BRUCE LEE, THE MAN & THE LEGEND: CONDUCT UNBECOMING by JOSEPH KUBY

BRUCE LEE, THE MAN AND THE LEGEND is the only documentary about a person's life that I've seen where it is bookended by two funerals for the same person. One may argue that it would have been too depressing to have both funerals shown consecutively, but then Golden Harvest could have neglected the Seattle funeral since they would rather have you believe that Bruce was completely Chinese in spirit despite his American education. There's definitely some propaganda going on with this doc. Hong Kong is referred to as Bruce's “real home” in the '70s although it was just a pit-stop as far as he was concerned. The “family quickly adapted to the new pace of life” despite Bruce telling Bob Baker in a letter that even himself, circa February '72 might I add, was still in the process of adjusting to life there. Furthermore, Golden Harvest would like us to believe that Bruce was blasé about offers from international producers when, in actuality, he was most excited because he knew that they had more money than what the Chinese could offer by themselves.

For a doc that revels in the wallowing of pity, no attempt is made at referencing Bruce's back injury, his coma on May 10, his injuries during the making of ENTER THE DRAGON or even his failure to star in his own U.S. TV series. People often wonder why Linda would have agreed to have a film company exploit her private life while she was mourning but they had her where they wanted her. Bruce had been using Golden Harvest to receive drugs from Bob Baker, who didn't destroy his letters from the Lee family in case he needed them as leverage. Perhaps he was concerned that he had letters worth being killed for, so he prepared himself a dead man's switch (especially in light of going to Taiwan after Bruce Lee's death so as to appear in a movie). Likewise, it would have been in Linda's best interest to keep letters from Baker in a way which suggests: “If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me.”

The opening Hong Kong funeral goes on for so long that it almost feels as if Golden Harvest were pandering to those who claimed that they would literally pay to see Bruce Lee dead. He had so many enemies that it's a wonder that Golden Harvest didn't include the photo of him in the morgue. The Chinese title of the doc is THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BRUCE LEE, but his death is never explained. As such, the title might as well have been The Life and Funerals of Bruce Lee. Then again, the doc provides so little info on his private life that it may as well have been titled The Career and Corpse of Bruce Lee. Schadenfreude best describes a film studio who creates a lobby card whose sole image is the corpse of their number one star.

It's especially morbid that another film company, Sing Hoi, had the distinction of filming the plane actually leave the runway for their mini-doc: THE LAST DAYS OF BRUCE LEE. Filmed at the same time as THE MAN AND THE LEGEND, the mini-doc is notable for featuring people who didn't attend Bruce's funeral even though Betty Ting Pei's voiceover narration states that they were his friends. Likewise, John Saxon can't be seen at the Seattle funeral unlike Jim Kelly, Paul Heller and Robert Clouse. For all of her significance in Bruce's life, Betty is never shown or mentioned in THE MAN AND THE LEGEND. Then again, this doc was screened in the month after the inquest. But still, that didn't stop Golden Harvest from casting her in Angela Mao's STONER or Michael Hui's GAMES GAMBLERS PLAY.

A trashy gossip site like TMZ has nothing on the carnival of horrors that THE MAN AND THE LEGEND treats you to. Contrast this with Shaw Brothers who lost Alexander Fu Sheng ten Julys later. He made more movies for them than Bruce Lee did for Golden Harvest, and he had less enemies, but they never stooped as low as Leonard Ho. I have singled him out because he can be seen at the Hong Kong funeral, but he seemed less emotionally involved than Raymond Chow. This doc is only one step above being labelled as a snuff movie. Danse macabre would be a fitting monicker since the Hong Kong funeral is more choreographed than a wedding in terms of who stands next to who.

Of particular note is stuntman Ng Ming-Choi, who stands next to character actor Wei Ping-Ao despite the fact that the other stuntmen acted as security for the funeral. However, Ng left Golden Harvest…as did Jackie Chan. In fact, both men worked with John Woo on THE YOUNG DRAGONS sometime after Bruce's death. The difference between Ng and Jackie is that Ng didn't work on any Golden Harvest movies in the '80s and '90s. As for the rest of the '70s, the only Golden Harvest movies that Ng worked on were ones which didn't involve Sammo Hung. Not only that but Ng positioned himself as Sammo's rival with BUTCHER WING and LITTLE MAD GUY.

Speaking of all things fat, the heavy-set New Zealander from THE WAY OF THE DRAGON – Mark Metekingi – can be seen on the left side of the screen when Linda and her children leave the Hong Kong funeral by way of the minibus. He had a connection to Michael Chan Wai-Man in that not only did Mark appear at the press conference for Sing Hoi's THE UNICORN PALM, but he appeared in one of Michael's movies – Adventure in Denmark – where he reunited with his castmates: Piet Schweer and Wei Ping-Ao. Speaking of reunions, THE MAN AND THE LEGEND allowed Golden Harvest's Andre Morgan to reunite with his co-stars from WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES: Jhoon Rhee and Anne Winton. The former barely gets a chance to speak while the latter proves to be as much of a ghost as Lee if not quite the haunting spectre. Which reminds me – we don't get to hear the audio of the Hong Kong funeral. Although I can imagine that Hong Kong would be a noisy enough place, let alone the sheer cacophony of a major funeral, the doc's treatment to mute it with music is like having a nightmare where we see a banshee screaming but we don't hear the screams (like a mute rape victim).

For a doc produced by Golden Harvest, THE MAN AND THE LEGEND contains very little coverage of their magazine: Golden Movie News. Even other magazines get more coverage than this. Even more shocking is that we don't get to see funeral attendee Tan Tao-Liang considering that he was a martial artist who Golden Harvest touted as the next best kicker in Kung Fu cinema. Yet not even he was granted the chance to take ownership of Bruce Lee's office. Speaking of which, there was a red badge below the license plates stuck to the wall. The badge has one word on it: road. Speaking of this doc presents a road less travelled: so many people were interviewed but we barely get to hear them. Maybe Golden Harvest couldn't bear the thought that the Americans had more profound things to say than the people of Hong Kong. They should probably have interviewed his Hong Kong film colleagues instead if they wanted the Chinese to have the final say on Bruce Lee, but there were a lot of things that probably had to be swept under the carpet.

They say “Blink and you will miss it” but this doc has the aural equivalent, especially with the lousy sound editing where things don't sync up visually. Case and point: Linda's airport statement can be heard when she delivers her eulogy at the Seattle funeral. The usually inaudible interviews are symbolic because, for a long time now, there has been a code of silence where very few people, if any, involved with this doc talk about it in interviews. I can only imagine what James Coburn had to say about it when he had a private word with Brandon Lee, if at all. At one point in the doc, Bruce's dark side is alluded to when the narrator says that it's “much safer to play downstairs” so that Bruce's kids don't interfere with him while he is in his study.

While editorializing is to be avoided in journalism, the interviews presented are thwarted by Golden Harvest's attempt at putting words in their words as they speak. If you think talk show hosts are bad, they have nothing on the attempt at damage control that Golden Harvest was conducting here. It actually made me appreciate the abbreviated nature of a 1993 Bruce Lee doc called THE CURSE OF THE DRAGON. Ironically, Golden Harvest's Andre Morgan had nothing to do with that one. More fanboys worked on that doc, but the use of fight clips was used sparingly. THE MAN AND THE LEGEND feels like those Hong Kong Legends DVD interviews where fight footage was used to pad things out (or to satisfy the limited attention spans of adrenaline junkies).

Moving on from the morbidity, the soundtrack is notable for its use of Pink Floyd. Besides being featured on the aforementioned THE UNICORN PALM, some of their music was featured on the 1983 Cantonese re-release of THE BIG BOSS. One of the occurring cues of the soundtrack for THE MAN AND THE LEGEND is Udo Lindenberg's Paradise Now. The more that I listen to it, the more that I become convinced of its influence on a '90s Deee-Lite song called Groove Is in the Heart. The latter has the same beat but sped up and in a higher key (i.e. major instead of minor).

On the subject of similarities, there is a discrepancy regarding Bob Baker and Bob Wall. While quite a bit is said about Baker in the doc, Wall does not get a mention and they only show footage of him from THE WAY OF THE DRAGON. Among the peculiarities of this doc is that Bruce Lee's training equipment is shown and talked about other than the legendary electric stimulation pads. I also take umbrage with the cinematic equivalent to a recording artist's album having filler. In this doc, photo montages go on for a long time with little narration to justify them. Then we have footage of U.S. martial arts contests which could easily have been replaced with the rest of the audition footage that was filmed for THE GAME OF DEATH such as Susan Shaw's screen test.

Like Clouse's version of the film, and Ng See-Yuen's Tower of Death, footage of Bruce Lee is taken out of context to justify the U.S. contest footage. It's done in a manner befitting FIST OF FEAR, TOUCH OF DEATH: the 1980 mockumentary which was really a schlocky parody aimed at Lee's expense. The inclusion of the contest footage is most peculiar because Golden Harvest were said to be aiming this doc primarily for the Chinese audience. On the other hand, Golden Harvest were disingenuous here about THE GAME OF DEATH having an undecided future since they deliberately avoided showing footage of Bruce fighting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or even showing the combat between James Tien and Dan Inosanto.

If THE GAME OF DEATH was the last film that Bruce was working on, why would the narrator refer to ENTER THE DRAGON as Bruce's last film/ I suppose the technicality is that it was a lexical ambiguity meant to imply “previous” instead of final. Be that as it may, I do take issue when the narrator claimed that Bruce “arrived on time every day without complaint” during the making of ENTER THE DRAGON. This completely negates Bruce's initial AWOL period and even the day that he walked off the set during the moment that he found out about Raymond Chow trying to pass off the film as a Golden Harvest co-production instead of a Concord one.

The access that Golden Harvest had to photos, footage, production notes and letters didn't prevent them from making a doc that feels like it was made by people who had no personal experience with its subject. There are times when the doc seems like it was made by amateur film students or even YouTubers creating videos consisting of montages set to music and little else. The running time is so scant that it's easy to play devil's advocate and assume that Golden Harvest had to heavily cut down on what they had so that they could get more theatrical screenings in a single day. If not that, you could say that the narration is so sparse that Bruce's death left them at a loss for words.

Going by some vintage Hong Kong flyers that I've seen, it would appear that ENTER THE DRAGON got released in all Hong Kong cinemas on October 18. Contrary to what's reported on the Hong Kong Movie Database, this doc was released on October 3. If ENTER THE DRAGON really did have its premiere on the day after Bruce's funeral (as Chinese Wikipedia claims) then it was more likely as a primer to instigate word of mouth. That still doesn't explain why they felt the need to include the abbot scene into the doc as if it was a deleted scene. This tells me that they were hoping that this doc would be released in the West, since the scene was not going to be incorporated into the international prints.

On the topic of incorporation, this doc shows Paul Heller in his office where we can see a headshot and other professional photos of an actress: Juanita Brown. Perhaps she was briefly considered for roles that went to other actresses in the following films which he produced: BLACK BELT JONES, GOLDEN NEEDLES and HOT POTATO. Instead, Juanita was in BLACK STARLET. This was co-written by Michael Allin (of ENTER THE DRAGON fame) and produced by Sequoia Productions (Fred Weintraub's company with Paul Heller).

You would think that a shameless exploitative doc would leave no stone unturned as far as privacy invasion goes but Golden Harvest failed to exploit Bruce Lee's identity as a photographer and videographer. Bruce had home movies, and I'm pretty sure that his interest in the Playboy magazine allowed him to enact his wildest fantasies (particularly when using the mirrored room in ENTER THE DRAGON for his own edification). After all, Playboy liked to advertise the latest in camera technology...so it does beg the question as to whether Bruce Lee made his own pornography. It's a question that has to be answered when Golden Harvest thought that it was appropriate for people to see the provocative wallpaper of his studio office.

On that note, this doc avoids showcasing the nudity that was in every one of Bruce's martial arts films. If Golden Harvest were trying to cater to children with this doc then it worked because the narration is overly simplified in terms of stating the obvious like a horse race commentator. Perhaps Golden Harvest wanted to cater to blind people in the hopes that the rhythm of Bruce Lee's choreography was like morse code. There is certainly a naivete about it in terms of how young martial arts students are allowed to showcase their stuff even though they don't come close to the magnifying presence of the person whose feature enabled them to perform for the camera. Equally naïve is the lack of hard-hitting journalism since Bruce had his fair share of detractors at Golden Harvest, and even run-ins with the law (including why he left Hong Kong as a teenager). Overall, the presentation of the doc is laughably quaint, but Raymond Chow's background was that of an old-fashioned news reporter.