Cinema kung fu fighting. The exotic novelty of hand-to-hand combat
Bruce Lee and son Brandon Lee, both deceased years apart under decidedly unclear circumstances…
Among the most unique cinematic phenomena of the past, the one inspired by martial arts certainly occupies a prominent place.
In January 1973, for the first time, a kung fu film was successfully released outside the East: “5 Fingers of Violence”, starring the Hong Kong star (but Indonesian by birth) Lo Lieh.
Decidedly crude in technique but complex in plot, full of references to the so-called spaghetti western strand, the film will be an unexpected success in Italy, grossing almost a billion lire.
An astronomical figure at the time for a movie without famous actors.
Soon came “From China with Fury”, and Hong Kong cinema kung fu fighting definitely took off : almost two hundred in a few years.
But the history of kung fu fighting movies is much more complex than can be summarized in a few lines.
This wave of films of not always sublime quality left only one actor who later became a myth : Bruce Lee, who died at the age of only 32, under circumstances (to say the least) that have never been fully clarified, right at the height of his success (hardly a coincidence either).
The success of this genre was explained by the exotic novelty of bare-knuckle fighting, while for the Chinese it was ethnic revenge.
In fact, before Bruce Lee, no Chinese had ever become an idol for non-Asian audiences.
This was partly because Mao had banned his films in People’s China, partly because Hong Kong was then a British colony and therefore a capitalist country, and partly because, deep down, he feared that Lee’s personal cult would undermine his own.
Bruce Lee embodied the migrant folk hero, redeeming the humiliation inflicted on his race by foreigners.
And that is why his duel with Chuck Norris (the famous Walker Texas Ranger) among the ruins of the Colosseum (The way of Dragon, box-office champion in Hong Kong in 1972, but released posthumously in the West in 1974) was considered in Asia to be the best ever filmed.
