Cinema: Kung Fu's Last Fight

REVENGE OF THE DRAGON Directed and Written by BRUCE LEE

The cult flourished while he lived. Now it has been strengthened by his death. Bruce Lee, the Galahad of the Orient, died last year at age 32, having made a string of Kung Fu epics on the cheap in Hong Kong. At first, the Lee movies were intended for local consumption only. But a few found their way to the U.S., a TV series called Kung Fu caught on, and the martial-arts imports have grossed some $12 million at U.S. box offices.

The geometrically muscular figurehead of this phenomenon was Bruce Lee, who fought with the grace of a ballet dancer and the contained fury of a one-man guerrilla army. His hands were like wedges, his feet flew like blades. With his flashing skill, though, came an edge of self-deprecation. He was sure enough of his own power to be casual about it. That quality made him not only indomitable but affable—a surefire combination for those who prefer their super-heroes to be approachable.

Revenge of the Dragon marks Lee's last appearance as star-director-writer, but audiences hoot and holler: there is no sign of the grave respect customarily due a last work. The film follows much the same plot, includes most of the same scenes as any other Lee movie. His fans seem to accept it all as reassuring evidence that, as one ubiquitous T shirt proclaims, BRUCE LEE LIVES!

Revenge finds Lee in Rome, where he has been dispatched by the daughter of his employer to assist his niece with her foundering Chinese restaurant. For dim reasons, the niece is being hassled by the Mafia.

The result, by the standards of the unconverted, is pretty tacky. Lee is fleet and exciting as ever in action, and amusing enough playing an Oriental bumpkin in the wicked city. But Revenge appears to have been edited barehanded, possibly by a few karate chops. The actors, whose performances are as broad as the Manchurian border to begin with, are further hampered by a brutal job of dubbing: superimposed English, phrases spilling out of the sound track long after their lips have ceased to move.

Lee's finest hour still remains the American-made Enter the Dragon (1973), to which Revenge is similar only in title. Enter gave him a start at cultivating an audience larger than the matinee trade. But he remains now, since his death, the proud province of a militant army of action lovers who respond to him the way previous generations watched Johnny Weissmuller swing through the jungle or Buster Crabbe chase the Emperor Ming all over Mongo. ∎J.C.