#347: Fist of Fury
Release Date: March 22nd, 1972
Format: Streaming (Tubi)
Written by: Lo Wei and Ni Kuang (uncredited)
Directed by: Lo Wei
3 Stars
I’m nearing the end of Matthew Polly’s incredible, definitive Bruce Lee biography, Bruce Lee: A Life, and decided, “Welp, I ought to watch some Bruce Lee movies now I guess.”
When the 50% off Criterion Collection sale returns to Barnes & Noble in November, I’ll be sure to scoop up their Bruce Lee box set, but for now I ran to Tubi and discovered they had Fist of Fury available.
According to Polly, Fist of Fury was the movie that solidified both Bruce Lee’s status as a Hong Kong movie star (it was a tremendous box office hit across southeast Asia) as well as his negative perception of the Hong Kong film industry. It would be the last movie that he would relinquish creative control to a director, and this was largely due to his contentious relationship with Fist of Fury’s director, Hong Kong filmmaker Lo Wei.
Wei, and many other Hong Kong filmmakers working at the two leading HK studios at the time, Golden Harvest and Shaw Brothers, emphasized expediency over artistry. They churned out rudimentary genre fare for working-class Asian audiences, and Wei’s particular style of haphazard filmmaking drove the aspirational Bruce Lee to the verge of violence; fortunately for Wei, his wife was brave enough to separate the men and save her husband from a real kung fu beatdown.
It’s Wei’s laissez faire approach and Bruce Lee’s ambitious screen presence that are both Fist of Fury’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. You can see Bruce straining against the film’s primitive production values, mostly unsuccessfully, but interestingly nonetheless. It’s a showy performance, in the vein of his acting idol and mentor Steve McQueen, where Bruce seems incapable of resigning himself to a supportive screen presence. Like McQueen, you get the sense that Bruce sees his co-stars as competition rather than collaborators. He’s always up to something to draw your attention, even if it’s at the expense of the other actors in the scene.
I’m sure Wei regarded him as a cocky showoff, and he wouldn’t be wrong, but Bruce’s instincts aren’t wrong either. He knows he’s a movie star, and he knows he’s deserving of a better film than Fist of Fury. The problem for Bruce is that he’s in Hong Kong and it’s 1972. It’s either stick around and butt heads with Lo Wei, or retreat back to Hollywood to play a subservient Asian on crummy American TV shows.
Bruce made the right choice, even though Fist of Fury shows that his decision hadn’t paid off fully yet.
Postscript: In addition to the creative tension between Wei and Lee, another thing that makes Fist of Fury interesting is its overt racism. The film’s Japanese villains are absolutely sinister, and Wei reserves Golden Harvest’s cheapest wigs and fake mustaches for them as well. They look ridiculous, and I can only imagine how crowd-pleasing it was for Hong Kong audiences to watch Bruce exact some on-screen revenge for the real-life atrocities that took place between China and Japan over the previous past century.
