Well, after hearing “Fists of Fury” on the radio, I guess it’s fitting to watch the film which was the second in the five-pack I bought last February (The Big Boss was the first in the set).
This film, which came out the year after The Big Boss, also has a common martial arts theme to it: The rival martial arts school kills/destroys the protagonist’s school. In this case, Bruce Lee’s character, the best in the school, returns from afar to find that his master has died–the authorities say from pneumonia, but Lee’s Chen thinks it was murder. So it happens. The film is set during the Japanese occupation of China around World War II, so the rival school is also a rival power/oppressor. The rival school crashes the funeral to boast of their prowess, but the senior student at the Chinese school, now the master, holds Chen back and does not want conflict. Chen goes and busts up the rival school, though, leading to further escalations. And he discovers insiders poisoned the master at the behest of the Japanese, so he gets revenge on them and, eventually, all the Japanese and a visiting Russian master of martial arts and strongman.
So, yeah, a martial arts film. With Bruce Lee, so a step above, I guess. The most noteworthy thing about it, though, is that the antagonists are not “The West” or “The Americans” unlike more modern martial arts films partially subsidized by the Chinese government (or allowed, perhaps).
Two down, and three to go. I’m kind of spacing them out because they are likely to be very similar to one another and to other martial arts movies from the pre-wire era. Looking at his IMDB page, he really did only make…. four movies in his lifetime? Incredible. He punched above his weight, literally and figuratively.
