50 Years Ago: Bruce Lee

50 years ago today, on July 20, 1973, Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong. Matthew Polly’s informative biography, Bruce Lee: A Life (2018/Simon & Schuster), offers a detailed section on Lee’s death, describing the star’s strenuous activities in the days beforehand, performed in the heat of Hong Kong’s hot summer, and earlier medical issues he’d suffered caused by overwork and overexertion. I’m not going to try to paraphrase any of it here, but recommend simply reading the book yourself.

The book has plenty more to offer, including detailed accounts of Lee’s childhood in Hong Kong, his early work in Hong Kong movies, his move to the U.S. in 1959, his student days at the University of Washington, his subsequent efforts to find students and establish schools to teach his particular brand of kung fu, and his ongoing tension with traditional Chinese martial arts instructors. It also charts his efforts to crack Hollywood in the 1960s, achieving some small success on TV before heading to Hong Kong to star in his own martial arts movies.

Jonas Mekas on the Joys of Hollywood Cinema 1960-65

Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) began writing a regular column, entitled Movie Journal, in the Village Voice of November 12, 1958. A filmmaker himself and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he eventually curated and supervised, Mekas was a champion of what was then called “the New American Cinema,” including the burgeoning experimental and avant-garde films, many of which constituted the “underground film” movement of the 1960s and he chronicled their showings in scattered venues in Manhattan, often subject to police raids because of the controversial and “scandalous” nature of the films. But he also wrote about the pleasures of attending “people’s movies,” i.e. Hollywood movies meant for a mass audience, and disdained the “so-called American ‘art’ film” aimed chiefly at the middlebrow mainstream movie reviewers. He wrote about the more overtly commercial films with a fan’s delight, a breezy wit and a caustic tone aimed at the regular New York newspaper movie reviewers whom he often tangled with.

He collected his reviews in a book published in 1972 entitled, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971. I’m sure Mekas was still writing reviews for the Voice when I started reading the paper in high school. Mekas had brought in Andrew Sarris to cover mainstream cinema releases in order to free himself to devote more space to the likes of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jean Genet, and Shirley Clarke, and recount his own filmmaking adventures and the movement’s constant battles with the police and the hidebound cultural establishment which rejected so much of the new work. As a budding auteurist, I was more interested in Sarris back then, but re-reading this collection reminds me of the turbulence of the era and Mekas’s singular voice, often laced with spirited outrage, pushing for acceptance of new ways of seeing the world through cinema and freedom of voice and vision.

Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, ca. 1963

50 Years Ago: When Kung Fu Came to Times Square

50 years ago, on March 20, 1973, Warner Bros. held two free screenings of a new movie at the Loew’s State Theater on Broadway and 45th Street in Times Square. It was called FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH and was set to open officially the very next day, March 21. It promised action on a scale that exploitation fans had never quite witnessed before, being the very first of a new wave of English-dubbed kung fu films from Hong Kong to hit the U.S. These films would galvanize grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences even more than the Italian westerns and Blaxploitation action thrillers that had been keeping us busy up to this point.

I had managed to beat the line and enter the lobby area to join a friend of mine who had been recruited by Warner Bros. to help pass out posters, stickers and promo material to the crowd leaving the first showing. So I helped out, too, and there was sure a clamor for the items as wildly enthusiastic fans came filing out of the theater and passing the table. When the clamor died down and all the piles were gone, I managed to slip into the second of the two free screenings that night, forced to sit much closer than I would have liked. I can assure you that the packed audience was won over by the opening fight sequence in which an elderly kung fu teacher under attack by a group of thugs leaped upward into the air and kicked two separate opponents in the head at the same time. The crowd went completely nuts and the level of excitement was maintained for the film’s entire 106-minute running time.

50 Years in Times Square: Kurosawa and his Western Remakes

On April 8, 1971, 50 years ago today, I made my first trip to see a Japanese movie on the big screen. It was Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and it may have been the first time the full three-and-a-half-hour cut of the film was shown on the big screen in New York. It was also the first fully foreign-language film with English subtitles that I would see in a theater. The theater was the tiny Bijou Cinema on West 45th Street, between Broadway and 8th Avenue in Times Square in Manhattan.  Interestingly, just over two months earlier, on January 28, 1971, I’d seen John Sturges’ THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), a western remake of SEVEN SAMURAI, for the first time at a theater around the corner from the Bijou, the Victoria on Broadway and 46th Street. On May 20 of that year, I would see Sergio Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), the first in the Italian director’s “Man with No Name” western trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, at the Astor Theater, adjacent to the Victoria on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets. A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was an Italian western remake of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961), which I would then see on July 17, 1971, at the Bijou Cinema around the corner. So I saw Kurosawa’s two greatest samurai films and their western remakes in a six-month time period on one strip of real estate in Times Square, all while I was still in high school. Where else and at what time period could that have happened? I was so lucky to be coming of age as a film buff at just that time.

Happy 70th Birthday, Angela Mao–Kung Fu Diva Supreme

On Sept. 20, 2020, Angela Mao turns 70 years old. She remains, in my estimation, the greatest female kung fu star ever. I re-watched two of her best films for this occasion, BROKEN OATH (1977) and HAPKIDO (1972), and decided to re-post the birthday tribute I did for her four years ago, on the occasion of her 66th birthday, after seeing several of her films, including these two, in new DVD editions. The original post, which includes comments, can be found here. 

Within the last two years, some of the best Hong Kong movies starring Angela Mao Ying have come out on DVD from Shout Factory, remastered, with cleaned-up soundtracks and new subtitles. My earlier VHS and DVD copies had all sorts of problems, so I’ve been wanting to sit down and watch these new editions and thought I’d use the occasion of her 66^th birthday today, September 20^th, to offer a write-up on them. I watched what I consider her four best films for this piece: HAPKIDO (1972), WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES (1973), THE TOURNAMENT (1974), and BROKEN OATH (1977). I didn’t have time for the fifth of her top five, LADY WHIRLWIND  (1972)

Pauline Kael on New York in the Movies, 1971

Pauline Kael was the chief film critic for The New Yorker for several decades and most of her reviews were collected every few years in published volumes. I pulled the fourth collection, Deeper Into Movies, off the shelf recently and re-read “Urban Gothic,” dated October 30, 1971, Kael’s review of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, the New York City police thriller directed by William Friedkin and starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar for that year. Kael’s first two paragraphs of the review, pasted below, offer a spot-on assessment of how New York movies of that time created “a permanent record of the city in breakdown.” As someone who lived through that era and had good times and bad times associated with it, I am always awe-struck at how accurate these films were in capturing the look, feel, mood and sound of New York, or “Horror City,” as she calls it, in those years. However, she goes a little overboard in her paragraph describing the audiences at these films, particularly in Times Square and Greenwich Village, and may be exaggerating the depth and intensity of audience reaction and participation, but at least she was there to observe it. I was, too, and I do remember an occasional fight breaking out, but the audience was generally way more focused on the screen than on each other, although I may not have gone to the same theaters or late-night screenings that Kael did. Still, her vivid portrait of New York moviegoing offers a fitting counterpart to the nervous, jangling energy of the New York movies onscreen.

White Heat: 70th Anniversary of an American Crime Classic

On September 3, 1949, 70 years ago today, Raoul Walsh’s crime thriller, WHITE HEAT, opened in the U.S.  Its star, James Cagney, was renowned in the 1930s for his gangster portrayals in such films as PUBLIC ENEMY, G-MEN, and EACH DAWN I DIE, but he hadn’t made a crime film at all in the ten years since the prohibition saga, THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939), also directed by Walsh. During that time, Cagney made war films, comedies, melodramas and the flag-waving musical, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY. By 1949, gangster fans were itching for the old Cagney, while younger filmgoers needed to be reminded what he was most famous for. The original trailer for WHITE HEAT is chock full of violent, graphic action, with Cagney a relentless, murderous force, snarling, punching and shooting his way through a quick, brutal rehash of the film’s plot in three minutes: train robbery, prison, daring escape, pursuit by the Feds, and an explosive climax at a chemical plant in Southern California. Older fans were beside themselves with gleeful anticipation, while the younger ones’ jaws dropped. As the trailer put it, “It’s your kind of Cagney / In his kind of story / Blazing his way to the top of the world!”

Filming Across Cultures: Cowboys, Samurai and Kung Fu Champs in the 1970s

In the 1960s and 70s, the neighborhood theater functioned as a Cinematheque of global genre films, offering Italian westerns, French crime thrillers, English horror, Soviet fantasy, Japanese samurai films and Hong Kong kung fu films, among other genres. I still marvel at the recollection of seeing such international movie icons as John Wayne, Jean Gabin and Toshiro Mifune in new movies at local theaters when I was still a teenager. I once wrote about this particular movie culture in a chapter for a proposed book on 42nd Street theaters. I’d like to share an excerpt from the chapter, after a few paragraphs of introduction.

Kung Fu on 42nd Street

I recently came across files of ads for kung fu movies that played New York theaters back in the 1970s, material I’d accumulated while researching a proposed book in the early 2000s on Manhattan’s 42nd Street and its movie culture. I had planned to include a chapter on kung fu movies and even questioned several friends who’d regularly attended these movies on 42nd street. Add these files to a couple of original newspaper ads I’d saved myself from 1973 and I see that 42nd Street theaters are listed in 95% of them. In fact, all eleven theaters on both sides of the legendary Deuce (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues) are represented in the ads. What struck me as I researched the titles listed was how many I was unfamiliar with. No matter how much I think I know about kung fu movies of the 1970s and ’80s, there are always more to discover. And I never fail to be impressed by the sheer number of these movies that played in Deuce theaters in those years.

Robert Aldrich Centennial

Robert Aldrich was born on August 9, 1918 and would have turned 100 today. (He died in 1983.) He was one of my earliest favorite movie directors. By the time I saw THE DIRTY DOZEN (pictured above, with Aldrich in the red sweater directing, with Charles Bronson on the right) in high school, I’d already seen three of his earlier films, two in theaters (THE LAST SUNSET, HUSH HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE) and one on TV (VERA CRUZ), and I loved DOZEN so much I made it a point to seek out every one of his films as they came out. In fact, just three weeks after I first saw DOZEN, I went to see his newest movie, TOO LATE THE HERO (1970) when it opened on Broadway. I missed the next one, THE GRISSOM GANG (1971), when it opened, but starting with ULZANA’S RAID (1972), a cavalry-and-Indians western starring Burt Lancaster, I saw every one of his remaining films in theaters on their original release. Also, as I began taking film classes in college and seeing movies in repertory theaters in Manhattan, I sought out Aldrich’s older films, especially as I learned of the high esteem he was held in by auteurists, and discovered for myself some of his very best films, including KISS ME DEADLY (1955), ATTACK (1956), and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), not to mention the chance to see VERA CRUZ (1954) on the big screen. At the beginning of 2018, I finally caught up with Aldrich’s debut film, THE BIG LEAGUER (1953), a baseball drama starring Edward G. Robinson, and, as of this writing, I have only one Aldrich film left to see, the rarely-screened lesbian drama, THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (1969).