Director: Jim Markovic
Writers: Larry Dolgin, Serafim Karalexis, and Dick Randall
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
A compilation of excerpts from Bruce Lee’s early films and then examples of two Brucesploitation films.
In honor of Bruce Lee’s birthday (November 27, 1940), I’m pulling out two Brucesploitation films that I haven’t watched yet. The first, The Real Bruce Lee isn’t much more than the brief description I offer above.
The movie is an exploitation piece in the sense that it’s trying to cash in as quickly as possible following Lee’s death. The movie starts with a brief biography, notes that Lee’s father was an actor, and then has some clips of early films Lee worked in. The movies, from what can be seen, are general melodramas and comedies. I can’t tell from these poorly-dubbed nth-generation bootlegs if Lee is any good, but they’re presented here as curiosities. Then the movie notes his death and starts talking about his impact on cinema.
Which is where the movie becomes an interesting object. The movie is at once describing the phenomenon of Bruceploitation films while being a Brucesploitation film. First it offers a clip of a Bruce Li movie saying Li is regarded by some as the heir to Lee’s crown. They also note that there’s a difference in how Li does his martial arts. Li is a little more clumsy, a little more comic, but he’s also striking real people as opposed to dummies so his action sequences are a little more tactile and immediate. I hadn’t expected that kind of analysis and it’s something that’s going to change the way I look at the remaining martial arts movies in these sets.
Then the piece moves into full exploitation when it introduces “the next great sensation” Dragon Lee. The producers are trying to set up their own inheritor to the Bruce Lee fandom and they do it by tacking on a severely edited Dragon Lee movie. The flick is fine—typical martial arts thing. Villain comes to town, trashes school, Lee beats villain and redeems school’s honor. Then another villain, related to the first, comes and challenges Lee. Kills Lee’s master, kidnaps his girl, then Lee defeats him. Since it’s edited, the movie runs through those beats about as quickly as I’ve written them.
There’s nothing special about The Real Bruce Lee as a piece of entertainment. The movie is the filmic equivalent of a People Magazine special memorial issue—appealing only to fans while offering them nothing new. What’s interesting is thinking of it as a product, thinking in terms of how it was experienced. This was released before the Internet, before home viewing. This movie toured theaters where people didn’t know what it was and I imagine a lot of them were really disappointed. They showed up for a movie about the recently-dead legend and what they got was a 7th-grade-level biography of his life and an extended advertisement for another actor entirely. I wonder how many people stuck it out, hoping it would get better, and still left disappointed.
I was initially neutral about this movie. Sure, the flick’s a quick cash-in, but there seemed to be nothing inherently offensive about it. Writing it up, though, has made me really aware of just how exploitative it is and how gross the central concept is. I wasn’t going to recommend it anyway because it’s just not that interesting, but now I’m saying avoid it because it’s fundamentally offensive.
That said, it is in the public domain. archive.org has a nice widescreen copy of it here. Since it’s all archival footage anyway, plunder, cut, and remix to your heart’s content.
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