Film: The Big Boss
Release date: 23rd October 2006
Certificate: 18
Running time: 96 mins
Director: Lo Wei
Starring: Bruce Lee, James Tien, Maria Yi, Han Ying-chieh, Nora Miao
Genre: Action/Crime/Drama/Martial Arts/Thriller
Studio: Contender
Format: DVD
Country: Hong Kong
In 1971, Bruce Lee returned to his native Hong Kong after unsuccessfully trying to launch himself in Hollywood. Capitalising on the popularity of his US television series The Green Hornet, Lee took the lead role in this low-budget exploitation flick. How was anyone to predict that he was about to provide a watershed moment in Hong Kong film history?
After getting in trouble in Hong Kong, Cheng Chao-an (Lee) travels to Pak Chong, Thailand, where his mother hopes he will be able to stay out of street violence. Wearing a locket to remind himself of the promise he made to her that he would never fight again, Cheng meets up with Hsu (Tien), leader of a small group of Chinese expats working in Thailand. Here, he finds camaraderie, and maybe even romance in the form of Chiao-mei (Yi).
Cheng gets a job with Hsu and the others, working in an ice factory, where the Chinese workers are bullied by the Thai foremen, who are in the employ of the mysterious ‘Boss’ (Han). When two of their group discover that the factory is really a front for a heroin smuggling operation, they are offered a place in the crime gang. When they refuse, they are brutally murdered, and pronounced missing.
But when Hsu visits the boss to get some answers, and he does not return, the Chinese expats finally begin to suspect that something sinister and deadly is going on at their workplace. How long will Cheng be able to keep his promise to his mother?
There is something innately thrilling about watching a movie star come into their own before your very eyes, and with Bruce Lee, the experience is intensified by the knowledge that The Big Boss was the Little Dragon’s very first leading role as an adult. Unlike Jackie Chan, who would succeed him as Hong Kong’s number one box office performer in the second half of the 1970s, Lee had no trial and error period where he perfected a cinematic persona, no artistic or commercial misfires to signpost his pathway to Legend-status. Like his launching into action at this film’s midway point, he exploded onto the Hong Kong cinema circuit a fully-formed icon - he just needed a film in which to appear. Though he would add and subtract elements in his subsequent movies, the core of the Lee persona is already in place in The Big Boss - here, Lee plays an initially mild-mannered young man looking to avoid confrontation until the moment he is left with no other choice (see also, Way Of The Dragon and Enter The Dragon); he fights on behalf of his persecuted countryman, in the name of family and revenge (see, Fist Of Fury and Way Of The Dragon); his skill-level is - perhaps inexplicably - preternatural (see, every subsequent Bruce Lee movie). A passionate, driven character off the cinema screen, there is no doubt that Lee was in complete control of how he appeared on it.
It is not just his star persona that makes The Big Boss a significant, landmark work in Hong Kong cinema. The fight choreography was also something the like of which had never been seen previously. Today, Bruce Lee’s fight scenes may seem lacking in comparison to the overly dexterous and imaginative work by such later revolutionaries as Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping and Lau Gar Leung, among others, who would take Hong Kong cinema to new heights in the years after Lee’s untimely passing in 1973. But The Big Boss offers something of a history lesson, clarifying the giant leap forward Lee made with his method of fight staging, which thrillingly merges a more practical form of combat with a shooting style that more than tips its hat to Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western genre, which were hugely popular in the US in the mid-to-late 1960s, when Lee would have been living and working in Hollywood. If one compares the movement of the leading man to supporting player James Tien and the others around him (all coordinated by credited fight choreographer Han Ying-chieh), one can see that Bruce Lee was not simply making a splash on the Hong Kong box-office - he was grabbing an entire cinema by the scruff of the neck and taking it forward with him. Elements of Lee’s work has dated since their early 1970s release dates - but the combat sequences still stand up as visceral slices of cinematic brilliance.
Given how beautifully destined all of this seems, an analysis of the film’s one true narrative masterstroke - the delaying Cheng Chao-an’s exploding-into-action for a tantalising forty-one minutes - would suggest that the filmmakers had every intention of The Big Boss being the signature, watershed movie that it became. After forty-one minutes of stylised kung-fu, filmed in the familiar static camera angles of an era on which Bruce Lee was about to close the book, the moment that a foolish Thai goon rips off Cheng’s treasured locket, bringing forth the furious vengeance of the previously mild-mannered expat, the film seems to take on an almost mythic significance.
Sadly, the reality is that the production of The Big Boss was a greatly troubled one, rendering any grander reading of the film’s intentions as something of a happy accident. In his biography of Bruce Lee, writer Bruce Thomas states that the original director Wu Chai-wsaing was fired in the early stages of production, to be replaced by Lo Wei (who would go on to helm Lee’s next, and best, film Fist Of Fury), and that production began with not a script, but a list of ideas scribbled on paper. Furthermore, Lee suffered from chronic back trouble, and lost weight from bouts of food poisoning. Thomas also claims that supporting actor James Tien was the original star of the movie until the producers saw that they had a more charismatic leading man in the cast. This latter point, knowing Lee’s charisma, personality - as well as the evident control he exerted over the production - is debateable; and it is worth noting that in his audio commentary on the original 2000 Hong Kong Legends DVD release, Asian cinema expert Bey Logan claims Tien was cast in a supporting role as a back-up in the (unlikely) event that Lee proved unable to carry the picture himself.
And what of the picture as a cinematic work? With every Bruce Lee vehicle, the reviewer must divorce themselves from appreciation of the leading man’s charisma and physical brilliance to view objectively the script and production. Of all his completed works as an adult actor, it is The Big Boss that perhaps falls the shortest when taken on its own merits. Though much of the production signified advancement and updating of Hong Kong cinema, it abides by the then-tradition of script-structure, whereby the plot serves only to set up the fight sequences, and the most done to ensure that the audience is on the hero’s side is to make the villains foreign (although the Thais of The Big Boss perhaps get off lightly compared to the portrayals of Japanese in Fist Of Fury, and Europeans in Way Of The Dragon). The characters are generally archetypes, which frustratingly limits the narrative options in the second half. As Cheng’s investigation into the disappearances of his Chinese friends places him in deadly corners that he has to fight his way out of, he emerges from one particularly desperate battle near-traumatised at the experience of killing an opponent with his own fist. Cheng’s trauma lasts but a minute before any of the psychological effects are swiftly forgotten as the film pushes into its finale with the discovery of a brutal massacre, but not before the viewer is left wondering why Cheng was left traumatised by that particular, empty handed, killing and not the variety of stabbings he inflicted earlier in the same fight. Certainly, these types of questions will always arise when, as noted, a production begins without a finished script, and this rushed, slam-bang approach is reflected in both the generally static cinematography and rickety sets - The Big Boss lacking some of the production value that Lee would insist upon later in his career.
That said, director Lo Wei - as he did in Fist Of Fury - shows a certain flair for the macabre. Scenes of unfortunate Chinese workers being first murdered and then placed into large blocks of ice are genuinely eerie, and really stand out among the otherwise uninspired level of craft on show in terms of script and direction.
But, the truth is, nobody revisits Bruce Lee’s movies for the script, direction or acting. The movies’ re-watch value is always high, because the pleasure of seeing Bruce Lee on screen remains a thrilling example of a man punching and kicking at the walls of a movie screen, threatening to burst free at any moment. Even today, nearly forty years after The Big Boss’s premiere, the walls of cinema can only just about contain the ferocious power of the Little Dragon.
Bruce Lee elevates an otherwise rote and overly-familiar screen story to a level above ‘guilty pleasure’. For its historical and cultural significance, The Big Boss is an essential work - a genuine time-capsule, capturing the moment Hong Kong cinema changed forever. JN
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