Bruce Lee

The career of Bruce Lee (1940-73) is one of the most interesting cases of cultural influence in the history of film. Lee's career as an actor in Hong Kong martial arts films--which he pursued after finding only minor success in American films--was one of the most successful ever. He revitalized action films in Hong Kong and, for the first time, Asian films were seen by large audiences in the United States. In part, Lee's appeal to Western audiences was simply based on the kinetic power of the wild, vigorous films that placed a premium on action and did not concern themselves to a great extent with the story, acting, and technical values that made Hollywood a major center of film production. Another factor in the appeal of the films was their simple exoticism. They were unlike anything American audiences had seen and offered a truly 'foreign' experience in many respects. But the exoticism went beyond a simple tourist's look at the unknown. Lee died very young, at the pinnacle of his career, and, as his subsequent fame has shown, his American fans were taking something more than simple, passing enjoyment from his films. Lee's films might be credited with creating the stereotype of the Chinese actor who flings himself about the room destroying everyone and everything in his path. But his own serious devotion to the martial arts, which was conveyed by the intensity of his precise, extraordinarily skillful athletic performances, also placed him in the broader Western cat

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in the Gung Fu Pian (kung fu films) which were "comparatively realistic . . . although the hero is often a kung-fu superman, he remains, however tenuously, within the realm of physical possibility" (Williams). Lee, it has been said, starred in "revisionist" kung fu films but the revisionism in his approach was not to take the art of film any farther than it had already gone in Hong Kong (Fore 242). What Lee offered was the spectacle of the truly accomplished martial arts expert whose skills were the star of the films. In previous kung fu films the skills of the actors and bit players had been important, but Lee raised the art of kung fu to a new level where audiences were as much amazed by the individual performer as they were by the "fantastic and extravagant" extent of the violence and action (Brodie). The extent of the revolution caused by Lee can be gauged by the fact that the biggest star in the world now is Jackie Chan, who did not connect with audiences until, as he puts it, he began to wonder "how can I get rid of the Bruce Lee shadow and be Jackie Chan?" (quoted in Dannen 33). He went about the task by viewing all of Lee's films and noting that it was the sheer proficiency of the moves and the startling intensity of

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