HOW BRUCE LEE GOT EVERYONE KUNG FU FIGHTING

Fighting Without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema’s Journey To The West Luke White Reaktion £15.99

Fifty years ago, parks and playing fields were packed with posturing pre-pubescents, kicking and flailing at one another, howling like dogs and laughing like drains as the crotch in another pair of bell-bottoms went west. The kung fu craze was upon us.

In May 1973, for the only time in history, three foreign-language films – every one of them a Chinese cheapie – topped the US box-office. Newsagents’ shelves groaned under the weight of martial arts mags. Meanwhile, on TV, David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine was taming the Wild West in the series Kung Fu, and The Goodies were at work on an episode called Kung Fu Kapers.

If Luke White is to be believed, those capers have never really gone away. In Fighting Without Fighting, he argues that ‘kung fu has left a lasting legacy on Western – and global – culture’. If you’ve ever glanced at a manga comic, eaten fried rice, tried herbal remedies or acupuncture, then you’ve been part of what his book’s subtitle calls ‘Kung Fu Cinema’s Journey To The West’.

And if that sounds overblown, then get a load of the lecturer in Visual Culture and Fine Art at Middlesex University’s claim that kung fu pictures allowed US movie-goers to understand how a ‘Vietnamese peasant army [came] to win against America’s technological and economic might’.

White is on surer ground when he points to the influence that Bruce Lee (above), the lean and mean fighter turned film star whose blows and bludgeons those schoolkids were copying, has had on subsequent movie stars. The fact that so many actors now spend more time building their muscles than their characters, White argues, is thanks to Bruce’s toned body.

Fair enough, though White ought to have found time to wonder whether what really made Bruce’s image so potent was his early death – in 1973, at the age of 32.

To be fair, although Lee’s films are no better (and perhaps even worse) than you remember them, there is no gainsaying his star credentials. He was no actor, but under his Cliff Richard haircut he was a looker, and as light on his feet as Fred Astaire.

Indeed, 50 years on, it’s easier to see that the rage for kung fu was less to do with violent fantasy and more to do with those other androgynous 1970s cults – come-hither gymnastics, glittery disco-dancing, glam-rock posing.

Bruce liked to call himself the Little Dragon but, given the way he preened and prowled, Little Drag Act would have been nearer the mark.

In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, when Brad Pitt’s stuntman hero takes down Mike Moh’s Bruce, he surely states the obvious – that for all his swish moves and swashbuckling moue, bantamweight Bruce wouldn’t have a hope against the heavyweight boxers he claimed to want to fight.

Maybe that is why, for all White’s blather about a ‘lasting legacy’, the kung fu craze was booted into touch within months of its kick-off.