Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story (1974)
Aka: Super Dragon; The Dragon Dies Hard; Bruce Lee Story: Super Dragon
Chinese Title: 一代猛龍
Translation: One Generation Fierce Dragon
Starring: Ho Tsung-Tao, Na Yan-Sau, Tang Pei, Cheung
Tai-Wai, Chin Yung-Hsiang, Chu Sing-Yat, Cheng Fu-Hung, Si Wai, Wei Yi-Ping,
Kong Kwok-Ping, Yue Fan, Lee King-Kwong
Director: Shut Dik
Action Director: n/a
Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story is generally regarded as the first true Brucesploitation film, as opposed to an otherwise unrelated movie that got slapped with “Bruce Lee” in the title once it reached overseas markets. The exploitation of the Bruce Lee brand—and mind you, he’d barely been dead a year at this point—is the raison d’être of this movie. As it stands, Brucesploitation as a genre consists of a number of sub-categories. You have the unofficial biopics, usually focusing on the more sordid aspects of the man’s life, not to mention suggesting that the man couldn’t walk ten feet without getting into a fight. There are those movies set in “real world,” usually about someone getting involved in intrigue in the wake of Bruce’s death. A number of them will simply rip-off or purport to be sequels to Bruce Lee’s own movies, most usually Fist of Fury. And finally, some of them just happen to do their own thing while the actor mimics Bruce Lee’s fighting style and mannerisms.
As you might expect from the title, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story falls squarely in the first group: the sleazy biopic. Bruce Lee here is played by a Taiwanese martial artist and gymnast by the name of Ho Chung-Tao. Prior to this film, Mr. Ho had had small parts in a number of low-budget kung fu movies, most of which were directed by indie director Joseph Kuo, a favorite among chopsockey fans. According to Ho, a fight choreographer friend, Wu Tong-Chiao, recommended him to a producer, observing that Ho Chung-Tao looked like Bruce Lee in profile. This ultimately led to his getting cast in the film Conspiracy, released in the States as Enter the Panther. As that movie has a 1975 release date attributed to it, I can only assume its release was delayed. His next film, also filmed in 1974—albeit released that year as well--was this one.
The movie opens in Seattle, where Bruce Lee (Ho, who would eventually receive the notorious stage name of “Bruce Li”) is making a living as a newspaper delivery boy. He runs afoul of some of African American thugs, wins a karate tournament, and is invited by American producers to play Kato in the “Green Hornet” TV series. However, Bruce is homesick for his native Hong Kong, A kerfuffle with some sword-swinging Japanese kendo experts exacerbates the problem. He leaves his wife, Linda, and two kids at home and heads to Hong Kong.
As soon as he arrives, Bruce meets up with Sir Run Run Shaw (Chin Yung-Hsiang, of Attack of the Joyful Goddess and Snake Husband), the head of the illustrious Shaw Brothers studio. Mr. Shaw offers Bruce a contract much like he would any other performer: low salary, living accommodations provided, and the promise of modeling and publicity jobs to supplement his income. Bruce balks at the offer and heads over to Golden Harvest instead. During the filming of The Big Boss, director Wu Chia Hsiang walks off the set and former Shaw Brothers director Lo Wei takes over instead. It doesn’t hurt that Lo Wei’s wife, Liu Liang-Hua (Lee King-Kwong), was an executive producer at Golden Harvest.
Anyway, the movie is a success and at a party some time later, Bruce is introduced to actress Betty Ting Pei (played by Tang Pei). The two immediately fall together, much to the chagrin of Bruce’s co-star, Nora Miao (portrayed by Na Yan-Sau), who herself wants nothing more than to get a hold of Bruce’s little dragon. Bruce and Betty’s relationship blooms into a full-fledged marital affair, with Bruce showing absolutely zero concern for Linda and his children, who are still in the States. As Bruce’s popularity grows and he spends more and more time working on his movies, a jealous Betty Ting Pei accuses him of caring more about movies than her and ends the relationship. She later tries to commit suicide. Nonetheless, Bruce still has feelings for Betty, even after Linda travels to Hong Kong to stay with her husband—and to make things worse, Bruce doesn’t make the slightest attempt to show any real affection for his wife. And the bit about Bruce working too hard? Well, it’s giving him migraines, which sooner or later are going to bite him in the ass.
It is interesting to see just how much character assassination is put onscreen so quickly after the death of the martial arts legend. Bruce Lee is a colossal jerk here: he practically abandons his family and then cheats on his wife with Betty. The film also implies that had he not chosen Betty, he would have eventually made Nora Miao his mistress. Even when Betty breaks off their romance, instead of Bruce going back to his wife and children, he still pines over his lover. I’m sure the real story behind Bruce Lee, Linda Lee and Betty Ting Pei is far more complex than what we see here; you get the feeling that writer Lui Ban-Chung had a subscription to the Taiwanese equivalent to the National Enquirer and used those articles as a basis for the story. The “story” of Bruce Lee’s affair is also told to some extant in the Bruce Li vehicle He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero and is the subject of the Shaw Brothers-produced smear piece, Bruce Lee and I, in which Betty Ting Pei plays herself.
A major subplot in the film is the competition between the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest for Bruce Lee. The film treats this conflict simplistically: Bruce signs with Golden Harvest because Raymond Chow offers him more money and creative control. The Shaw Brothers executive shows up later on to try to sway Bruce to join them, but Bruce stays onboard. At one point, they hire a big fighter (Cheng Fu-Hung, of The Big Fight) to beat up Bruce and tarnish his reputation. It does not work out that way. Interestingly enough, the film portrays director Lo Wei as a lazy opportunist and he clashes with Bruce at Golden Harvest when the latter rejects his new script—probably A Man Called Tiger, which would end up starring Jimmy Wang Yu. Of course, all of this is given basic lip service, as the filmmakers are more interested in Bruce’s philandering.
The first act of the film should have been the most interesting, but it feels hurried and forced. His time in Washington relegated to him beating up a few black guys. The infamous Long Beach International Karate Championship of 1964, in which Bruce performed two-finger push-ups and demonstrated his infamous “one-inch punch”, is told through a 30-second montage and mainly exists to set up a series of fights with Japanese fighters who walked off the set of The Chinese Boxer. There is one scene of Bruce filming “The Green Hornet,” and there isn’t even any fighting. He just jumps down a hill and that’s a wrap! We know that he had two kids (Brandon and Shannon) by the time he flew to Hong Kong, but they disappear from the film after their first appearance.
Most subsequent Bruce Lee biopics—with the exception of Bruce Lee and I—would up the ante on the martial arts action, in both quantity and quality. The action here is both sparse and uninteresting. There is no credited action director, so it might have been Wu Tong-Chiao (who had worked with Bruce Li on Enter the Panther and Gecko Kung Fu) or any member of the cast who had background as a fight choreographer[1]. Early on, Bruce Li fights a couple of thugs. He has a fight with a Japanese karate fighter and later with some kendo masters. A “recreation” of the finale of The Big Boss is the film’s longest and best fight scene. The “climax” has Bruce beating up a few random goons who are harassing Betty Ting. Boring.
After production wrapped, the film was picked up for American distribution by Winthrops Amusement, Inc. Evidently the distributors felt that there was too much relationship melodrama and not enough fighting. So the ten-second Kato sequence is replaced with a five-minute fight from the 1974 film Superior Youngster, released stateside as Karado: The Hong Kong Cat. The five-second Fist of Fury scene (Bruce Lee does a jump kick and that’s that) is replaced with the 11-minute final fight of the film Little Superman, in which Leung Siu-Lung (billed as Bruce Liang) has a long and brutal fight with Korean actor James Nan. Later on, the distributors apparently said, “Who are we kidding?” and threw in a third fight with absolutely no context. In this case, it’s the ten-minute climatic fight from Superior Youngster. Those scenes really have nothing to do with anything, but the fighting on display is ten times superior to anything we got in the movie proper. Hell, the distributors even went so far as to steal the opening credits from Superior Youngster!
As a martial arts film, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story fails. As a biopic, the movie succeeds, although the focus is on the gossip rag aspects of Lee’s life. Some fans even see this as one of the most accurate Bruce biopics in existence.
[1] - Those would include Chou Tai-Sheng (The 18 Bronze Girls of Shaolin), Tsang
Ming-Cheong (Buffalo Hsiung), Robert
Tai Chi-Hsien (The Five Deadly Venoms),
Suen Shu-Pau (The Bone-Crushing Kid),
and Pan Chang-Ming (Bruce Takes DragonTown).
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