Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book by Ric Meyers Read Free Book Online Page B

nine months after Fist of Fury . Essentially, this is Bruce Lee ’s last film. It is certainly the only film he completely controlled, and the only film in which his approach was primary. In it he played unassuming, but fiercely patriotic and surprisingly clever, Tang Lung, who travels to Rome to help relatives run a Chinese restaurant.
    Although the first part of the movie chronicles largely humorous “stranger in a strange land” confrontations with the locals (including a child and a prostitute), Lee slowly strips his character of his surface naiveté to reveal a supremely capable hero beneath. First Tang Lung shows the other restaurant employees the superiority of “Chinese boxing” in an alley behind the restaurant. But when racketeers arrive looking for protection money, the lessons become more pointed. He teaches the derisive, arrogant thugs a comparative lesson in a nicely structured fight that culminates with the reappearance of the nunchaku. Probably the sharpest moment here is when the hoods’ leader manages to grab it. At first he seems to think that it will imbue him with some sort of magical power, but he winds up knocking himself out with it.
    All this is achieved, essentially silently, and is a mark of Lee’s skill as a film director (as is his use — obvious in the Hong Kong edition, but steamrolled by subsequent U.S. dubbing — of different languages … the Chinese and Italians literally can’t understand one another). The next major step forward Way of the Dragon takes is in allowing the appearance of guns. Guns could sound the death knell of kung fu movies because no matter how skillful one is, no martial artist can fight a bullet (a lesson the Boxer Rebellioners learned the hard way). Lee confronts that problem in this movie, Kato -style, by having his character make wooden darts that he hurls into his enemies’ hands. It is the most unlikely technique in the picture, but at least Lee attempted to deal with this particularly sticky genre drawback.
    Tang Lung repeatedly stymies the Mafioso’s takeover attempts, so the big boss decides to fight fire with fire — calling in one Japanese and two American martial artists. Two of them, played by Wang Ing-sik and Bob Wall , pretty much take care of the restaurant employees. The final American is flown in especially to take on Tang Lung. It is Lee’s old California friend Chuck Norris , in his first major screen role. The two face each other in the Roman Coliseum, using their real skills, with all the graciousness and solemnity of honor-bound warriors, in the most realistic empty-handed martial art fight ever filmed to that date.
    Lee smartly infuses this serious, yet exciting, scene with small humorous touches, supplied by a mute kitten that witnesses the fight, and Norris’ own abundant body hair. Another change in Lee’s approach is in the ending — he is neither arrested nor killed. Instead, it looks as if he will settle down with the romantic lead (played in all three Lee films by the lovely Nora Miao ), only to suddenly pack up and go.
    “In this world of guns and knives, wherever Tang Lung may go, he will always travel on his own,” is the last line. And travel Bruce Lee did. All the way back to America. There, two projects were being created just for him. One was Enter the Dragon (1973), produced by Fred Weintraub , who had seen some of the those “swingy-arm” kung fu films, and “loved the last ten minutes, when the hero would take on an army of crooks and defeat them all bare-handed. I was certain a hugely successful American movie could be made.
    “I went to Hong Kong and saw Bruce’s films,” he told me, “and brought one back to show Ted Ashley [then chairman of the board at Warner Brothers]. If it wasn’t for Ted, the movie would have never gotten made. I had half the money, but everybody else had turned me down — including other executives at Warners. But Ted asked me what I needed, and then said, ‘Go