Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey

Well, my friends, those of you still reading my Jeffreviews are probably sick of my unending fascination with my "Bruce Lee" DVDs. And I can't blame you. So I will draw my Bruce Lee Jeffreview series to a close with the best of my "Bruce Lee" DVDs, Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey. That's right, this will be my last Bruce Lee Jeffreview. At least until I watch Clones of Bruce Lee. Just kidding.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey is not about a trip that Bruce Lee went on. The title is metaphorical. Probably. It doesn't feature any characters saying, "so you're Bruce Lee... you don't look so tough!" and subsequently being beaten. It doesn't refer to Bruce's quest to become a "samurai soldier of fortune." It doesn't star Bruce Lee "look-alike" Bruce Li. So what is Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey? Well, it's like an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. Or it's a documentary.

The thing about documentaries about Bruce Lee, as with biographies in general, is that they usually try to encapsulate the entire life of the subject in an hour or two. The free-market economy being what it is, it's reasonable for a video or film company to create a product hoping to reach the widest audience possible, which mostly consists of people who have heard of Bruce Lee and may have an awareness of his movies, but who don't know much about his life. So you end up with documentary after documentary telling you the same thing, over and over again.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey is somewhat different. The first half addresses his life, especially the development of his martial arts philosophy, but this is prologue to the subject of the second half: Bruce Lee's movie Game of Death. In 1966, Bruce Lee co-starred in the Green Hornet TV show, as martial artist/chauffeur/superhero sidekick Kato. This show was canceled after one season, but the episodes were syndicated in Hong Kong, among other places, where it became very popular. Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong and parlayed his recognition into a movie deal. His first movie, The Big Boss (US title: Fist of Fury), was a low-budget fight movie that became a box-office smash in 1971. It made Bruce Lee a superstar in Asia.

In his subsequent movies, Bruce took on greater and greater creative responsibilities, eventually writing and directing his third movie, Way of the Dragon (US title: Return of the Dragon). With his fourth movie, he hoped to portray a little of his philosophy behind the martial arts. He began planning it and even flew some of his friends in to Hong Kong to shoot some scenes. This movie was Game of Death. As he was working on Game of Death, Warner Bros. made a deal to co-produce a movie starring Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon.

Bruce stopped work on Game of Death to make Enter the Dragon, which was released in 1973. After it was finished, Bruce returned to working on Game of Death. He never got very far, though, since he died just a month before Enter the Dragon was released. Five years later, an American movie company took the footage Bruce had shot for Game of Death and edited it into new footage they shot, finally releasing the 1978 movie called Game of Death. This theatrically-released Game of Death contained 11 minutes of Bruce Lee's original footage, 2 or 3 Bruce Lee "look-alikes," and 1 cardboard cut-out of Bruce Lee's face. It even included a Kareem Abdul Jabbar "look-alike."

What we learn in the documentary Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey is that Bruce Lee had shot a lot more than 11 minutes of footage for Game of Death. In 1994, during research for books based on the writings of Bruce Lee, his original script and fight choreography notes were discovered. This included a 12-page breakdown of his original storyline. It turns out Bruce had shot about 100 minutes of footage for Game of Death. Now this may sound like enough for a whole movie, but bear in mind that a lot of the footage is outtakes, fighting moves shot over and over to get them right. But there was still more footage than had ever been released as part of the 1978 Game of Death. This documentary combines the newly discovered original footage from Game of Death with Bruce's notes, and pieces together a picture of how Bruce's movie might have been.

The cool thing about this documentary is that it's all about rare footage. While the other Bruce Lee documentary I Jeffreviewed, Intercepting Fist, had mostly footage from Bruce's movies, as well as general file footage to illustrate its segments, this documentary primarily uses old photos of Bruce, along with brief glimpses of home movies of Bruce practicing and Bruce's TV interview, and his Green Hornet screen test. Some of this footage has been released in the past, but it's not what you'd call common footage, like his movie footage. There is one grainy home movie scene of Bruce doing Wing Chun with someone, and all you're seeing is the back of his head. Then as they movie around, you see that he is very deliberately looking off to the side, chewing gum, not looking at his opponent, but with his lightning-fast hands he doesn't have to.

There is also interview footage of those who knew Bruce, including his former students Taky Kimura and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and his widow Linda who tells her anecdote of when Bruce was challenged by the kung-fu establishment in San Francisco for teaching Chinese martial arts to non-Chinese. She describes the fight, which she witnessed, as "about three minutes, consisted of a lot of running" where Bruce's opponent kept running away from Bruce, until finally Bruce managed to corner the fellow and take him down.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey was released by Warner, and is professionally done with a nice breadth of source material. It includes a little footage from Longstreet, and Bruce's movies, but it also has some nice bits which I have never seen before, including Bruce in full sparring gear demonstrating his full-contact training techniques at a major martial arts tournament, and audiotape of Bruce reading an article about himself from a newspaper. Throughout this material we see glimpses of Bruce's take on the fighting arts, and his legendary iconoclasm.

Among martial artists, Bruce was known not only for his incredible physical ability and his on-screen charisma, but for the martial theories which he developed. He was well-known as a rebel in the martial arts world, and gained notoriety for both espousing his beliefs and proving their value. He gained high-profile students, not only Hollywood movie stars, but the greatest professional martial arts competitors of the day, including Chuck Norris, Mike Stone, and Joe Lewis. Many have heard of the fighting style he created, Jeet Kune Do, but he didn't create his own style because he wanted to create something new to market, like Tae-Bo, or because it was the fashionable thing to do.

The further his martial studies took him, the more he realized that traditional fighting styles had become rigid dogmas which were ultimately unsuited to the realities of actual fighting. He strove to absorb all that was useful from a broad range of fighting techniques, including Asian martial arts, boxing, and even fencing, and discard all that wasn't useful. He fervently espoused flexibility in fighting and in thinking, and came to believe that martial arts could not truly be taught, but rather had to be sought. This philosophy was at the core of what he hoped to demonstrate with Game of Death. By fighting his way up a tower, with a different fighting style on each level, he demonstrates how his flexibility as a fighter, and his willingness to do whatever is most efficient to win, allows him to prevail.

The real gem of this DVD is the previously-unreleased footage Bruce shot for Game of Death. And you know me, I loves me some unreleased footage. At the halfway point of this DVD, we get into Bruce's original story for the movie. He was to play Hai Tien, a retired martial arts champion who is approached by members of the Korean underworld to take part in the raid of a five-level pagoda containing an untold treasure. They then kidnap Hai Tien's family members and force him to aid their effort. The previously unreleased footage includes fight footage which featured Hai Tien's sidekicks, as well as dialogue which was shot but which Bruce hadn't yet dubbed over.

In Hong Kong it was common practice to shoot movies silently, then to dub them over later. This is less expensive than shooting with "sync-sound" as is common in Hollywood, and makes for quicker shooting, too. There are several reasons for this practice. For one thing, real estate is at a premium in Hong Kong. All of the useable land is occupied, so the movie studios are right in the middle of the city, which means that there is often no shortage of city noise in the background. Additionally, the Chinese dialect of Cantonese is common primarily to the inhabitants of Hong Kong and the surrounding province. Throughout China there are other dialects, often as different from each other as European languages are from one another. And the nations of southeast Asia and Japan and Korea still more different languages. So why bother going to the trouble and expense of shooting a movie with sound when it will just be dubbed into another language for 90% of its release anyway?

The dialogue footage is presented on this DVD, with an actor dubbing in Bruce's lines. Which, after all, would have been done back then anyway. The dialogue isn't Shakespeare (which, come to think of it, is probably a good thing) but it is very much Bruce Lee. The 50 minutes the documentary spent describing Bruce's life and fighting philosophy pays off by creating the context within which we view this dialogue, which was completely cut from the 1978 Game of Death.

When Bruce faces off against former student Dan Inosanto, who uses a pair of short, wooden escrima clubs, Bruce uses a long, whippy piece of bamboo which symbolizes his flexibility as a martial artist. He warns Inosanto, "You know, baby, [hey, it was the 1970s] this bamboo is longer, more flexible, and very much alive. And when your flashy routine cannot keep up with the speed and elusiveness of this thing here, all I can say is that you will be in deep trouble." Like I said, it's not Shakespeare, but at least it means something, especially in Bruce's context. Compare this to any of the dialog from the 1978 theatrical release.

Knowing Bruce's vision for Game of Death, the contrast between it and the 1978 release are stark. The 1978 movie was a convoluted story made even more ridiculous by the manner in which it was shot, namely, to conceal the fact that Bruce Lee was hardly in the picture at all. Bruce's original Game of Death plot concept was fairly simple. The Korean mob sends a crew of five martial artists, including Bruce as the coerced Hai Tien, to retrieve some treasure from an ancient temple village. Guns are prohibited in this village, so martial arts are the weapon of choice. In the center of the village is the pagoda tower, with a different martial arts style guarding each floor. And Bruce and his teammates must fight their way to the top. Like Bruce's philosophy of fighting, the plot was simple, direct, and efficient.

The 1978 movie was much more complicated. Written with deliberate references to Bruce Lee's life and death, the 1978 movie tells about Billy Lo, martial arts movie star, who refuses to sign a management deal with a crooked syndicate. They try to strong-arm him and his singer girlfriend, resulting in many fight scenes. Scenes of Billy at work are recycled footage of earlier Bruce Lee movies, instruct with shots of a film crew ostensibly filming the action. In a retrospectively chilling scene, an attempt is made on Billy's life by replacing a blank (fake bullet) with a real bullet. Chilling, because of the resemblance it bears to Brandon Lee's death many years later.

Billy survives the attack but requires surgery, which puts him in a conveniently-face-concealing bandage. He decides to fake his own death, which is followed by big, public funereal crowds, like Bruce's funeral in Hong Kong. He then proceeds to don disguises as he follows his would-be killers and attacks a couple of them. At one point he goes through an elaborate procedure to tail the enemy back to their estate. He sneaks onto the grounds to find the boss alone in the garden. He then proceeds to strangle the old man, but does it so badly that the old man is able to scream for help even as Billy's hands are wrapped around his throat. Guards come, and Billy runs away. All that trouble was basically for no point whatsoever. An apt metaphor for the 1978 movie.

Eventually, we reach the climax, which uses the footage Bruce originally shot. As you'll recall, he shot three fight scenes for the scenes where he fights his way up the pagoda. In the 1978 movie he instead fights his way up several floors of... a Chinese restaurant. That's right, he goes to a Chinese restaurant where the villains are headquartered, and heads right on up the stairs, one level after another. And the least explicable thing of all, the fight scenes used in the 1978 movie are noticeably shorter than originally shot! Now, I'm no movie-making professional, but if I had to take a little bit of footage of Bruce Lee and build it up into a full-length movie, I would damned well use as much of the footage as possible. ESPECIALLY if it was fight footage! But if you watch the original footage as assembled in Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey and then watch the fights as used in the 1978 movie, the contrast is quite noticeable.

Bruce's absence from the 1978 movie is very apparent. Most of the Billy Lo character's shots are wide shots, or shot from an angle of about 4 to 8 o'clock. A variety of tricks is used to conceal the faces of the Bruce Lee "look-alikes" including disguises, blood splatters, strategically-placed shadows, re-used close-ups from other Bruce Lee movies, the infamous cardboard cutout on the mirror, and the biggest pair of 1970s-style sunglasses they could find. When we finally arrive at the actual Bruce Lee footage, it's almost jarring to see a fight in which the hero's face is fully visible and unconcealed. But these real Bruce Lee fights aren't the final battles. They had to throw in one more fight between Billy Lo and the heads of the criminal syndicate. This is more body double work, intercut with reused close-ups. The villain fights so clumsily, it's difficult to believe he wouldn't fall over at Bruce's first cat-like attack-cry, let alone last as long as he did in a fight with the man.

A couple of interesting points of trivia about the 1978 theatrical release version of Game of Death: the fight choreographer for the new footage was Sammo Hung, close associate of Jackie Chan and director of 4 of Jackie's movies. Sammo also appeared onscreen in a ring match in the 1978 movie against the evil henchman played by Bob Wall, who was also Bruce's scarred opponent O'Hara in Enter the Dragon. Sammo also worked on Enter the Dragon as a stunt coordinator, and faced off against Bruce in the first fight scene. Another close associate of Sammo and Jackie, Yuen Biao (who has co-starred with Jackie in 3 movies) was supposedly one of the Bruce Lee "look-alikes" in the 1978 movie.

The 1978 movie was a very typical Hollywood type of movie: pointless running around from location to location chasing after bad guys in what passes for a plot. It was not very typical of Bruce's movies. But Bruce longed for Hollywood stardom. Enter the Dragon was a first step in his triumphant return to Hollywood, and its success would implies that it wouldn't have been his last. I wonder, then, if Bruce had lived, would this have been the type of Hollywood action movies he would have been making by 1978? Who knows? At least the fighting would have been better.

I thought Intercepting Fist was a pretty decent little documentary, but I'm glad I saw it before I saw Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey, because that was just an appetizer while this is the main course. Anyway, if you're enough of a Bruce Lee fan to resent the existence of the 1978 Game of Death, then this DVD is for you. And if you even got Game of Death just for Bruce's fight scenes, then this is DEFINITELY the DVD for you. Bruce only completed the three fight scenes for the end of Game of Death, but as assembled on the Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey DVD with all the dialogue and story points and Bruce's sidekicks, the scenes total about half an hour. Compare this with about 11 minutes as shown in the 1978 Game of Death. Think you're missing something? You have no idea.

Throw out your Game of Death DVD and put this one in its place.

© 2002 Jeffrey P. Hui