholes gonna do? We're in charge.
Um, not if Bruce has anything to say about it. The Japanese present Jingwu with a sign that says “Sick Man of Asia” and say “we'll eat our words” if the pathetically inferior Jingwu is able to challenge the Japanese. Bruce, being Bruce, decides to take them at their word. He goes over to the Japanese school, beats the shit out of everyone there in one good Good almighty awesome fight scene, removes the paper sign from its frame, and feeds it to them.
Shit gets personal at this point. Bruce kills a couple people—the ones directly responsible for Huo Yuanjia's death—and the Japanese try and shut down Jingwu. Bruce kills a Japanese interpreter. Many asses are kicked. Ultimately, Bruce gets his revenge by killing the head Japanese bad guy, after dispensing with his Russian mercenary pal (just a couple years after the Russo-Japanese war, no less; the Land of the Rising Sun does not come off as the land of principles or morality here). But, in seeking his revenge, he's done bad things, and so he faces a police firing squad, into which he jumps defiantly. He freeze-frames in midair as we hear a volley of gunshots.
Even when I was a little kid, Fist of Fury was never my favorite Bruce movie. It's a little stiff, and there are a couple really weird anachronisms—this was the movie that caused me to learn what that word meant, in fact—like in the scene when Bruce goes for a walk in the park only to find a sign saying “No Chinese or dogs allowed,” and while the guard is busting Bruce's balls a couple dressed in total 1970s ensemble walks past Bruce into the park. Keep in mind Huo Yuanjia died in 1910, and the movie gets the date wrong but sets it even earlier, 1908. The fight scenes are pretty great, but everything else is kinda meh.
It also suffers from the fact that in 1994, Jet Li remade it as Fist of Legend, and some changes, like letting some of the Japanese be kind of all right people:
---When Jet kicks Akutagawa's ass, and derisively tells him he never would have defeated Huo Yuanjia if he'd been healthy, Akutagawa gets pissed and yells at Fujita for being an amoral fuckhole, whereupon Fujita kills him.
---Funakochi is actually a really good guy. He and Jet have that amazing battle where they end up fighting blind, and Funakochi teaches Jet “with your talent, if you learn to adapt, you'll always be unbeatable.”
---Jet's girlfriend, Funakochi's niece, is a little whiny, but nice.
These, among other factors (like Yuen Wo-Ping's fight choreography; this was what got him the Matrix gig), make Fist of Legend an infinitely better movie. Jet's so fucking awesome in it people actually have “who would win in a fight, Bruce or Jet?” arguments. (For the record, Bruce would probably own Jet, due to his extensive street fighting experience as opposed to Jet being more of a tournament and exhibition fighter; Jet's moves look pretty, but Bruce would fight dirtier). All in all, it makes Fist of Fury a little hard to watch.
Way of the Dragon aka Return of the Dragon (1972)
Bruce directs! Basically, this movie exists for two reasons: to show lots of cool shit in Rome (where it takes place) and to showcase Bruce's fighting. These are awfully legitimate reasons to watch a movie, however. And the music kicks ass.
Bruce tries his hand at comedy, playing a dorky redneck who comes to Rome to help his friend's niece (Nora Miao, really really hot) deal with the local Mafia, who are harassing her restaurant. A number of eye-rolling fish out of water gags ensue.
Bruce teaches the restaurant employees Chinese boxing, and they—but mainly Bruce, and his trusty nunchaku—sufficiently frustrate the Mafia that the Evil White Guy resorts to progressively more baroque means to dispose of Bruce, ultimately becoming the first guy in the history of cinema to say “fuck it, I need to bring in Chuck Norris.”
And so Bruce and Chuck Norris square off in the Coliseum, with a kitten refereeing. This is one of the most famous fight scenes ever, and not without reason. It's goddamn magnificent. People forget, just because Bruce eventually beats Chuck, just how good a fight Chuck puts up in this sequence. Consider:
(1) “Bruce eventually beats Chuck”? If it takes long enough for Bruce Lee to kick your ass that you need to use the word “eventually,” you put up a good fight.
(2) When Bruce (reluctantly) kills Chuck, he stages a silent funeral ceremony out of respect.
(3) It was such a good fight the kitten watches the whole fucking thing. If you can get a cat to watch something it can't fuck or eat for longer than ten seconds, you have something very compelling on your hands.
After that, Bruce dealing with the treacherous head chef of the restaurant and the Evil White Guy are a little anticlimactic, but such is life. I was always a little disappointed that Bruce didn't end up hooking up with Nora Miao because holy God Nora Miao was foxy in the early 70s, but Bruce never really was one to get the girl in his movies.
A couple random notes about Way of the Dragon: the fact that the Don of the Roman Mafia was a really Jewish-looking American guy always cracked me up. Bob Wall shows up as one of the pre-Chuck mercenaries the bad guys bring in (Bob Wall rules, especially when he tries to act, goddamn is that shit funny). The music, again, is bizarrely terrific: it's a little heavy-handed about “ok, this is Bruce doing comedy,” but it's ridiculously catchy. My second grade teacher used to ask me why I was always humming the Pink Panther theme, and I'd have to correct her, no, it's Return of the Dragon, I'm just not a good singer. (She also once asked me why I was wearing a t-shirt for the Jordanian national airline once, and I had to gently explain that “Air Jordan” was a rookie for the Chicago Bulls).
Enter the Dragon (1973)
I saw Enter the Dragon way after I'd already seen Bruce's Hong Kong movies about twenty times apiece, and as a result it really threw me for a loop when I heard Bruce speak English. The day after Enter the Dragon played on TV (I guess I was in about the 4th grade at the time) and everyone watched it, much discussion ensued:
“Yo, he sound like a Chinese Elmer Fudd.”
“Chinese people don't really talk like that, retard, Bruce just has a speech defect.”
“You know, it's funny, because he grew up in America--”
“Danny, shut up. You're always all smart and shit.”
To Bruce's credit, he doesn't hide it at all. He does a lotta yappin' in this picture, and actually turns in a pretty terrific lead performance. Sure, there's the typically bizarre facial expressions, and random weird hand gestures, all the usual Bruce stuff (and, sorry, but his accent is brutally fucking hilarious). On the other hand, his charisma was second to none and he's got genuinely good comic chemistry with John Saxon. And, come on, it's a goddamn kung fu movie.
Enter the Dragon earns a lot of points for keeping it simple. The story: Han, a nefarious, reclusive villain is holding a martial arts tournament. British Intelligence hires Bruce to infiltrate and take Han out. Bruce has personal motives as well, Han's guys, led by Bob Wall, attempted to assault his sister, who offed herself with a shard of glass rather than have her honor violated, leaving Bruce to plot revenge. Compulsive gambler John Saxon enters the tournament because he needs to get out of town to escape creditors. John Saxon's Vietnam buddy Jim Kelly also has to get out of town—he kung fu'd a couple racist cops—and so also enters the tournament. Jim Kelly's Afro stars in a tour de force turn, defying gravity, never once moving, even during fight scenes, and instilled a life-long regret that I would never be able to grow a 'fro.
On the boat out to Han's island, Bruce takes the opportunity to relieve John Saxon of a few bucks betting on a praying mantis fight, as well as teaching a racist bully a lesson by teaching him the “art of fighting without fighting,” to wit, luring him into a lifeboat that he detaches from the ship, turning the rope over to the Asian crew members the guy had been fucking with (it's never revealed whether they let the lifeboat capsize, but either way lesson learned).
The tournament gets underway. Han lavishes the competing fighters with exotic feasts and women, having Ahna Capri shlep around a group of hookers to each fighter's room, offering the fighter his pick. This leads to a pretty neat bit of character revelation: Bruce picks the British Intelligence mole so they can swap info (because Bruce, for some reason, never seems to get a boner unless you slip him roofies), John Saxon picks Ahna Capri (because John Saxon never flies coach), and Jim Kelly picks every single girl Ahna Capri brings with her (over a half dozen, if my count is correct, and he fucks all of them, which makes the fact that can still walk, let alone fight, all the more impressive).
Bruce kills Bob Wall in front of everyone. Somber murmuring ensues. Han, in disgust, pronounces Bob Wall a disgrace and treasonous (Han has a tendency to use big words without really knowing what they mean, which fucked me up on a number of elementary-school vocab tests).
So while John Saxon is rolling around in a water bed with Ahna Capri and Jim Kelly is taking a breather after his menage a neuf, Bruce goes out snooping; Jim Kelly, while outside practicing his moves, sees Bruce without recognizing him and laughs, a couple seconds after hand-signaling to a patrolling guard, “Hey, just practicing my moves . . . by the way, I just fucked eight women!”
Bruce gets up to a bit of mischief and has to kick a couple guards' asses. Han gets pissed and has Bolo kill a couple of his other guards in a demonstration of what Han considers to be necessary ruthlessness. Han, not realizing Jim Kelly wasn't the only person out that night, has Jim Kelly killed. Han then, sensing worldliness in John Saxon, tries to co-opt him into selling heroin in the States, so Han can penetrate that market. However, when Han shows John Saxon Jim Kelly's corpse as a warning, John Saxon grimly resolves to vanquish Han (because it's that kind of movie; certain kinds of villains need to be vanquished, not just killed).
Bruce ass-kicks his way through Han's underground lair, but Han catches him, and the next morning has John Saxon choose between fighting Bruce and fighting Bolo (talk about your fucked-one-way-or-the-other decisions . . .) John Saxon chooses to fight Bolo, and, impressively, wins. Han, after John Saxon kills Bolo by kicking him in the balls, panics and sends his entire private army after John Saxon and Bruce, before fleeing to his underground lair. Bruce takes off in hot pursuit.
Which leads up to Bruce pursuing Han through a maze of mirrors. This sequence is terrific, not in the least for the “if you would beat an enemy, one must first conquer himself” imagery, but because it's shot and edited for maximum suspense, and the fact that you never see a camera in one of the mirrors even for a second is pretty impressive from a logistical perspective (I wasted a couple hours shooting one time because I kept getting the camera in the mirror's reflection).
After a while, Bruce gets pissed and just starts smashing mirrors so if Han walks in front of one of them, Bruce will know he's really there (earning, by my count at a very young age, 84 years of bad luck in the process). The ploy works, and Bruce impales Han on a spear and heads on out to the aftermath of the fight, and quietly exchanges thumbs-up with John Saxon as British Intelligence mops up.
Sadly, Bruce died less than a week before Enter the Dragon's premiere, and so his greatest American fame would be posthumous. Before he died, though, Bruce managed to get about 40 minutes of usable footage in the can for:
Game of Death (1978)
Originally intended to be a demonstration of Bruce's Jeet Kune Do style, where Bruce's character fought his way through a five-floor pagoda, with each floor manned by a fighter in a different style, whose weaknesses Bruce would expose by a) kicking their ass and b) explaining through dialogue why he was kicking their ass. Bruce had finished three “floors” as well as a sequence where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar kills James Tien (Hsu Chien from The Big Boss) when he got the offer to do Enter the Dragon. Bruce put The Game of Death on hiatus, dying before he could finish directing it.
A few years later, Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse took Bruce's footage and made it the climactic sequence in a completely different movie, wherein international martial arts movie star Billy Lo has run afoul of “the Syndicate,” who send an assassin on set to take him out (eerily prefiguring the way Bruce's son Brandon would be killed by an improperly-checked handgun on The Crow). Billy doesn't die, and swears revenge blah blah blah. Game of Death kind of sucks until the footage of Bruce at the end, especially his fight against Kareem, who in real life was a student of Bruce's. Considering that Kareem was, contrary to his official 7'2”, really about 7'5” (8' with his 'fro) and Bruce was a full two feet shorter, that's automatically a pretty awesome fight. The fact that Kareem never bothers to change out of his pajamas or take his sunglasses off make it even cooler.
But in the end, Game of Death was one of many cynical attempts to cash in on the cult of Bruce. The cult of Bruce was such that even the extras from his movies went on to be stars (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, et al). If not for Bruce, none but the most dedicated nerds would ever have been aware of martial arts movies, and considering how much fun they are, that would have been a tragedy. Sure, you can poke holes in Bruce now, like an asshole: his acting was, at best, eccentric; the plots of his movies could have been written by a ten-year-old (hey, why do you think we all loved him back in the day?); and his voice, speaking English, was kind of funny (again, sorry). But focusing on all this shit at the expense of remembering how physically vital, mind-bogglingly badass, and truly original Bruce was brings to mind a quote from Enter the Dragon:
“Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” (fast-forward to the 1:20 mark if you like, the whole scene's cool).
Fuck how he's saying it, people, that's good advice. As a philosopher, Bruce was well sorted out, as well (favorites in bold):
"Be formless... shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend..."
"All kind of knowledge, eventually becomes self knowledge"
"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."
"Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there."
“A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough."
"Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it."
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
While, arguably, there may be martial artists as skilled as Bruce, or skilled in different ways, and martial arts movies with better production values or plots than Bruce's, Bruce was first. And there will never be another Bruce Lee.
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