cult film freak: BRUCE LEE & NORA MIAO 'FIST OF FURY/THE CHINESE CONNECTION'

Bruce Lee in FIST OF FURY/THE CHINESE CONNECTION Year: 1972 Rating: ****1/2

In FIST OF FURY aka THE CHINESE CONNECTION, composer Richard Loo's Spaghetti Western style chanting soundtrack (with tense cues from Johnny Keating's ROBBERY) leads to the polar opposite of Bruce Lee's first feature THE BIG BOSS (ironically re-titled FIST OF FURY in America): there he's calm and passive until being pushed into fighting while here, right off the bat, he feverishly attacks a coffin...

There's also a tremendous progression of aesthetics: the previous vehicle's a shoddy/rural low-budget modern-western while FURY is both plushly stylistic and genre stylized, taking place within either cool Asian-designed interiors or the kind of nighttime film-noir atmosphere when Lee's sneaking around, attempting to keep Japanese gangsters (having just occupied pre-WW2 Shanghai) from shutting down his master's multi-tiered dojo...

Bruce Lee and Nora Miao in FIST OF FURY/THE CHINESE CONNECTION

And as his Hong Kong Trilogy ingenue merely worked at a drink-stand in BOSS, and would provide central exposition for WAY OF THE DRAGON, the adorable wide-eyed Nora Miao is the perfect ingenue...

Meanwhile Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL VOL. 1's climactic moonlit garden showdown (following a bombastic kung fu massacre) is a shot-for-shot homage of what's perhaps the greatest low-budget karate flick with or without the legendary Bruce Lee, sharpening both the basic vengeance plot-line and the otherwise one-dimensional villain/adversaries — as FIST OF FURY is really more about the man's non-stop action than his action-packed mission.