With the recent release of Bruce Lee’s key four films on UK Blu-ray, Hugh looks at the legacy of the films, and what to expect from the discs…
Bruce Lee in death remains not just a legend or the centre of a fervent cult of admirers. He remains the touchstone by which all martial artists seeking to engage with modernity look to, much more than just a screen presence in TV and film. Devotees of cinema alone often miss this fact, content to simply enjoy the few films and TV episodes that are his legacy, but talk to practitioners and the man occupies a very special place in the history of the martial arts and their interaction with the world at large. Thus, when watching his films, it is his attitude and personal philosophies poking through the characterisation and choreography that help elevate these from a sequence of exceptional action flicks to something more.
By now, those unfamiliar with Lee beyond his name and occupation have no need of a review to fill them in; an online search will put all the details at your fingertips, while reams of articles, academic papers, books and documentaries have been created around him and his work for those who want to delve further in depth. The first true Asian global superstar, Lee’s desire to become just that took him on the journey all fans want to believe is the way of fame, from humble beginnings through earning Hollywood dues in bit parts to the scene-stealing co-lead Kato in the 60s TV version of The Green Hornet, then finally on to his own starring career in four Chinese features and one American that would change cinema and help increase the globalisation of popular culture. He died suddenly and far too young, another ground-breaking talent of that era alongside the likes of Jimi Hendrix to leave too soon before their work was done. As with Hendrix, even now there are only a few who have truly furthered his legacy; the shadow his innate talent and hard work cast is just too long.
For those coming to these films new, there is good reason to watch them now even if they have been homaged, ripped off, and parodies ad infinitum for four decades now. The blends of Chinese martial arts and spaghetti westerns with doses of crime films (and in the first two directed by Lo Wei a touch of grindhouse horror too) were ground-breaking and set the tone and templates for so much of action cinema to come the world over. Things may have improved since then technically – those who are sensitive to post-dubbing, out-of-sync audio f/x and visibly missed strikes will find these hard going – but seeing them now it’s easy to draw the line down the years from these to such recent films as the Ip Man series, Keanu Reeves’ Man of Tai Chi, Bollywood and Tollywood actioners, and even scenes in the Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer’s TV series Sense8. Even when a show like the rebooted Doctor Who includes an anachronistic kung fu sequence (by Highland monks of all people!), the choreography, shots and editing all refer back directly to those established by Lee and the creatives around him in these films.
The Big Boss, the best-looking of these four high definition remasters, sets the tone immediately. The plot is effectively a fairly typical crime story about a young Chinese travelling to Thailand to join his brother working in an ice factory. Local thugs who run in with the brothers turn out to be connected to the owner of the ice factory, who is running drugs in the ice blocks. Threats and violence escalate to full-blown war between Lee, the workers and the gangs. Director Lo Wei has come in for much criticism by fans of Lee, but his work on this and Fist of Fury is, frankly, pretty damn good by the standards of the time, combining drama, comedy, sex and violence into a near-unbeatable combination. His compositions make a small-scale, personalised crime drama into an epic war, the final showdown at the Big Boss’ home surrounded by great natural beauty in the fore- and background framing events the way scenery does in Westerns. These men facing off for their lives are irrelevant to the landscape and even the surrounding population, as buses and traffic pass by on the road outside the estate, their occupants oblivious to the bloody desperation the other side of the fence from them.
Fist of Fury, regarded by many as Lee’s finest film and the finest kung-fu film ever (some of those who regard it as such are featured in the extensive extras), shows Lee’s own ideas about characterisation, fight choreography and his personal philosophy working their way to the fore even as Lo Wei keeps the bone-crunching action and heavy-handed nationalism coming. The film, a historically-based tale during the Japanese occupation of China, tells of a martial arts school’s student seeking revenge for his dead master against the conspiracy of Japanese martial artists and quisling Chinese adminstrators who brought him down. It remains both more blatantly anti-foreigner than its 90s remake by Gordon Chan, Yuen Woo-Ping and Jet Li, but it is also a darker, personalised, more animalistic 70s revenge pic. Lee’s character tics as an action hero – the removal of the clothing layers fight by fight, the slow wiping away of one’s own blood spilt, the animalistic yells and cries as he expels chi particularly around incapacitating or killing moves – take hold here, while the design of the fight choreography like dances rather than brawls becomes even more impressive as the cameras and blocking figure out how best to capture it. Lee’s tendency to actually make contact in the fights can be observed, making for more realistic fights if tough days on set. The heroic yet downbeat ending matches perfectly with moments that feel almost like a wartime spy pic, making the film once again an interesting blend of other popular genres with the uniquely Chinese kung-fu genre.
Way of the Dragon is Lee’s first chance behind the camera, and he continues to expand his horizons as a performer and fighter as well as those of the audience as director and scriptwriter. Again he advances the genre with the initial half-hour of country-bumpkin-style fish-out-of-water comedy, to become a hallmark of both period and modern-day-set HK films after that, not least but especially visible in the Peking Opera-influenced films of the 3 Dragons (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao). Filmed in Rome as well as back in the studio, Lee’s character gets mixed up with local mixed-race gangsters while defending his friend’s Chinese restaurant (compare with Chow Yun-Fat’s arc in A Better Tomorrow), giving the film an air of a kung-fu take on Italian poliziotteschi films (particularly the sun-kissed finale). However it’s the fight between Lee and imported American enforcer Chuck Norris against the backdrop of the Coliseum, observed only by a stray kitten, that cements the movie’s place in history, with the two of them clearly really going at it in some scenes. The sense of respect and honour demonstrated by the two opponents would also become a mainstay of future HK films, not least those of director John Woo.
Lee’s next project, Game of Death, was both a step back towards a more traditional martial arts film story structure and another move forward as a showcase for Lee’s talents and philosophy. While he and fellow actors from the earlier films started shooting sequences, Warner and director Robert Clouse came knocking. The international success of their Western production Enter the Dragon, a blend of HK martial arts and James Bond-style pulp actioner, made Lee wonder if Game of Death could be reworked, with another of his students, former Bond George Lazenby, joining the production. However, on the day the team were meeting to discuss such a rework, Lee’s life would shockingly end. The film that bears the name and includes sequences and shots from the earlier shoot but was completed and released in 1978. The international cut is the one featured here on the disc, although scenes from the longer HK cut feature in the deleted scenes. Producer Raymond Chow asked Enter the Dragon director Clouse to help him and fight director Sammo Hung (co-credited in the Chinese print) fashion a narrative to both join up the existing sequences and act as a tribute to the late young master. The final production is both a disjointed mess – the tale of actor Billy Lo and his white singer girlfriend in conflict with local and international criminals, the former faking his death to track down their leaders and take them down – and full of interesting moments, some of them quite poignant. The music on the Chinese cut suits the film better, but John Barry’s score to the international cut frequently elevates on-screen beats and material, while when Clouse doesn’t ruin them in the editing or via poorly placed cameras, some of Hung’s action scenes stand out nicely as being in the spirit of Lee. The use of real footage of crowds at Lee’s funeral could have been exploitative but manages to work. The motorbike-based action scene towards the end prefigures John Woo’s use of them in the majestic Hard Boiled, but it’s the final fight between Lee himself and his student, American basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that everyone paid to see and which actually delivers on every score. These elements by themselves earn the film a place on the shelf.
The violence in these four Chinese films, finally released to U.K. blu-ray through cult TV specialists MediumRare last month, has a fractious history with U.K. audiences and censors. It is Lee’s mastery of the nun-chaku that led to its popularity in 70s Britain and their misuse that led to the BBFC’s blanket ban on their visibility in films released here. For the best part of two decades, Lee’s work was unavailable in anything other than butchered form to those resident here, until multi-region VHS started to make uncut bootlegs possible. Fullscreen pan & scan however was almost as vicious a butchery, so the advent of uncut widescreen DVDs in the early years of this century was like manna from heaven for the British kung-fu film fan. Those discs, the work of celebrated label Hong Kong Legends (following on from the excellent work of VHS label Made in Hong Kong), had such in-depth extras they have all been ported over here, meaning that not only do you get a great film when you buy one of these discs, you get hours of extra material that originally set the benchmark Criterion-style for fully contextualising both the film, its makers and Lee himself. (This author when he worked in DVD produced a commentary with one expert author who described HKL’s Bey Logan as “the man to beat” when it came to commentaries worth hearing; listening to them again now, he was not wrong.) Sitting down with all four will teach the viewer as much about Lee, his work, his colleagues and his era as a university course could. Treating 70s HK kung-fu films the way the Criterion Collection treats its selections set a standard for how “low” art and trash cinema could be re-presented in the digital era, pre-figuring the work today of labels such as Arrow, Shout! Factory, Network, Shameless and 88 Films.
However, Hong Kong’s own legacy of film preservation is a historical calamity, and Lee’s films are no exception. There has been a fair bit of justified criticism of Fortune Star’s remastering work on the many classic films in its catalogue. However, while it is entirely possible to find fault with the masters here, many of us watching grew up seeing beaten-up, cut and dubbed film prints (if we were lucky), or umpteenth generation bootleg VHS tapes all washed out and fuzzy. DVD was the first time we started to see these films even close to how they were intended, and these discs unquestionably improve over those in every respect. There is now so much detail and colour visible in these widescreen high definition masters that for those of us familiar with Asian countries one can practically smell the flowers or alleyways and feel the heat.
Ultimately, faults attributable to the original prints used are neither here nor there – modern restoration cannot be expected to compensate for already-old stock footage spliced in, or lighting or in-camera issues on the day. If there is an overriding issue to experienced eyes it is how dark many shots now appear, despite clarity of detail and colour; some of that is down to the stock used but some of that is decisions made in the mastering process. Red cloth or paint can sometimes be a little too vibrant, while skin tones can vary somewhat, although not in the same shot. Parts of Fist and Way look muddy and low resolution too. Death has been discussed online as an upscale, yet there are several sequences that look properly scanned and mastered, making one wonder about how these were prepared. In the end, however, these will do until such time as money and effort are spent on tracking down and properly restoring the best existing materials (including that private collector’s copy of the uncut Chinese edition of The Big Boss).
Audio is more of an issue. Generally the 5.1 mixes in Mandarin, Cantonese or English are pretty lousy, so opt for the original 2-channel mono tracks every time. However, anyone not familiar with the post-dubbing and library effects of the era will probably have difficulty appreciating what’s on offer here; those experienced in the ways of cinema then will certainly enjoy the quality of those mono tracks.
Extras are simply superb: commentaries (two per film, from Andrew Staton, Will Johnston, Bey Logan and Mike Leeder), extensive interviews with cast and crew members, deleted scenes, title sequences and full-blown documentaries make for a degree-level education in the man, his movies, and the people and times around them. Owners of previous DVDs will be familiar with most of them, but they are absolutely essential, especially the reconstruction of the surviving Game of Death footage on that disc. That forty minute sequence gives such a clear-cut sense of how that film would have looked and sounded as a follow-up to Way it’s arguably more valuable than the main feature on that disc.
All in all, Lee’s legacy is simply too important to cinema around the world for action fans not educated in him to pass these four discs up. While long-time fans will probably weigh up the value to them of these discs most will probably plump for owning them, and they’d be right; newcomers to Lee’s life and works should do so too. Watching them again (several times over given the commentaries) to write this feature has been an absolute joy, full of great, thrilling moments of pure cinema yet also possessed of lessons for filmmakers today and even just audience members living their lives. Many have tried to honour this legacy, but few have made such a difference in so short a space of time, although his son Brandon had only just begun to when he too was taken far too young from this world. Still they are both missed, yet their presences hang over action cinema and television the world over, ensuring they live on. If you have ever loved action movies and remain ignorant of them, these four discs are here to say it’s time to change that.
The Big Boss, Fist Of Fury, The Way Of The Dragon and Game Of Death are available on dual format UK DVD and Blu-ray from MediumRare Entertainment.
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