Rating:

Aka: THE CHINESE CONNECTION
Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Maria Yi Fung, James Chung
Director: Lo Wei

1972, Hong Kong, Golden Harvest

 

Everyone has seen this one.
It tells the story of the Chiung Wu School and the death of the master Ho Ying Cha.

After the death of his master, Chen (Bruce) goes to Shanghai to pay his respects. When he sees the coffin he goes crazy and to stop his pain he’s knocked down by a school member. After the incident he doesn’t eat for weeks. When the Japanese insult him and his people during the ceremony of his master and call them "sick men of Asia", he goes furious. To find out the truth of his masters death he takes the law in his own hands.

 

I remeber seing this when I was a kid and it was my first Bruce Lee experiance. A scene that sticked with me since then was when Bruce enters his school and is late for his masters funeral; I love this scene, he shines with charisma.

 

This is one of Lee's best films (the other, in my opinion, is "Enter the Dragon") and I love it. Without doubt this one has the best plot of all his other 4 movies, or at least 3 of them.

Here for the first time he used the Nunchucks and his famous power punch. He even won a Golden Horse award in Taiwan for best acrobatic acting. A scene that Bruce didn't like was when he takes two Japanese guys and spins them around (obviously two dolls). He said it was unrealistic and quite impossible. He didn't like the scene where he lifts up a guy sitting in a rickshaw either.

During the filming, Bruce and director Lo Wei had a furious argument and Bruce swear never to work with him again. The movie made 4 million dollars just in Asia, and in Singapore it caused the first traffic jam in the country's history.

In one scene where Bruce kicks a japanese through a wall it’s actually a young Jackie Chan, who impressed Bruce by running and jumping through the wall without any protection making the highest fall ever atempted in a Hong Kong film (at that time).

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