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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

In Memorium: Bruce Lee the Greatest on the 70th Anniversary of His Birth

There were and are great martial artists. There were and are great action stars of world cinema. Then, there was the one and only, Bruce Lee (李小龍). Unmatched.

He was born in San Francisco, California, 70 years ago (on November 27, 1940) as Lee Jun-fan/Li Zhen-fan (李振藩), to parents of Chinese and Chinese/German heritage. I won't provide a bio or filmography in this post--there are more than enough out there written by experts and commentators with far more experience and insight than me. The temporal world lost him on July 20, 1973, when I was soon to turn 9 years old. Too soon. (A gross understatement.) Despite his only 32 years in this life, we lost him after his nearly life-long career on screen--though he only made seven major films, he was in countless films in cameo parts since he was a child, and appeared in numerous television programs.


Bruce Lee was "The S@#^" when I was a kid. The baddest-a$$ed character on screen, and the one almost all macho American boys looked up to. It happened very quickly. I remember vividly, even at that young age, that he became super-famous so fast, and then, like lightening, he was gone. Hollywood -- and, unbeknownst at the time to "provincial" American kids (even in a city like New York where I was born, raised, and where I still live), also the Hong Kong flim industry -- were scrambling to find a replacement for the "image" that was Bruce Lee. "Bruce Le," "Bruce Li," the variations on the name went on incessantly throughout the '70s. Martial arts films were shown in New York in a variety of venues, but as a child, I remember them being shown in the rundown cinemas on 42nd Street in Times Square--Kung fu/Karate, Blacksploitation films, and porn. My father would take me to the theaters to see a double feature of a martial arts film. I was 10, 12, etc., but I always knew the difference between the "real deal" -- a.k.a. Bruce Lee -- and the imitators, but I didn't really understand why. Later, in my late teens and 20s, when my parents and I used to go downtown from our New York Chelsea neighborhood home to Chinatown to see martial arts films in their original "Chinese" (still provincial, we had no idea whether it was Mandarin or Cantonese) with usually hilariously-translated subtitles at the old Shaw Brothers cinema, The Music Palace Theater, and at the Pagoda Theater at the foot East Broadway. (Neither still exist.) I was transported by the martial arts films that I saw, whether serious or silly, but marvelous as they were to me, still not Bruce Lee films.

No one ever moved like Bruce Lee--he created original styles of movement in his martial arts learning and teaching, and for cinema. He was ferocious--it reminds me of Herbert von Karajan's conducting: there was just no one else, in either of their fields, with that kind of implacable, deeply focused, masculine energy. It was just natural to both of them--they tore into what they did with no fear. Both, for those reasons, became heroes of mine. Other martial artists in film never had Bruce Lee's complete lack of fear.

Bruce Lee was a beacon for all who came after him, and he is profoundly missed on this, in three days, the anniversary of his birth.

Watch Bruce Lee fight the (then... and ONLY then) great Chuck Norris in this clip of their climactic fight from "The Way of the Dragon" (猛龍過江; U.S. name: "Return of the Dragon"). MAGNIFICENT!:

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