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 category of Eastern sage, the source of mysterious hidden knowledge--an unlikely role he shares with figures ranging from the Buddha and Confucius to Gandhi and Dalai Lama.
The Hong Kong film industry blossomed in the 1920s and, after the Peoples Republic of China nationalized the Shanghai film industry, the British Protectorate of Hong Kong became the principal source of Chinese-language films as the four Shaw brothers established "the largest studio complex ever...