Poster Boy
In 1973, there was an anti-violence movement in Hong Kong that was as much aimed against violent on-goings on screen as off. Although Bruce Lee’s movies were nowhere near as violent as some of the other martial arts movies, he was the figurehead because of one incident on Hong Kong television where he punched the face of a martial artist who wanted to show off how strong that his stomach was. Bruce’s cavalier attitude coupled with the fact that the Hong Kong police wanted to glorify its own image meant that there was an attempt to find a more positive role model. This existed in the form of Larry Lee, who was a Karate instructor for the Hong Kong police.
Unlike Bruce Lee, Larry Lee refrained from being a raunchy comedian and was more reserved, all in all. Overall, he dressed conservatively. Even if Bruce was the perfect family man, his chequered past meant that the police didn’t want young people to be encouraged by his reputation as an unruly school punk and street pugilist. Unlike Bruce, Larry didn’t have a white wife or biracial kids. So Larry was seen as more pure, even though he ironically was less involved in Chinese martial arts than Bruce was. Ironically, Bloody Ring (1973) was an attempt to win Bruce Lee’s fans over by making Larry Lee the next Bruce Lee. Larry’s hairstyle is similar, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In Bloody Ring, Larry Lee does three identical kicks consecutively with the same leg like Bruce Lee. He wears a striped tracksuit whose colour matches his nunchaku like Bruce in The Game of Death, albeit red instead of yellow (although Dan Inosanto fought with a red nunchaku in The Game of Death). Another aspect to the red tracksuit is that it could be seen as an allusion to Bruce’s red tracksuit in an American TV series called Longstreet. Like in The Game of Death, one of the characters wants to raise money for an operation that will help a relative. The finale is somewhat similar by having Larry having to fight martial artists on different levels of a building in order to get to the top.
It doesn’t end there because Bloody Ring begins similar to how Bruce Lee’s movie would have begun had he lived to complete it. The Game of Death was meant to begin with Bruce’s character getting off the plane in a different country before being encountered by the local mafia. Bruce Lee must have been ticked off when he found out about Bloody Ring because it is also similar to The Game of Death with there being a brother and sister situation where the latter is kidnapped. In Bruce’s movie, we were going to see a flashback to when his character used to be a professional fighter. In Bloody Ring, Larry Lee doesn’t enter the ring but we get to see other people do.
Like Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss, Bloody Ring takes place in Thailand. Unlike Bruce’s movie which was directed by Lo Wei, you can tell that Larry Lee’s movie was filmed there. The Big Boss looked like it could have been filmed in a run-down place in India, Indonesia or the Philippines. In Bloody Ring, character actor Li Kun even has a similar comic relief role to the one that he had in The Big Boss. Unlike Bruce Lee’s first two martial arts films (the second of which was Fist of Fury), Bloody Ring wasn’t a Golden Harvest production but Bruce would have learned about the movie sooner or later, with or without the help of magazines such as the July 1973 issue of Cinemart.
The company behind Bloody Ring was called Far East. Their final three movies were Larry Lee movies directed by Teddy Yip: The Thunder Kick (1973), Bloody Ring (1973) and The Chinese Tiger (1974). In Bloody Ring, there’s a projector reel scene like in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon where a martial artist is observing footage of another martial artist. Clearly, word had gone round before Enter the Dragon had even been released. Some of Bruce’s stuntmen worked on both movies. Despite taking place in the world of Thai kickboxing, Bloody Ring doesn’t feature Hong Kong’s number one instructor of Muay Thai - a man named Fong Yau. He was involved in a rival production called The Greatest Thai Boxing (1974).
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Bloody Ring was actually the less dignified production despite the other one being made by the Chinese mafia. Larry Lee’s movie goes out of its way to ride the coattails of Bruce Lee’s other movies. Like Fist of Fury, there are Japanese martial artists and an attempt to have a fight scene which pits a swordsman against the nunchaku-wielding protagonist. Like The Way of the Dragon, the movie ends with a scene whose setting is a graveyard. Both scenes are vaguely similar in that a poignant observation is made of the protagonist. Unlike Bruce Lee’s directorial debut, Bloody Ring is more strict in how it deals with the law. In Hong Kong cinema, a character couldn’t commit a crime without being killed or arrested. In The Game of Death, Bruce’s character was going to live like a free man despite killing people.
Like in Bruce’s The Big Boss, Larry is surrounded by the police after he collapses from exhaustion after killing the villain. In The Way of the Dragon, Bruce’s character kills the enemy played by Chuck Norris but he doesn’t get killed or arrested, yet the excuse is that the enemy was an assassin who the hero had accidentally killed. The redemptive moment is when the hero places the fallen foe’s jacket over his face as a sign of respect. One aspect of the finale in Bloody Ring being similar to The Big Boss is that the hero finds himself having to fend off assailants who are armed with blades. Ultimately, choreographer Sammo Hung would make a better Thai boxing movie in the form of The Tournament (1974).
Golden Harvest founder Raymond Chow was well-aware of Hong Kong’s anti-violence movement, and had to soften Bruce Lee’s image when he was being interviewed for a Singaporean newspaper called New Nation. This was in the first week of February 1973 when The Way of the Dragon was so popular in Singapore that it ended up being banned. Beforehand, the government had to warn the public against buying movie tickets from touts, but this proved to be a fruitless warning. Supposedly, there were too many crowds and not enough cinemas. Raymond had to appease censors by saying that Bruce’s next film would be about a young man who is reformed before reforming some of his friends.
In late February 1973, Bruce Lee agreed to do something that he hadn’t done in the previous year - he agreed to present awards at a local Catholic school. This didn’t really improve his image, and it made him look like a phoney trying to live up to some kind of Boy Scout ideology. It didn’t help matters that he was carrying a gun. During one point, he ducked to the floor when he heard a loud bang that he was thought was gunfire. It turned out to be someone slamming the door. Bruce had to explain his actions to one of the Catholic teachers by secretly showing him his gun. In Enter the Dragon, an attempt is made to clean up his image by having him play a monk who works for the British government. The joke is that Three Legs Lee has to play a Goody Two Shoes.
Around this time, the South China Morning Post reported a “major drive against crime” would be launched that June, where public cooperation with the police would be the driving force. Secretary for Information Jack Cater was heading a committee tackling the issue after a recent survey of the police had produced results that shocked senior officers. There was a strong sense of disdain for the police among young people who characterised them as arrogantly authoritarian. Ironically, Bruce Lee never played criminals during his time as a martial arts movie star. He never even so much as portrayed a character who was at loggerheads with the police. You were more likely to see former cop Chan Wai-Man at odds with them.
By May 1973, legislative councillor James Wu appealed to citizens by essentially bribing them in a manner akin to the Wild West where rewards would be given to those who reported or apprehended law breakers. By late May, a large number of leading firms and banks had already pledged 750,000 Hong Kong dollars to people who took the trouble in reporting criminal activities. As always, you can’t trust the government. In late June, the SCMP detailed the story of 41-year-old Koo Bing-Lun who went up six flights of stairs and across a roof in pursuit of an alleged robber. Koo grabbed him by the neck and detained him until the police arrived, but he only received 600 dollars for his efforts.
Word was going around in Hong Kong that Bruce Lee took drugs. On April 19 in 1973, the government established a new Misuse of Drugs Act. This act had introduced a classification system for controlled drugs: A, B and C. It created the new offence of possession with intent to supply a controlled drug. It also increased the penalties for trafficking offences whether it be production, supply, importation and exportation. Golden Harvest’s Raymond Chow was friends with a spokesperson for the Hong Kong police, Ted Thomas - a British man who was also a dubbing artist for Hong Kong movies. One of Golden Harvest’s directors, Huang Feng, was a close friend of the police commissioner.
Bruce Lee could feel the heat, as if he wasn’t under enough pressure already by incurring the wrath of Hong Kong gangsters who didn’t like that he was cutting into their sales with his own brand of drug dealing. When he threatened Lo Wei with a belt buckle knife on July 5, the Hong Kong police didn’t want the event to be publicized because then some of his more impressionable fans would have followed suit. It was only after his death in late July that the incident came to light, but the context was that Bruce was being made an example of karma. With fortune on his side, Larry Lee was in a position to be pitted as the new Bruce Lee. Like Jeff Speakman, Larry never really hit the big leagues as a martial arts movie star.
