Bruce Lee: The Legend

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.

An older documentary but surprisingly watchable. Really dives deep into Bruce's early years. But also inadvertently throws more mystery on his death.

A tribute to the incomparable kung-fu master. It includes rare footage of his athletic capabilities and interviews with some of the people who knew him. Produced by Golden Harvest, it is light on details of Lee's early life and heavy on the details of his films for Golden Harvest. As such, it leaves out several interesting and important incidents from Lee's life, and gives short shrift to what is arguably Lee's most important film "Enter the Dragon". It also focuses heavily on some of his co-stars from his early Hong King films, and makes no mention of his most prominent co-stars, Chuck Norris and John Savage. It's difficult to say just who its intended audience is since dedicated Lee fans will find it uninformative, yet casual fans may find the immense amount of detail about his early films tedious.

This documentary included footage from movies Bruce Lee made as a child. I didn't know he started making movies when he was 6 years old. The movie definately shows him in a very positive way; they only mention some of the rumors in passing. There are film clips throughout which made it more interesting. If you like Bruce or martial arts films, this is a movie worth seeing.

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.