Bruce Lee Story

While this is Raymond Chow's official "Golden Harvest" tribute movie about the great Bruce Lee, it makes some interesting, and to me, odd choices of things to include and/or exclude. For example, it mentions his disappointment in not being cast in the lead of the American TV series "Kung Fu," but not the key point that he created the whole idea for the show. Continuing through to his untimely death in Hong Kong in 1973, we get to hear several of the rumors about it, most notably that he was in the midst of an affair with a popular Asian "femme fatale" of the time. But the far more popular theory that traditional Chinese martial-arts extremists loathed Bruce's U. S. schools' equal opportunity education of all sorts of "western" (non-Asian) peoples, and had some sort of deadly poison introduced to kill him. Not a word about the non-salacious story that doesn't insult his and wife Linda's memory! So, I grant it 6/10 stars for a lot of fight footage, some never before seen BTS, but it gave pretty short shrift to his ethical and philosophical POV, both of which were the true essence of the man.

This is Golden Harvest doing their tribute to the legendary martial arts movie star from Hong Kong. There are some interviews, some film stock, and many old photos.

Of course, Golden Harvest is heavily favored and that's well deserved although Raymond Chow is the executive producer. It's a lot of old footage and that's its main strength. I love his Hong Kong films as a child actor. It shows the amateur energy and Bruce's innate charisma. Mostly, this is a filmography of Bruce Lee. It's a lot of film clips like a greatest hits album. It does try to address the contraversy around his death. My main suggestion is to get one of Bruce's famous Hollywood star friends to do the narrations. The actual narrator sounds like all those old style documentary voices.

This documentary which looks at the life of Bruce Lee is filled with many clips from his movies. It offers a straightforward chronological view of his life, from his birt in San Francisco, to his young adulthood in Hong Kong, to his attempts to break into Hollywood, followed by his Hong Kong movies; then, having achieved his crossover into mainstream, while filming his first Hollywood co-production, he died.

There is little to stop the legend of Bruce Lee. Cut down just at the point of achieving everything he had striven for, the imagination of his admirers takes over, building castles in the air about what he might have done. In truth, we are left with very little: the four movies made while he was alive, the one cobbled together after his death, the myriad imitators who faded away within a decade, and the respectability of the martial arts movie: respectability in the industry sense, in that you can sell a lot of tickets. In fact, that looks like the subtext of this movie. Lee's movies were still playing worldwide, and this documentary would have appealed to his fans, and perhaps caused them to buy tickets to see again Lee's few movies.

The film that would make me a life long fan of Bruce Lee, who died two years before my birth. Although my further studies would later prove this documentary to be a little underdeveloped and one-sided, but those who are willing to suspend their disbelief might find this to be an interesting watch. Golden Harvest truly knows how to immortalize its former star.

Bruce Lee, the Legend (1984)

*** (out of 4)

Good, 90-minute documentary taking a look at the life, career of death of martial arts legend Bruce lee.

BRUCE LEE, THE LEGEND is without question a good documentary that features some wonderful stuff but there's no question that it falls well short of being the definitive film out there. I will be the first to admit that I don't know too much about Lee and while this documentary answered many questions, it still left me wonderful a lot more. I think the strengths of the film include some of the wonderful footage we get of various movies from Lee's childhood. We learn that his father was a professional actor and we get to see some terrific clips from some early Hong Kong movies. Even better is that we get to see a lot of behind-the-scenes footage to his films including THE BIG BOSS, THE Chinese CONNECTION and THE WAY OF THE DRAGON.

There's a lot of good information given about the actor's personal life, his rise to fame and why even Steve McQueen was amazed by his talents. The documentary does have some very weak spots including the direction, which is just all over the place. While the stories being told are entertaining, there's no doubt that the way they're told is a bit off and the overall film just doesn't have a very good pace to it. Still, thanks to the footage, fans of Lee will still want to check this out.