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At the beginning of the 70s when Bruce started making films for
Lo Wei's company, such as 'The Big Boss, Tangshan Dasyong' and 'Fist of Fury, Jingwu Men,'
the Cantonese movie reached its lowest ebb. So these two films were both made in Mandarin;
later on the Golden Harvest dubbed them in Cantonese and released them in Hong Kong. Bruce
Lee brought back the audience with his excellent martial arts skills and his irresistible
screen charisma. His performance encouraged the Hong Kong movie industry and stabilized
the unshaken position of the Golden Harvest as a leading movie company. The kung fu movies
were inspired, and of course his salary for shooting a movie soared. Movie companies from
Hollywood and Japan all came to him, and the Chinese movies he made in Hong Kong were sold
on an international scale. In 1972 he and the Golden
Harvest together produced the 'Return of the Dragon a.k.a. Way of the Dragon, Menglong
Guojiang.' He wrote the screenplay, directed and acted in this movie. It was about a young
man called Tang Long, who left Hong Kong for Rome to seek his fortune. When he found that
the ethnic Chinese who ran restaurants were bullied by the gangs, he stood up for them and
started a series of fights and eventually he won. This movie broke the box-office record
in Taiwan alone, and was the winner at 11th Golden Horse Awards.
In the same year, Bruce Lee was elected to be one of the seven best martial artists in the
world by the Black Belt magazine in the States. He was given this honor because of his
invention of the martial art, Jeet Kune Do. This sect of martial art puts emphasis on
speed, initiative and flexibility. Bruce intended to prove that Jeet Kune Do was more
powerful than Karate.
The death of Bruce Lee saddened his fans, when he was only 33 years old in 1973. It was
also an unbearable disaster to the Chinese movie industry, which planned to expand its
market internationally. The high tide of the kung fu movies also ebbed away. A Hong Kong
columnist Shih Ci said that the death of Bruce Lee was a enormous loss to the Hong Kong
movie industry but at the same time the residents of Hong Kong already knew that they did
not have to beat the foreigners to regain their self-confidence, subsequently the
residents should love their land and their cultural traditions more and from them discover
new things. |
