Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book (7 page)

Lee looked very lean, even wan, in the footage, and rumors circulated about his exhausting schedule and arduous training (including one exercise where he strapped electrodes to a band on his forehead and tried punching in the time between two electric shocks). Tales of his blinding, debilitating migraines were rampant (as were stories about various ways he tried to relieve them). Nevertheless, he soldiered on. More than an hour of nearly finished footage was completed on
Game of Death
, and it was looking like a magnum opus of Bruce’s kung fu — smart, humorous, effective, exciting, fascinating, and even deep.

But on July 20, 1973, Bruce Lee
died. After he was late to a dinner with Raymond Chow
and George Lazenby
to discuss making a film with the Australian actor who had resigned the role of James Bond
during
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
(1969), he was found in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei
. His death was attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage, or brain aneurism. None of his fans could believe it, and the hysteria that followed was equally hard to believe.

Some said that he was murdered by envious kung fu masters using the “Death Touch,” or poisoned by jealous rival studios. There were tales of his involvement with gangsters and drug pushers. In short, no one could believe that their idol, their “Chinese Superman,” had died naturally. He had to have been killed by some sort of insidious supervillain or because of an elaborate conspiracy.

Enter the Dragon
premiered in the U.S. during the summer of 1973, then opened in Hong Kong in October. In the meantime, a small distributing company, National General, had secured the rights to present Lee’s earlier films to the American public. The movies were dubbed, and the Chinese titles translated.
The Big Boss
was supposed to be called
The Chinese Connection
, and
Fist of Fury
was to be called
Fists of Fury.
But, with the care and consideration customarily reserved for “chop-socky” flicks, the titles were switched. Now
The Big Boss
was
Fists of Fury
and
Fist of Fury
was
The Chinese Connection.
That’s how American audiences saw the features, and that’s how American audiences still know them … by the wrong titles. Soon after,
Way of the Dragon
came to U.S. shores as
Return of the Dragon
— promoted, of course, as a sequel to
Enter the Dragon
…
although made before that film.

Bruce Lee
was the most successful Chinese star in the world — a month after he was already dead. Still, decades later, people don’t believe the “official” cause of his death. They maintain that drugs had to be part of his downfall. While it is impossible to say for certain that Bruce Lee
did not use drugs, Fred Weintraub
was definite in his opinion: “Let me tell you that Bruce would never put anything into his body that would hurt him. I had him examined at UCLA the week before he died. He was in great shape. He had an aneurism. That happens to people under the age of thirty-five.”

Mike Stone
echoes Weintraub’s sentiments. “I’ve met several people with Bruce’s intensity and, interestingly enough, those people died quite young. But the unique thing about Bruce was that his belief in himself, and the intensity with which he did things, was always at a peak. He had a tremendous faith in himself and a belief in his ability.”

Sadly, the Chinese film industry could not let their hero go honorably. They chose to remember him by mounting literally dozens of quickie, rip-off productions that purportedly showed the king back in action, or told his life story. Even the best of these films were pretty bad, if for nothing else than they were being made at all. Asian hackmeisters recruited Ho Tsung-tao
, an otherwise credible actor with good martial arts skills, to become “Bruce Li” in a series of undistinguished (but fun) adventures like
Bruce Lee
Superdragon
(1974),
Goodbye Bruce Lee
, His Last Game of Death
(1975), Exit the Dragon
, Enter the Tiger
(1976), and
Bruce Lee
Against Supermen
(1977).

These movies can be entertaining in a ludicrous way. One never knows when a Bruce Lee
“clone” will appear behind trademark sunglasses (as in
Exit the Dragon
,
when the “real” Bruce Lee
asks Bruce Li to solve his murder if he just so happens to get killed in the near future) or when mountain gorillas will rise on their hind legs and fight kung fu-style (as in 1977’s
Shaolin
Invincibles
).

Following hot on Bruce Li’s heels was Bruce Le, originally named Huang Kin-lung
. At least Li was a decent performer — an actor who was able to shake his Lee clone mantle in subsequent years to act in better, more respectable, productions. Le is not the former and has not done the latter. Le is a wooden screen presence, sinking any scene in which he isn’t swinging his fists or feet. In addition, he seems content to toil in exploitive garbage, trading on both his slight physical resemblance and willingness to go through Bruce’s superficial motions. The directors and writers of these travesties manage to sink anything their star can’t. Certainly there are defenders and fans of these efforts, but I am not one of them.

Quite possibly the most blatant, shameless exploitation came with
I
Love You, Bruce Lee
,
known in America as
Bruce Lee
: His Last Days, His Last Nights
(1975). Sold as Betty Ting Pei
’s own statement about her alleged lover’s fate, it was actually the esteemed Shaw Brothers
Studio’s sneering, shabby “settling of accounts” with the “star that got away” and the ex-employee, Raymond Chow
, who had the audacity to make it on his own. Starring Betty herself with Li Hsui-hsien
(aka Danny Lee
) as Bruce, it was helmed by lean, mean action thriller maker (Johnny) Lo Mar
as the most obvious of sore-loser-hack jobs, made all the more sad by Ting Pei’s willingness to degrade herself. The film pictured her as a hopelessly self-delusional, constantly nude gold-digger with a self-worth issue, and Bruce as an immature, egomaniacal rapist who occasionally gripped his skull in pain.

After trotting out mean-spirited caricatures for ninety minutes, the sympathetic bartender to whom Betty has been pouring out her memories beats up some thugs who want to punish the girl, and tells them to respect Bruce’s memory … which is more than this movie did. But the worst was yet to come. As howlingly bad fun as
I Love You, Bruce Lee
was, the ultimate indignity came from Bruce’s own studio, Golden Harvest
. With about a hundred minutes of footage Bruce had completed before he died, Raymond Chow
announced to the world that
The Game of Death
would premiere in 1978.

They had Bruce Lee
’s notes. They had Bruce Lee
’s hand-picked co-stars, James Tien
and Chieh Yuan
. They had the footage. Using the co-stars, they could have created a framing story, and fashioned a film that honored Bruce Lee
’s wishes. Instead, they jettisoned all but eleven minutes of Bruce’s work, and hired Robert Clouse
to create what was essentially an entirely new movie … a patently ludicrous and shameful one.

Using several obvious stand-ins, and some of the most labored camera tricks imaginable (including positioning a stand-in so that it looks like his body is coming from a cut-out picture of Bruce’s face pasted on a mirror), Clouse tells the labored, laughable story of movie star “Billy Lo” fighting for his freedom against a crime syndicate who wants to control him … or something equally absurd. Rather than being a brilliant treatise on kung fu, in Bruce’s so-called collaborators’ hands, it becomes the stupid story of “Brewce Leigh” fighting an insane actor’s agent.

Markedly better was 1981’s
Tower of Death,
known in the United States as
Game of Death
II.
Directed by Ng See-yuen
, who also directed
Bruce Lee
, the True Story
(U.S.:
Bruce Lee
, the Man and the Myth
,
1976), it starred Kim Tai-chung
in the leading role of Bobby Lo, the brother of Billy Lo (Bruce’s
Game of Death
character)
.
This time the actual Bruce Lee
footage came from scenes edited out of
Enter the Dragon
,
with all new dialogue dubbed in. The “real” Bruce Lee
appears in only the first half hour, “playing” Billy, who is mysteriously killed, allowing Bobby to investigate. Bob-o is then given a series of eight, increasingly more ambitious, fights, until he reaches the top of the pagoda, where he has an excellent battle with Huang Jang-li
, one of the screen’s best “leg fighters” (i.e., kickers). In a bunch of dreadful movies, this one
reigns supreme, which, of course, isn’t saying much.

Some fans seem to think that
Game of Death
would have been Bruce’s ultimate kung fu statement, had he lived. But given that Lee wanted to continue making movies, that opinion is doubtful. After all, he had yet to realize his full potential as an actor, filmmaker, or even as a martial artist. But there is no doubt Lee’s honorably realized
Game of Death
would have been far superior to what Clouse, Golden Harvest
, and Warner Brothers came up with.

Fred Weintraub
put it in perspective. “I miss Bruce. I liked him. We fought, but it was never personal. It was for the film, for art’s sake. He knew I cared and that was all that counted. He knew, in a funny kind of way, that I was the only one who cared enough to get him into the international market. Nobody wanted him. In the history of show business, there had never been an international Chinese star, especially not one who was five-foot-seven and not gorgeous. Bruce stood tall. Bruce is martial arts. He made the form work. No matter who you see doing martial arts, you always compare him to Bruce Lee
. Say ‘cowboy’ and you think ‘John Wayne
.’ Say ‘martial arts’ and the name that pops to mind is Bruce Lee
. That makes him one of the few giants in show business. That’s the mark of his influence and his genius.”

And like any icon, he would not stay down. Decades after his death, he has remained a constant, with books, magazines, posters, re-releases of his films, statues, countless collectibles, and more. At the time of this writing, there is both an amusement park and a Broadway musical being planned. So, naturally, a big budget Hollywood bio-pic was green-lit. The production started promisingly. Rob Cohen
, an eclectic and enthusiastic director, and the producer of such popular projects as
The Running Man
(1987) with Arnold Schwarzenegger
, set about adapting Linda Lee
’s biography
Bruce Lee
: The Man Only I Knew,
with the Lee family’s cooperation. He even hired several top jeet kune do
teachers to choreograph the film’s many real and imagined fight scenes. Then the problems started.

Ironically, most of the people who created
Dragon
: The Bruce Lee
Story
(1993)
probably wouldn’t think of them as problems. As far as they may have been concerned,
Dragon
was a critical and financial success, so what could possibly be the problem? There were really only two: finding the bite-size bits of truth amid the total fabrications and wild flights of fantasy, then, perhaps more importantly, honoring Lee’s non-cinematic life’s work: the creation of jeet kune do
.

Dilemma one: how to communicate the anger Lee reportedly felt throughout his life — the anger that made him win any confrontation at all costs. In the case of
Dragon
,
the anger was visually manifested as a demon — a demon dressed in what appears to be Japanese, not Chinese, armor. Was this a clever nod to the Japanese villains who helped make
The Chinese Connection
so successful, or Hollywood standard operating racism? You decide.