Review - It is remarkable that Bruce Lee achieved such fame from just five kung fu movies of which one, Enter the Dragon, a Hong Kong-Hollywood collaboration, was a worldwide smash.
Photo of Bruce Lee from the film ''Fists of Fury" in 1973. Photo: Public Domain
Film historians have pointed out that Lee was part of a trio of superstars who catapulted to fame in the 1970s, playing ethnic underdogs; there were Lee and the likes of Sylvester Stallone’s Italian-American working class hero, Rocky, and John Travolta’s dancing hero in Saturday Night Fever.
Perhaps the greatest of them was Bruce Lee.
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Before him, Asians in Hollywood films were restricted to Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan or the occasional cook in a Western; yet here was Lee, the leading man, virile, tough, sexy.
Before him, kung fu movies were a staple in Hong Kong, after him they were one of the defining genres of the 1970s. Yet even today, Hollywood movies with Asian leads are so rare that this month’s Crazy Rich Asians made headlines for it.
Matthew Polly’s Bruce Lee: A Life is a welcome analysis of the making of an icon, whose image has lived on long after his death at 32. It is odd that there haven’t been more.
Polly himself told an interviewer that most half-decent actors get three biographies, so he was surprised to find no attempts to produce a definitive biography on Lee since his death in 1973.
Polly’s work is comprehensive, meticulously researched and large: as the Irish Times put it, “Enter the Door Stopper”.
It tells the story of the brawling, excitable kid who loved martial arts and couldn’t sit still through to his death on the cusp of fulfilling his goal of being a bigger star than Steve McQueen.
His mother, Grace, was part of a family of wealthy Eurasian traders, Chinese businessmen and concubines in the Hong Kong mercantile milieu, but she had abandoned it all to marry Li Hoi-Chuen who specialised in Chinese Opera comedy parts and had made some money performing for the Japanese when they conquered the city in 1941.
Lee was born, apparently in the hour and year of the Dragon, in San Francisco’s Chinatown while his parents were touring California with an acting troupe.
Bruce Lee with his parents. Photo: Public Domain
Raised in Hong Kong, he got a taste for three things; acting, fighting and dancing. It was perfect training for stardom.
His father’s contacts got him parts in movies as a child actor. He went on to make around two dozen films. But his other interest was fighting - first, brawling with schoolmates, forming fighting gangs and looking for trouble.
His family knew him as “Mr Never Sits Still”.
Martial arts was the solution to instil discipline and use up the energy. Lee learned Wing Chun, which emphasises speed and agility, under master teacher Ip Man whose life would become its own mini-film genre after Lee became a star.
The young Bruce Lee was also a dancer and he won the Hong Kong cha cha contest as the craze swept the colony.
By the time he was a young adult, Lee was familiar with acting, martial arts and was a great mover.
Where Polly’s biography takes off is when Lee is shipped off to the States by his family to learn discipline, go to college and make something of himself after being repeatedly threatened with expulsion from school in Hong Kong.
The chapters of the young Bruce Lee dreaming of setting up a kung fu school, scrapping for parts in Hollywood, fighting with established kung fu schools, training McQueen and James Coburn in martial arts and seething at his troubles in getting parts because he was Chinese, are the best in the book.
Lee hustled and hustled hard to make it.
Polly himself trained in martial arts. He dropped out of Princeton and headed to China to train under the Shaolin monks, an experience he captured in Tapped Out and American Shaolin.
So he scrupulously records every new recruit to Lee’s ventures and even the fight sequences as Lee challenged the existing karate, judo and kung fu champions with his mix of martial arts relying on his speed, agility, anger and belief that no single school of fighting had a monopoly.
So was Bruce Lee a kung fu savant who made films or an actor who was obsessed with mixed martial arts? Polly favours the latter.
Van Williams as the Green Hornet and Bruce Lee as Kato from the television program The Green Hornet. Photo: Public Domain
A break came when he landed the role as Kato, the faithful kung fu-kicking valet to the Green Hornet, made to cash in on the success of the campy Batman TV series.
At the time, the only other Asian face on American TV was that of Kam Fong playing Detective Chin Ho on Hawaii 5-0.
When the Green Hornet folded after 18 months, Lee was passed over for the part of wandering warrior-monk, Caine in Kung Fu for a drugged out David Carradine.
Lee was furious. He determined to never again play the part of Asian sidekick. The goal now was to be the leading man, calling the shots, showing Hollywood that he could make it, bigger than Steve McQueen.
It was back in Hong Kong that the goal started to come together. The lock on Hong Kong’s film industry by Run Shaw, the entertainment mogul, was being challenged by his former protege Raymond Chow. When Lee returned home for a visit, it was Chow who moved to sign him.
It didn’t start well. The movie was The Big Boss. Director Lo Wei was used to the Shaw Brothers’ factory system in which actors did what they were told, not an ambitious upstart from the US.
He hedged his bets and hired two stars, Lee and James Tien. The first fights belong to Tien. But by the end, there’s no doubt who is the star.
Tien has been killed off. It is Lee who fights the climactic battle against the evil crime boss. The fight is electric; Lee is fast, furious, feral and very sexy.
Despite some mawkish acting, The Big Boss was a hit in Hong Kong. The New York Times, reviewing what were labelled 'chop socky' movies, sniffed that it was terrible; it “makes the worst Italian Westerns look like the most solemn and noble achievements of the early Soviet cinema.”
But cinemagoers in Hong Kong and beyond flocked to it and Lee was on his way.
Unfortunately, this is the point at which Polly’s book becomes a little flat. There is some great gossip, but Polly becomes bogged in the detail of film deals as first Fist of Fury and then Way of the Dragon rolled off the production line and straight to the top of the Hong Kong box office.
The final climactic fight scene between a bulked up Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee in the Coliseum:
Polly reveals that Lee asked his pal Chuck Norris to put on 20 pounds for the final fight scene in the Colosseum in Way of the Dragon.
Lee told Norris it was so he looked more intimidating, but Polly suspects it was so Lee’s chiselled chest would be shown off. Norris later said he felt and looked like an elephant.
Lee was now a huge star in Hong Kong; his every move was documented in the press, strangers would challenge him to fights on the street, there was a kidnapping attempt on his family, he started carrying a gun.
Polly captures the hysteria, but he struggles to capture just why Lee ignited audiences.
Lee was careful to make sure his movies would appeal to Chinese; Fist of Fury has Lee fighting back against Japanese aggressors who murder his martial arts master in occupied Shanghai.
Polly is a competent biographer of Lee’s films but he misses the charge that Lee gave audiences. There was the feral, feline movements, the tomcat yowl of his fights and the sexual charge of his bare torso.
Watch the final scene of Fist of Fury again when Lee charges a line of gunmen then is captured in freeze frame as the sound of bullets ring out. It is the stuff of film legend, breathtaking, riveting.
Even US film critics, less huffy than the New York Times, began to call him the “Fred Astaire of Martial Arts”.
It all came to an end in Kowloon on 20 July, 1973.
Enter the Dragon, a Hong Kong-Hollywood production with Lee as star, had wrapped. It would soon be a global phenomenon, sweeping box offices across the globe, and making Lee bigger than Steve McQueen, the first Hollywood Asian superstar.
After Enter the Dragon, everybody was kung fu fighting, as the 1974 song had it. But Lee was found dead in the bed of his mistress, Betty Ting Pei, a Taiwanese actress.
Rumours spread and have persisted ever since. Was it drugs? Was he killed by triads? Had Betty killed him in a jealous rage?
The coroner’s inquest listed the official cause of death as brain swelling caused by sensitivity to the painkiller Equagesic.
Polly has a plausible alternative explanation. He claims Lee died of heat stroke. He had been working in a stuffy dubbing studio in the middle of a fiery Hong Kong heatwave.
More importantly, says Polly, he had just had the sweat glands under his armpits removed as he thought it looked unsightly on film. He felt dizzy, overheated and collapsed. Outside, the tempest of kung fu mania was gathering storm.
The book itself is worth reading. It is readable, extensively researched, written in a chatty style and offering new details of Bruce Lee’s short life.
If it doesn’t quite capture Bruce Lee the superstar, it does reveal Lee the ambitious, thrusting actor and fighter.
Moreover, it gives some of the flavour of the phenomenon which swept around the globe. Even today, Bruce Lee posters are a staple of $2 shops.
On a recent trip to China, I counted more than 400 different statues and souvenirs featuring Bruce Lee.
Back then, the kung fu wave launched new stars, established one of the defining genres of 1970 films and set in motion a pop cultural movement that flowed from Hong Kong to Hollywood then beyond into Africa, Europe, the Pacific and even to Te Puke, New Zealand.
There, an English-born GP, whose usual film favourites were Dr Zhivago or James Bond, decided one primary school holiday night to see what all the fuss was about, ignored the film rating, and took his ten-year-old son down to the town’s local cinema to watch Enter the Dragon. And I’ve never forgotten it.
