Way of the Dragon (1972)

Way of the Dragon (1972)
Aka: Return of the Dragon
Chinese Title: 猛龍過江
English Translation: Fierce Dragon Crossing the River

 

Starring: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Chuck Norris, Wei Ping-Ao, Bob Wall, Whang In-Sik, Huang Chung-Hsin, Unicorn Chan, Gam Dai, John Benn, Lau Wing, Wu Ngan, Robert Chan, Chen Fu-Ching
Director: Bruce Lee
Action Director: Bruce Lee, Unicorn Chan

In 1997, my friend Jacob Proctor was celebrating his 15^th birthday and invited me over to his house to have pizza and spend the night. I brought my Return of the Dragon VHS and we watched it along with his brother Jim. This movie essentially kicked off our classics list. When I brought it over again a year and a half later for another sleepover at Jacob’s mom’s place, we were rewinding almost each scene just to laugh at whatever poor sucker was getting kicked in the face. It had earned its place forever on our list.

               The movie begins with Tang Lung (Bruce Lee) arriving at the airport in Rome, waiting to be picked up, while some old white lady stares at him as if the only Asian person she had ever seen was Swedish actor Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan. He’s eventually picked up by Miss Chen Ching-Hwa (Nora Miao, who was in The Chinese Connection and Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin), who has just inherited her father’s Chinese restaurant. The downside is that a small-time mafia has set their sights on the land and have been threatening customers in an attempt to force Miss Chen to sell. Remember that scene in The Godfather where the different family heads are having a meeting to discuss their expanding operations to include drug dealing, albeit only to black people? Few scenes have exemplified the stereotypical Italian racist more than that one. Anyway, wouldn’t it be something if, during their meeting, one of the guys said, “By the way, I’ve been trying to buy the local Chinese restaurant, but some Chinaman keeps on beating my men up!”

               Initially, Miss Chen doesn’t really like Tang Lung. He’s a complete fish out of water, hailing from the New Territories of Hong Kong, making him a bit of a hick. He has something of a prejudice against foreigners and just doesn’t know much about anything beyond martial arts. I can only hope that he spent his adolescence beating up those inbred Disco Boys from The Beasts. After a strange aside featuring a hooker—the U.S. release cuts out the scene where she undresses in front of him—Tang arrives at the restaurant and meets the staff: Uncle Wong (Wang Chung-Hsin, of Twelve Gold Medallions and Fist of Fury), Ah Kung (Gam Dai, who went on to produce the legendary The New South Hand Blows and North Kick Blows) Tony (Lau Wing, who gets beat up by John Saxon in Enter the Dragon), Jimmy (Unicorn Chan, who tried to make it big in Fist of Unicorn, but ended up in crap like Shaolin Drunk Fighter), Thomas (Chen Fu-Ching, Slaughter in San Francisco), Robert (Robert Chan, of Kung Fu 10^th Dan and Tiger Force), and the guy who doesn’t speak English (Wu Ngan). Jimmy has been teaching karate to the others so they can fend of the gangsters, but if Unicorn Chan’s choreography later on in the film is any indication, he’s in no condition to teach anything resembling self-defense at all.

               Later that evening, some thugs show up and order some food, leading to the classic exchange:

 

Thug: I’d like some Chinese spare ribs.
Jimmy: Chinese spare ribs?
Thug: You mean to say, you…you don’t know what Chinese spare ribs are?
(Jimmy shakes his head)
Thug: Well, let me show you, man.
(Thug lifts up Jimmy’s arm and punches him in the ribs)

 

This eventually leads a fight between Tang Lung and the gangsters, all of whom fall effortlessly to Tang’s “Chinese Boxing.” All of a sudden, things are now looking up for the restaurant.

               The next evening, an armed man shows up at Miss Chen’s apartment, but Tang beats him up, too. That’s followed by the gangsters, led by John Benn (who played a mad scientist in Clones of Bruce Lee) and his second-in-command, Mr. Ho (Wei Ping-Ao, who played similar roles in The Chinese Connection and Hapkido), paying a visit to the restaurant. They try to bribe Tang into leaving Rome, but it only results in the film’s second major fight sequence, where he takes on all the thugs with a pole, two pairs of nunchaku, and fisticuffs, too.

               Mr. Benn and Mr. Ho decide at this point that Tang will have to be dealt with more forcefully, so they send a sniper to wipe him out…and they kidnap Miss Chen while they’re at it. That attempt fails, and Tang and his new buddies come to the rescue. The resulting fight is quite strongly at odds, with regards to the choreography, with everything we’ve seen before. That leads me to believe that Unicorn Chan was allowed to choreograph, but to little effect. On the same token, having seen the fight between Sharon Tate and Nancy Kwan in The Wrecking Crew, I can’t help but wonder if the man was only good at choreographing himself.

               So now Mr. Benn has had it. He hires a trio of martial artists, one Japanese (played by Korean actor Whang In-Sik, of Young Master and A Fistful of Talons) and two Caucasian (Game of Death’s Bob Wall and the master of the roundhouse kick himself, Chuck Norris), to beat Tang Lung at his own game. It all culminates in a legendary final fight at the Roman Colosseum between two of the biggest names in the history of martial arts cinema.

               I still can’t figure out how so many people have labeled The Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow as the first kung fu comedies. They certainly created a new formula for mixing kung fu and humor, but they certainly weren’t the first martial arts films to have heavy comic elements. Call Me Dragon (1974) and Win Them All (1973) have lots of slapstick humor incorporated into their numerous fights, for example.  And with Way of the Dragon, even if you ignore the hilarious dubbed dialog, this movie is largely a comedy, even when Bruce Lee is seriously kicking the stuffing out of everyone around him. You have low-brow fart and boob humor (once again, depending on the version you watch). You have an overweight Italian man yelling “Momma mia!” after witnessing his men get a sound thrashing from Bruce. You even have some social-tinged humor based on the stereotypical Asian (or Hong Kong—because of the limited space, perhaps) practicality, as Tang Lung declares Roman ruins and monuments to be a waste of space that could be used to build on.

               That humor is important, because it takes a good twenty minutes for the movie to really get moving. Once Bruce takes out the thugs in the back alley behind the restaurant, things pick up and never slow down. The fighting is classic Bruce. As I watch more and more Brucesploitation films, especially those made by Bruce Le, I grow weary of the monotony of the action of some of those films. There was a certain charisma to Bruce that allowed him to do the same simple moves and still knock our socks off with them. Moreover, Bruce does make an effort to shake up each fight, changing the stakes, the location, the players, or the weapons, without relying on any goofy gimmicks.

               The first fight is mainly a showcase for Bruce’s lightning-fast kicks. The second fight, set in the same back alley as the first fight, raises the stakes as the he takes on more opponents, all of whom are armed. Bruce evens out the score by bringing weapons, including his trademark nunchaku skills, into the mix. The next fight has Bruce standing off to the sidelines while the restaurant’s waiters take on the thugs, giving us an interesting point of comparison between differing choreography styles. And to top that fight off, the diminutive Lee performs a standing jump/front kick to break a light bulb several feet above. It’s a simple, but powerful display of the man’s athleticism.

               The final fight to Way of the Dragon would not only give viewers another opportunity to see Bruce Lee in action, but would carry with a number of other significances. The first was that it would give Bruce Lee a worthy opponent: Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris, a relative unknown at that point, was a Middleweight Karate Champion (record: 65-5) and a master in Tang Soo Do, Shinto-Ryu karate, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Tae Kwon Do. He had a spinning-back kick that would help catapult him to legend status in certain internet circles 30 years later, the which gets ample time for demonstration in the first half of this fight. He was certainly a better opponent for Bruce Lee than Han Ying Chieh or Riki Hashimoto. As powerful as Chuck’s kicks are, they are no match for the rapid kicks that Bruce unleashes on him. Chuck can try to make a movement, but by the time he’s halfway to his target, Bruce’s foot is already connecting with Chuck’s face. Lee’s roundhouse and spinning kicks are faster than his opponents. Lee’s speed is spell-binding, especially in his famous kicking combination: one kick to the legs, another to the stomach, and three to head, all in rapid succession. This combination would be used by the character Jackie, a proponent of Jeet Kune Do, in the Sega game Virtua Fighter.

               An interesting observation about Bruce Lee’s kicks: Bruce’s original style, Wing Chun, uses few kicks and most of them are low kicks adapted to close-quarters combat. In teaching practicality, Bruce believed that high kicks were not ideal for actual fights. However, time and time again audiences have shown a love for flashy moves and thus Bruce incorporated such kicking into his movies. His kicks are from Tae Kwon Do, which he learned with Tae Kwon Do master Jhoon Rhee. It is said that Chuck Norris himself encouraged Bruce Lee to use high kicks in their fight, although Bruce had been using flashier kicks since The Big Boss.

               Besides his famous kicking combination, the most memorable combination we’ll see in this fight is a demonstration of pure Wing Chun. In close quarters, Bruce and Chuck trade a few blows, with Bruce being able to trap Chuck’s arms. What follows is a five-punch combination performed in about one second. That’s right, he punches Chuck Norris five times in one second, following it with a roundhouse kick to the head. It’s an awesome moment, and Sammo Hung would pay homage to this sequence in his 1990 film Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon.

               Their duel in the Roman Colosseum would set the standard for all one-on-one fights for all years to come. Not only that, it would establish the glorious tradition of Hong Kong filmmakers importing foreign martial artists for their films, generally as the villains. People like Jeff Falcon, Richard Norton, Bill “Superfoot” Wallace and Benny “the Jet” Urquidez owe a big part of their careers to the Bruce Lee-Chuck Norris Showdown. It truly is a classic moment in martial arts cinema.

               Internet movie critic and author, Keith Allison, best summed up this movie when he said: 

            “So if you want to see Lee’s biggest film, see Enter the Dragon. If you want to see his first film,               see The Big Boss. If you want to see his best film, see Fist of Fury. If you want to see the one                 film out of all of them that shows Bruce Lee at his finest in all ways, the one film at that has the             most Bruce at its heart, the one film that, more than any of the others and despite its rough                     edges, defines where Bruce wanted to take the genre, then you have to see Way of the Dragon.”