Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book

by Meyers, Ric

  To put it mildly, the script was makeshift. Han is hardly more than Dr. No, and even has a white, long-haired cat like 007’s main nemesis, Ernst Stavros Blofeld. The only place the movie excels — in fact, the only place the movie is unique — is in its kung fu and its star. Not surprisingly, getting the project started in a city known for its standard operating racism was no easy task.

  Darker Than Amber (1970) star Rod Taylor was considered for the integral role of co-hero Roper, but the versatile John Saxon, an actor who had been toiling in B movies since the mid-1950s, shared equal billing with Lee. Rockney Tarkinton was cast as Williams … at first.

  “Jim Kelly was a last-minute replacement,” Weintraub revealed. “He came on the night before the picture was to start. At the last minute Tarkinton said I was taking advantage of him. I disagreed, and that was the end of that. At two o’clock in the morning, I went to see Kelly and said, ‘You’re hired.’”

  Weintraub had Saxon, Kelly, and Bob Wall ready to go. He had also hired Shih Kien, famous as Huang Fei-hong’s most consistent adversary, and the “Queen of Kung Fu,” Angela Mao, to play Bruce’s sister. To give the American audience a henchman they could understand, he cast Yang Sze as the muscular bodyguard Bolo (a name and physique which stuck with him, despite the fact that he was a skilled taichi fighter). What he didn’t have, at first, was Bruce Lee.

  “For the first three weeks, we shot around him,” Weintraub maintained. “Linda Lee, his wife, was the one who kept things going when he wouldn’t show up on the set. I think he was nervous. It was his first big film. And he was fighting with Raymond Chow at that time. He was fighting with me, too, but not as much. It was just that he was so nervous. On the first day, he had a facial twitch. We needed twenty-seven takes to get the shot. But then he settled down, and we made the film.”

  Things ran relatively smoothly, and word started getting around that Weintraub might have a tiger by the tail. “Once we started,” the producer told me, “everybody thought Bruce was going to be something, and started sending me scripts in the middle of shooting. There was a man at Warner Brothers named Dick Moore who understood the market, so we worked up a script with Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander and showed it to Bruce. We tried to do it as a movie first.”

  That movie was called Kung Fu and took place in the Sierra Nevadas of 1868. It tells of the Chinese “coolie” laborers building the transcontinental railroad. Among them is Caine, a half-breed. Almost immediately, the movie flashes back to Caine’s training by Shaolin Temple monks, culminating in a final test that has him in a booby-trapped hall blocked by a red-hot cauldron. He escapes the corridor by lifting the cauldron with his forearms, which leaves tattoos of a dragon on one arm and a tiger on the other.

  From there Caine travels to Peking, where his blind sifu, Po, stumbles into a royal guard. He’s shot for his mistake, and Caine kills the guards and, of all people, the prince. Then he escapes to America and gets a job on the railroad. From there, the script degenerates into a western Big Boss, but with one added twist. After Caine leads the coolies in a revolt against their corrupt masters, another Shaolin monk appears to challenge him. It seems the temple was destroyed as retribution for Caine’s act, and the monk wants revenge. Caine kills him, bows farewell, and disappears down the road.

  “Tom Kuhn, who was in charge of Warner Television at the time, said, ‘Why don’t we try this as a series?’” Weintraub said. “I said, ‘Great. Bruce would be perfect.’ We designed the series for Bruce.”

  According to the “official” network story, Bruce Lee ultimately turned down the offer to star in the series, thinking he wasn’t ready yet. Weintraub doesn’t remember it that way. “When he didn’t get the part,” he recalled, “I was stunned. Bruce was heartbroken, and I couldn’t blame him.”

  The late Harvey Frand, who told me that he was the executive who was actually given the unenviable task of telling Bruce in person, didn’t remember it the network’s way, either. “Ted Ashley wanted Bruce,” he said, “but the network wanted someone like William Smith [who, ironically, played the Darker Than Amber villain, and was considered for John Saxon’s role in Enter the Dragon]. We felt that casting David Carradine made for a good compromise. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think Lee’s English was strong enough yet.”

  But his kung fu certainly was. In a vain attempt to try to convince the executive what they were missing, Lee kicked a feather off the bridge of Frand’s nose without touching his skin. It still wasn’t enough. Carradine got the part in the series that ironically succeeded because of Enter the Dragon. And Enter the Dragon succeeded because of Bruce Lee.

  Comedian Margaret Cho concurs. She has always felt that the TV series should have another name. “I hated that show, because the lead actor, David Carradine, wasn’t even Chinese,” she said in her comedy act. “That show should not have been called Kung Fu. It should have been called That Guy’s Not Chinese.”

  Lee’s Chinese contribution to Enter the Dragon, however, was telling. Bruce starred essentially as himself, and supervised all the kung fu — using many of the same stuntman he had worked with on Fist of Fury, including, most notably, the pre-superstar Jackie Chan (Jackie had stunted the Fist of Fury villain who was kicked across a stone garden, and, in Enter the Dragon’s subterranean fight sequence, memorably gets his neck broken by Lee). This was Lee’s showcase, and its every fault only served to bolster Bruce’s participation. He was truly the best thing about the movie. In that respect, it could not have been a better vehicle for him.

  To top it off, he also gave the entire film a heart most weren’t aware of. “I don’t think anyone else knows this,” Weintraub told me back in 1984, “but when Enter the Dragon was finished, I completely reedited it. When it was initially done, it was a linear story that started in the United States. But Bruce went back and did the Shaolin Temple sequence. That was his. He did that without me, and I loved it. I took that and opened the film with it. Then I went onto the boat and did flashbacks, which everybody thought I was crazy to do.”

  For that memorable, important, prologue, Lee introduced the world to Stephen Tung Wai, who played the young man Bruce was teaching. The child actor grew up to be one of the industry’s most promising new kung fu choreographers. But back at the time, Lee also called upon his friend Sammo Hung Kam-po, whom he had met when first coming to work for Golden Harvest. At that time Sammo had been the studio’s top action director, so he had listened to all the stories about how great Bruce was with some skepticism. On his first day back in Hong Kong from location shooting, Sammo visited the studio offices.

  “I walked around the corner, and there he was,” Sammo told me. “I said ‘You’re Bruce Lee?’ He said, ‘You’re Sammo Hung. Wanna fight?’ I said, ‘Sure!’ So we set up right there in the hall. We’re getting into position, then suddenly he relaxes, leans over, and asks, ‘Ready?’ I said “Yeah!’ … and the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling. Bruce leans over and asks, ‘How was that?’ I gave him a big thumb’s up and said, ‘Great!’ And we were friends ever since … until….”

  The “until” was that Enter the Dragon prologue. “I was working in Thailand, I think, and I hear from Bruce,” Sammo recalled. “He was wondering if I could do him a favor. So I fly all the way back to Hong Kong, and do the fight scene with him.” Sammo played Lee’s adversary in the sequence. But, with the scene over, Bruce, according to Sammo, drove him back to the airport. “And there he hands me around two hundred (Hong Kong) dollars [the equivalent of about twenty-five bucks],” Sammo said. “I said ‘What’s this? I was doing you a favor. Why are you treating me like this?’” Sammo rejected the token payment and returned to his set, bewildered. It was his first sign that Bruce Lee was changing. “We didn’t really talk after that,” Sammo admitted.

  Bruce, meanwhile, returned to Hong Kong to a tumultuous reception. It was months before Enter the Dragon would premiere, but just the very fact that he had starred in an international film aft
er having attained star status from his first three movies put him in superstar category. After years of being ignored and diminished, his every word and deed in Hong Kong was being received with devoted worship. It would seem that Bruce Lee had the last laugh. Weintraub and he were already discussing a second American movie, for which he would receive a million dollars. He supposedly was on the verge of signing a contract with the Shaw Brothers studio to do a period piece; photos to that effect were taken.

  But first he wanted to do a project he called Game of Death. Lee had been planning it for some time. He had copious notes and already secured much of the cast. Initially it seemed to be a sequel to Way of the Dragon. In the company of two friends, Tang Lung is forced to travel to Korea, where he must secure a treasure at the top of a pagoda, guarded by a different type of martial artist on each level. Under grueling, non-air-conditioned, conditions in the dog days of a Hong Kong summer, Bruce filmed three fight scenes — one with Daniel Inosanto, one with Chi Hon Joi (a hapkido fighter), and one with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  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.”