Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’
Photo: Courtesy of the Criterion CollectionBruce Lee was just 32 years old in 1973 when an adverse drug reaction triggered his sudden death less than a month before the premiere of what became his most successful film, “Enter the Dragon.” Yet he accomplished many things during his short life, including elevating various martial arts, primarily kung fu, to world-wide popularity and increasing, at least for a time, the visibility of Asian actors on American film and television screens.
Locally, his most significant impact may have been helping forge the cultural identity of Hong Kong, where the native film industry remained parochial until Lee, who was born in San Francisco but moved to the island at age 3 months, energized it and set the stage for the emergence of figures like Jackie Chan, John Woo and Chow Yun-fat.
Now, as the Chinese government in Beijing enacts new measures of control over Hong Kong, that unique identity is in peril. So the moment seems ripe for reappraising Lee’s import and impact, something easily accomplished thanks to “Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits,” a set of seven Blu-rays just out from the Criterion Collection.
A still from ‘The Big Boss’
Photo: Courtesy of the Criterion CollectionIf ever there was an overnight sensation years in the making, it was Lee. He had been a child and teenage star in Cantonese cinema before returning to the U.S. in the late 1950s, making his mark as an iconoclastic West Coast martial artist. In the mid-1960s, he appeared as the sidekick Kato on ABC’s poorly received “Green Hornet” TV series. Dejected when substantive Hollywood work eluded him, he returned to Hong Kong and was quickly cast in “The Big Boss” (1971), the first of the five films—all in impressively clean and bright 4K or 2K restorations—that compose the bulk of this collection. It was his 21st movie, and his first true hit.
It takes 15 minutes before Lee lands a blow in this picture, and a full 46 before we see a high kick and a real fight. Lee isn’t even the movie’s star in the first reel; James Tien is. But Lee radiates quiet charisma, and when his graceful moves finally arrive—he was an adolescent cha-cha champion, after all—you can’t look away. The plot, a very bad man operates a heroin ring out of a Thai ice factory, is bare bones, and the ending, with Lee’s character arrested by a platoon of cops after destroying the syndicate, daft.
A similarly confounding conclusion caps the far better “Fist of Fury” (1972), ostensibly a period piece set in early 20th-century Shanghai, in which Lee plays the star pupil of a martial-arts master murdered by overbearing Japanese rivals. Each film, in turn, held the Hong Kong box-office record, so for his next effort, “The Way of the Dragon” (1972), Lee was allowed to write and direct, as well as star. The result, set in Rome, centers on a Chinese restaurant that becomes the target of a criminal gang. The overall package is clumsy, but there are some scene-stealing villains, including a mincing Chinese henchman and a gruff American mob boss. There’s also the now-famous fight sequence between Lee and Chuck Norris at the Colosseum, most of it clearly filmed on a sound stage. (The scene hasn’t aged well; it’s bloated, flat and full of dull preening.)
A still from ‘Fists of Fury’
Photo: Courtesy of the Criterion CollectionThat film’s considerable success internationally gained Lee the Hollywood foothold he’d long sought. And “Enter the Dragon” (1973)—a title Lee insisted on—is a potent cocktail of two parts martial arts and one part criminal conspiracy, topped by a spear of James Bond motifs, several drops of social commentary and big glug of shock value. Low budget though it was for an American studio film, its production values leave Lee’s other films looking shoddy by comparison.
Which brings us to “Game of Death” (1978), with some three minutes of genuine Lee footage (shot before “Enter the Dragon” for a project that Lee never lived to complete) grafted onto the end of a limp crime movie featuring Lee impersonators alongside two Oscar winners, Dean Jagger and Gig Young. The climax finds the real Lee (5 feet 8 inches) in a death battle with no less than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (7 feet 2 inches).
This survey’s bountiful supplemental materials will overwhelm even the most die-hard Lee fans. Pity that four of the six full-length audio commentaries are marred by poor recording quality, and a number of what pass for documentaries are more interesting as period curios. But Lee biographer Matthew Polly’s short introductions to the five primary films are witty and authoritative. And two extras are absolutely essential: “Match the Lips,” a beguiling primer on dubbing by two British experts, and “Bruceploitation,” Grady Hendrix’s hilarious illustrated essay on why not everything connected with Lee’s legacy has value.
So this comprehensive set gives us not just Lee’s most important films in the fresh transfers they deserve, but also, in the surfeit of bonus material, the context by which to judge him. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe before him, Lee was a movie star cut down in his prime, with the promise of greater things to come. But he was something else, too: a global ambassador of ancient arts he had modified to suit the modern society in which he lived, and where we still do.
—Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film and classical music.
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