Author: Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. I seed my stacks with things which will only later become imperative. For example, at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library in autumn 2023, I bought this DVD (and thought it was a documentary). And this year, I read Be Water, My Friend by Bruce’s daughter Shannon, which inspired me to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought in February 2025 (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, and Game of Death II, the last two completed after he died–and the very last made without any footage that Lee shot for the film). So, when I was rifling through the unwatched videos and came across this disc, oh, yeah, I had to watch it and right now.

Although I thought it was a documentary, it is not. It is a fictionalized account of Bruce Lee’s life. And I watched for what seemed a very long time on Saturday night, and I started to wonder if it was a miniseries. Ah, The Legend of Bruce Lee was a Chinese television series. Which explains why every once and a while the music would swell (the theme song sung by Shannon Lee? I cannot find confirmation or refutation of the thesis, but I’m not going to spend an hour on it for a movie review that three people will read, and two of them are mes of the future) after a bit of a climax, but then we’d get another scene starting somewhere else. The Wikipedia for the television series indicates it had seven segments with numerous episodes per segment–50 in all? So I thought on Sunday night I would have another three hours to go since I was but through the fourth segment (the first four being, according to Wikipedia, “High School in Hong Kong”, “Late Adolescence in America”, “College Years and Opening a Kung Fu School”, and “Oakland”). I expected I would need to get through three segments (“Hollywood”, “Rise to Fame in Hong Kong”, and “International Fame and Death”). Oh, but no: This was but a three-hour feature film cut from the whole television series.

Which explains a lot of jumps in the film. Reading the summary, we get jumps from Hong Kong to Seattle–not much of the late Adolescence or Oakland portions (part 2 and part four) if any. It’s a rather simplified version of his story, or at least the highlights from Be Water, My Friend, although Wikipedia’s entry on Bruce Lee includes details that Shannon Lee’s book did not and which might or might not be true. And in the film I watched, not only are Seattle-Oakland-San Francisco blurred, but the last three sections go by very quickly, too–we go from him beating “Yellow Skin,” a lifetime rival who almost paralyzed Lee after a bout. I thought Be Water, My Friend put it on a weightlifting accident, but which is the real story and which is the legend? And right after the swelling music and advanced cinematography which indicated this was A Moment (and perhaps end of a section), we cut to an ambulance and Bruce Lee’s death, and finis! Wait, what?

As it’s a 21st century work, you still get bits of the China versus the West bits that mar 21st century Chinese martial arts films. Some of it probably are apropos, given that parts of the film took place in Hong Kong and Chinatowns in the middle of the 20th century, but the heavy thumb on the scale undercuts the other, more universal, themes in it, an outsider or a man going against the system and trying to improve himself and the world. One of the things that have made Bruce Lee endure as an icon for a small guy beating great odds.

But, eh, you’re probably better off spending time with the actual Bruce Lee films. Especially as Bruce Lee, the man, has been re-written into Bruce Lee, the legend. Which might or might not be true, and for better or for worse depending upon the needs of the moment. At least with the films, you know they’re fictional.

I got this film on a spree at Relics three years ago, and looking at the list of films I got, I’m pleased to say that I’ve watched maybe half of the 29 I bought. Which is pretty good for me, but the number of yet-to-watch films atop the cabinets has grown quite a lot despite those efforts.

So: The film’s protagonist, as it were, is Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, a half-Irish kid growing up in the middle fifties in sight of the local mob guy’s restaurant. He starts running errands for him, growing into a hijacker role along with full-Italian Tommy DeVito (not the quarterback) played by Joe Pesci and Jimmy played by Robert DeNiro. The first third tells about how they come up, the second kind of about a big heist they do and its aftermath, and then the final third is Hill going up for something and getting into the drug trade behind bars–and the final climax is a day where it all falls apart for him. Deep in the drug trade–against the wishes of Paulie, the neighborhood mob boss–he is hoping for a big score but the cops bust him, and he turns on and testifies against his former colleagues.

When I bought the film, Friar commented:

Goodfellas is like the anti-Godfather. No romanticized wiseguys, just crooks.

And I kind of agree with it. It looked like Hill might be the conscience of the group, maybe balking at how violent the groups became coming into the 1970s, at odds with his romanticization of them from his youth, but…. Nah. The film starts in media res, with the trio driving and hearing something in the back of the car–the dead body in the trunk wasn’t dead, and Jimmy and Tommy dispatch it further–and the first part is flashback leading up to that moment, and when the film catches up with it, I expected…. I dunno, something other than same old, same old with the latter dipping into the drug trade and then a rather abrupt jump into the passage of time to the final act where Hill has been too much into his own product and is strung out and under heavy suspicion. And then he testifies, and then he’s a schnook like the rest of us. So, ultimately, he is not the conscience of the film.

The film is based on an autobiography or memoir named Wiseguy by a former gangster. The film, of course, could not bear that title because the Ken Wahl television series claimed that title in the middle 1980s–perhaps also inspiried by the book, but more likely the free-flowing mob fascination of the era.

The film has punched above its weight, though, remaining timely at least through the two memes that one sees on the Internet even today. Tommy Gets Whacked and the over-the-top laughing image (although one still hears “Funny? Like a clown?” from the same scene from time-to-time). So people recognize images of it without, perhaps, understanding the context of the images, even now. Like so much of an Internetified education.

It took me two nights to watch the film for the oddest of reasons. Halfway through the movie, the screen went blue, and as my beautiful wife was home from her whatever that night, I didn’t look into it further, but apparently, for some reason, they put half of the movie on the back side of the DVD, so I had to flip it like a flippin’ laser disc. I dunno, maybe this is how media companies mark a serious mob movie–I have a set of The Godfather films which are on two VHS cassettes (because they’re recorded on the slow setting for better fidelity) which I watched almost five years ago and I think I have a two-VHS version of Casino around here somewhere, tentatively scheduled for viewing in 2031 because I go five years between mob movies apparently. But I’ve not seen that on DVDs before.

So: Well, one more down, which leaves only 8 of the 28 films I bought that day atop the cabinet (amidst dozens of others I have bought since then). Which I count as progress. But next month has two book sales, so….