If you love action movies, you love Bruce Lee. If you don’t love Bruce Lee, you don’t love action movies. I don’t make the rules, but there it is: in his tragically short career, Bruce Lee redefined what was possible in martial arts movies in ways that are still being felt today.
As a stuntman and fight choreographer, Lee understood the importance of the long, unbroken take: the idea that seeing real people have at each other in the most realistic way possible was more impressive than the quick cutting and careful shooting that enables a stuntman to sub in for a leading actor who may not be too keen on risking having their nose spread across their face for the sake of an on-screen dust up. With Lee’s movies, you’re never in any doubt that it’s Lee throwing punches and kicks.
As an actor and performer, Lee’s charisma is incredible. He was a natural star who commanded the screen, but struggled against the then prevailing (white, western, dumb) wisdom that an Asian man couldn’t carry a film. Which is why he skipped out of Los Angeles after making his mark as Kato, driver and bodyguard to the eponymous hero in TV series The Green Hornet (1966–67) and decamped to Hong Kong where he made the string of movies on offer here and changed cinema forever. Even when the plots are rather rudimentary – an issue with a lot of ‘70s martial arts cinema, if we’re being honest – Bruce Lee is eminently watchable.
And let’s not ignore the man’s sheer physicality – Lee’s martial arts prowess is legendary for a reason, but even when he’s not actively engaged in kicking mooks onto the next spoke on the Great Wheel of Karma, he’s just something to see. His whole body is like a clenched fist waiting to be unleashed, every muscle tense, every nerve-ending raw.
Lee looks more dangerous asleep than most people do awake, and that lends an element of suspense to his films as we wait for this obvious murder machine to be unleashed on whichever drug lord, gang leader or international crime kingpin has made the mistake of raising his ire.
Fist of Fury (1972)
In the first film in the marathon, Lee’s second major starring role sees him as a kung fu student in 1910 Shanghai who wants nothing more than to marry his fiancée. However, when his master dies of apparent illness and the students of a Japanese karate dojo show up at the funeral to mock him, he suspects the latter are responsible for the former, and the stage is set for a series of brutal kung fu vs karate smackdowns. This is a no-nonsense, meat and potatoes “my school is better than your school” martial arts movie that well and truly delivers on the fights/running time ratio. Keep an eye out for a cameo from a young Jackie Chan.
Fist of Fury is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
The Way of the Dragon (1972)
Bruce is on both sides of the camera on this one. The Way of the Dragon is his only completed directorial effort.
When a Chinese restaurant in Rome is threatened by the Mafia, the restaurant owner sends home for help, which arrives in the form of Bruce Lee. At first appearing to be a clueless bumpkin completely out of his element in cosmopolitan Italy, Lee soon proves very adept at kicking heads, prompting the Mafia to recruit martial artists of their own to see him off. Happily for the audience, one of them is Chuck Norris, and so we get the unparalleled treat of watching two supremely talented martial artists rain hell on each other, a scene only rivalled here by the earlier sight of Bruce devastating a pack of mooks with paired nunchaku.
The Way of the Dragon is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
Game of Death (1972/1978)
Only partially filmed at the time of Lee’s death, The Game of Death was later completed by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse, a decision which is still controversial today. Bruce plays a martial arts movie star who is resisting pressure from a criminal syndicate who want a piece of his films. After an assassin shoots him in the face, he has reconstructive plastic surgery, altering his appearance and allowing him to go on a roaring rampage of revenge. The Game of Death only uses a little over eleven minutes of footage from the original shoot, but it’s eleven minutes of blistering action, including Bruce taking on his real-life student, towering basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Game of Death is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
The Big Boss (1971)
Lee’s first starring role on the big screen sees him working at an ice factory in Thailand, only to discover that a crime lord (the titular “big boss”) is using the factory as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation. This will not stand, of course, but Bruce has taken an oath of non-violence, wearing a jade pendant as a symbol of his promise to his dear old mother to foreswear kicking people to death. Fortunately for the audience the bad guys keep pushing and pushing and pushing, until Bruce has no choice but to assault the Big Boss’s compound and beat the living snot out of every henchman who crosses his path.
The Big Boss is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
Also look out for The Death of Bruce Lee, coming to SBS On Demand on 20 December. The documentary follows an investigation initiated by Bruce Lee’s brother, Robert Lee, who was never satisfied with the official cause of death – a fatal reaction to aspirin. Robert Lee enlists a former Hong Kong police detective to look into the death, and along the way the investigation uncovers more about the life of a complex superstar.
