In Lee filmed 30 minutes of fight scenes for a movie about a yellow-jumpsuited hero who battles his way up a five-story pagoda to retrieve a secret treasure. Lee died before he completed the project, but five years later, Golden Harvest studios unearthed the footage, cut it down to seven minutes, and stuck it on the end of a creaky plot about a Chinese stuntman who gets shot in the face, gets reconstructive surgery, and takes revenge from beyond the grave.
The whole thing is a distasteful mess. Once again, Lee was cast as a lost boy. His father co-starred in the film and the promoters, seeking to play off the family connection, gave Lee a new stage name: Little Hoi-chuen. Based on this performance, he had his work cut out for him.
Too old for the scrappy orphan role, he attempted to play against type and broaden his range with mixed results. Esther Eng was a pioneering female film director who specialized in patriotic war movies. His mother was flustered to see her delicate child so transfigured for the camera.
In another close-up, a warmly wrapped baby Lee cries inconsolably, eyes squeezed shut, mouth agape, arms flapping, chubby cheeks and double chin reverberating as the sound echoes through San Francisco.
In what amounts to a PSA against harsh Confucian parenting, Lee plays a poor kid who, yes, runs away to become a street urchin and petty thief. In real life, Lee and his classmates had formed an actual gang that would roam back alleys looking for fights.
That lived experience led to a sharp performance in an otherwise tedious film. In , Lee joined a socialist collective of filmmakers and actors called Union Films, leading him to appear in a string of socially conscious, message-driven movies. In this particularly earnest melodrama, a poor mother and father give away their infant daughter to a childless middle-class couple, only to regret their decision. This social-realist satire contrasts the family life of a rich businessman with a poor car mechanic who makes an honest living, finding comfort in his family.
Fun fact: Lee was once the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong. Also fun: His real-life dance partner, Margaret Leung, co-stars as a spoiled rich girl in this lighthearted rom-com.
Want to see Bruce Lee as a fashionable, sweater-vest-wearing toff as he cha-chas in a nightclub? This is the movie for you. It may be the only known instance of Lee running away from a fight.
Lee plays her son — a dance tutor. More Bruce Lee dance trivia: Later, as a college student in America, he taught dance classes to help pay the bills. And at that time, it was against the rules to stray from the traditional teachings of martial arts.
However, Lee never allowed anything to limit him, in martial arts or in life. He went on to invent Jeet Kune Do, a system and hybrid fighting style based on his philosophies of being formless and limitless.
As the founder of Jeet Kune Do and a master of martial arts, he became one of the most revered and well-respected people in the world. And he did all this during a time where the Chinese were still stereotyped as meek house servants and railroad workers. Many of his friends and loved ones have described him to be a man obsessed with perfection. He would do splits or sit ups while watching television, or workout with a dumbbell while reading the latest fitness magazine.
Lee never stopped working towards being the best version of himself. But with Lee, it's different. He's a patron saint. Martial arts is quasi-religious, and when you're insulting Bruce Lee, it's like insulting someone's iconic saint hero, almost a religious figure. In Glover's description of the fight, Lee hit Noichi with a double punch that "lifted the man completely off the floor and sent him flying 6 feet through the air.
Polly's vigorously researched biography is not immune to that sort of mythopoeia either. He too repeats the "6 feet through the air" figure about Yoichi. And in another scene, a pound skeptic who asks to see Lee's famous one-inch punch flies "8 feet" through the air when our hero demonstrates the technique on him. These are signs and wonders, the hysteria of the acolyte.
The truth is, in many ways, prizefighting is directly opposed to the ideals of traditional martial arts, which stress inward development, combat against the unruly and opaque self. LeBell also makes this point. While he has the utmost respect for Lee as a martial artist, he believes that the only thing that makes one a fighter is fighting other professionals, and often.
Unless somebody is hitting back at you, you don't become what I consider adequate," LeBell says. It gives you ideas about what to do. But if you want to be a professional, you fight. In a strange anachronism, not remarked upon, everyone in the scene uses the name Cassius Clay.
Lee and Booth agree to a best-of-three, the winner of each round the man who claims the first fall. Lee floors Booth with a flying kick, exactly the kind of maneuver the real Lee would deride as a flourish unfit for combat. But this Lee steps away jauntily, taking the bait when Booth invites him to try it again. Lee does, only to be snatched out of the air and heaved against a car, cratering its passenger-side door.
Notably, Tarantino has Booth remembering this fight in a daytime reverie, adding yet more doubt to how much of the scene we should believe is true and how much of it is blurred in the honeyed sunlit glow of Booth's self-aggrandizing memory. The third round is a close-run thing.
Booth is the larger man, and he's not without skill. It's unclear who is going to take it before the two men are interrupted. Obviously, part of what rankles some about the scene is the racial subtext. But somewhere underneath that is the tremor of fantasy rubbing up against the ambiguity and unpredictability of human performance.
Despite its obvious choreography, Lee and Booth's fight is tense, almost startlingly so given the dreamland setting it takes place in.
Its faithfulness to what a fight between two such men might feel like is exactly what the real Bruce Lee strove to achieve in his own work. And that surprising realness, despite the audacity of the whole sequence, is another source of its controversy. Tarantino forces some encounter between our idea of Bruce Lee the icon and, however narrowly or fleetingly glimpsed, however clumsy, an image of Bruce Lee the man, the fighter capable of rashness, capable of losing. In that meeting, myth quickens to flesh, sweats and trembles.
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