So after completing the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, the first thing I watched was a Bruce Lee movie, one of the ones in the set I bought . You see, Be Water, My Friend truly was inspiring. Although I am not doing 100 punches or 500 punches every day, I did get into this film set. We can only speculate on how fast I get through the other four movies in the set; although I finished the winter reading challenge six days ago, and I was eager to watch some videos to change the tamber of the evenings, I have been compelled to finish Perelandra, the middle book of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, which was a bit of a slog. Maybe I’ll watch more films and television the next time my beautiful wife travels.
I think I’ve seen this film before, but I don’t think I have it on my shelves already, which would have meant I would have recorded it digitally in the era when I could do that. Or maybe martial arts films of the era have very similar plots. In this one, Lee moves across the water (a ferry is involved) and in with his cousins, promising his uncle that he will not fight any more–apparently, he’d been a bit of a fighter back home, and he’s moving for a fresh start (implied). They get him a job working with them at the ice factory, which is really an ice distribution center which cuts ice from large blocks in storage and ships it. When two of the cousins discover packets in the ice, they’re invited to The Manager’s Office. He offers them money, and when they decline, a group of men befall them and kill them after some kung-fu fighting. The cousins are worried and ask about them, but they trust The Manager even as other cousins disappear. But when the remaining cousins are killed in their home except for the pretty cousin who is kidnapped, then Bruce Lee’s character goes to the home of the Big Boss, the factory’s ultimate owner, and has to face him and his flunkies in combat.
So, yeah, pretty much what you would expect from a martial arts film plus Bruce Lee. The plot’s a little head-scratching–people from the family start disappearing, and they go to work and ask The Manager to intercede, and he reports that the Big Boss is talking with the authorities, and they all let that ride? Perhaps that’s a cultural thing from Hong Kong in the late 1960s or something. But I don’t think that’s how we would handle it in America, Jack.
At any rate, an amusing spectacle in the time before we had UFC fights to show up how those things would really go, and even UFC is a little gamified as to what various Internet videos show us fights to be (nasty, brutish, and short). But pretty to look at. They feature a lot of jumping over opponents, which I presume was mere camera work at this time and not wire work that would come later as usually you only see the jumper in the shot and not the jumpees.
But. I have four more to watch, and I’ll watch them sooner rather than later. The regular regimen of hundreds of punches a day? Should, but probably won’t.
