‘Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits’ a real kick
Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits Blu-ray box set (seven discs). Criterion Collection ($124.95 list price). 6666 out of 4
It’s no surprise that Bruce Lee was intense, in both his martial arts and his acting. The man who provided his English-dubbed 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, who dubbed hundreds of characters in Hong Kong films into English during the 1970s and ’80s.
“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 Blu-ray box set “Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits,” which was released this week.
The box set, which is loaded with extras in its seven-disc 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 eye-popping. His Hollywood
film, the James Bondian “Enter the Dragon,” a co-production between Warner Bros. and Golden Harvest co-starring Jim Kelly and John Saxon, is presented in a watchable 2K in both a 99-minute theatrical version and a 102-minute 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 (“Bruce Lee: A Life”), 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 Cantonese-language films in the 1940s and ’50s. After embracing martial arts under the famous master Ip Man, he moved back to the U.S., first 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 such Hollywood stars as Steve McQueen and James Coburn, and he was cast as Kato in the short-lived ABC series “The Green Hornet.”
Unable to gain a foothold in Hollywood, he returned to Hong Kong after a decade away 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.