New box set shows impact of Bruce Lee
It’s no surprise that Bruce Lee was intense, in both his martial arts and his acting. The man who provided his Englishdubbed voice in Lee’s masterpiece “Fist of Fury” can testify to that.
“‘Fist of Fury’ was the toughest piece of dubbing I’d ever done in my entire dubbing career,” recalls voice actor Michael Kaye. “It was rather a big problem dubbing Bruce Lee movies. The first problem was the fact that Bruce Lee decided to direct the dub himself, which meant he stood behind you and hit you on the shoulders and said, ‘More passion! More anger! More more more!’ And my shoulders were getting to be a bit sore, you know?”
Kaye’s reminiscences are among the fresh content in the new Criterion Collection Bluray box set “Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits,” which is available Tuesday, July 14.
The box set, which is loaded with extras in its sevendisc package, includes all five of Lee’s martial arts films in one set for the first time. The great news: All four of his Golden Harvest Hong Kong films — “The Big Boss,” “Fist of Fury,” “The Way of the Dragon” and “Game of Death” — boast recent 4K restorations, and they are eyepopping. His Hollywood film, the James Bondian “Enter the Dragon,” a coproduction between Warner Bros. and Golden Harvest costarring Jim Kelly and John Saxon, is presented in a watchable 2K in both a 99minute theatrical version and a 102minute special edition.
It’s hard to grasp what an impact Lee had on world culture. Lee, who was born in the Year of the Dragon in San Francisco’s Chinatown and became an international cinema and cultural icon, died at 32. After “Enter the Dragon,” released a month after Lee’s death of a cerebral edema on July 20, 1973, martial arts participation in the United States shot up from a just a few million people to around 40 million.
He would have turned 80 this year on Nov. 27.
“Lee introduced the Chinese martial arts hero to the West,” says biographer Matthew Polley, who introduces each of the films in the Criterion set. “Previously, Chinese were houseboys, servants or evil. Lee introduced this hero archetype to the Western cinema.”
Lee’s parents relocated the family to Hong Kong when Bruce was 3 years old, and he grew up something of a child star, appearing in about 20 Cantoneselanguage films in the 1940s and ’50s. After embracing martial arts under master Ip Man, he moved to San Francisco, then to Seattle, to complete his high school education.
Lee dropped out of the University of Washington to move to Oakland and open a martial arts studio. Eventually,
he taught martial arts to stars such as Steve McQueen and James Coburn, and he was cast as Kato in the ABC series “The Green Hornet.”
Unable to gain a foothold in Hollywood, he returned to Hong Kong to make a revolutionary series of martial arts films that reimagined fight choreography. “The Big Boss” became Hong Kong’s biggest box office draw ever — dethroning “The Sound of Music” — and each of his subsequent films broke that record.
One interesting aspect of the Criterion set is its treatment of “Game of Death.” Lee, who was to direct the film, had shot much of the end of the film — about 35 minutes of an epic battle in which Lee’s character advances up five levels to dethrone the evil martial arts king played by NBA star Kareem AbdulJabbar, one of Lee’s reallife martial arts students.
Producers of “Game of Death,” released in 1978, constructed a bizarre story around Lee’s character, played by a double in big sunglasses or some sort of disguise, going up against mobsters who include Dean Jagger and Hugh O’Brian. The soso film works better than it should, and ends with a flourish, using only 12 minutes of Lee’s final footage.
Included as an extra here is “Game of Death Redux,” produced last year by Alan Canvan, which reconstructs all of Lee’s footage, with a new sound mix that incorporates John Barry’s film score. It’s a lovely tribute that essentially functions as a Bruce Leedirected short film.
The biggest knock on the set, and it’s frankly noticeable, is the lack of an Asian perspective. One can’t discount the expertise of Polley, who has done the research, but the fact is that every introduction and every commentary is by a white man. There is a printed essay by author and critic Jeff Chang, but Criterion should have found room in the budget for at least one documentary or one commentary track (or more!) from an Asian expert on cinema that would have helped bring proper context.