Long admired for the climactic duel between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, this movie is a lot more innovative than most people realize and its influence is still being felt today
Kung Fu movies were a huge part of my life growing up. I discovered them at age 12 and during my teen years I must have watched a hundred or so. They became my thing along with RPGs, wargames, and Dr. Who. The first one I can remember watching was Return of the Dragon.
Even its fans don’t seem to put this film in its historical context. It is in fact a vital turning point for action cinema and is probably Bruce Lee’s most influential movie. Sure plenty of actors tried to copy Lee’s mannerisms; his death stare, his high pitched yells. But looking at his movies, how many of them were copied? Game of Death was just a slapped together mess redeemed only by Bruce Lee’s footage. Leonard Maltin called Enter the Dragon a perfect action movie but its Sax Rohmer inspired plot was rarely copied, the notable exceptions being Gymkata and the first Mortal Kombat movie. The Chinese Connection/Fist of Fury was too much of traditional kung fu movie to have an influence beyond Hong Kong. Fists of Fury/The Big Boss was pretty close but not much happens until the final reel. Return of the Dragon however has had an enormous impact on action cinema in the West.
Look at the plot to Return of the Dragon, then look at all the Hollywood chop sockey films that followed. Return of the Dragon has been the template for most Western made martial arts movies. Look at China O’Brien, Nowhere to Run, Roadhouse. You can find this plot being repeated in non-martial arts actioners like The Annihilators or The Substitute.
The Return of the Dragon is your basic Western with kung fu replacing fast draw gunmanship. It’s nearly identical to Shane. Instead of the Wild West it takes place in Rome. The damsel in distress (Nora Miao) is danger of losing her restaurant instead of the old homestead. Instead of a cattle baron, she’s menaced by a mafia boss. And instead of a gunfighter coming to her aid, it’s top Kung Fu man Tang Lung. At the time this movie was made, 1972, the action genre was undergoing incredible change. Old genres like the costume swashbuckler and the Western were all but dead; victims of changing tastes and rising production costs. The switch was being made to action movies with contemporary settings. Just a year previously, Clint Eastwood had transported his Man With No Name from the old West into 1970s San Francisco in Dirty Harry. It was one of the first if not the first movie to move tropes found in Westerns into the modern day. But that movie pointed out just how difficult that can be. Dirty Harry is mostly about how out of place Harry Callahan is in the modern day. The final scene of him throwing away his badge is character’s acknowledgment that his brand of justice doesn’t belong in the modern world. They conveniently overlooked that part when it came time for the sequels but a big problem remained with these new Westerns; there was only so much gunplay you could put into them and still be believable.
Nothing makes this more clear than the first scene at the restaurant. Tang Lung arrives just as a group of thugs show up to start trouble. In a Spaghetti Western it’d be no problem to gun these men down go to the coffin maker and ask for four coffins. But how would that fly in modern Rome? No so much. So what is our hero supposed to do? Movement Number 4, Dragon Seeks Path.
And here is where Return of the Dragon changed action movies. Kung Fu provided the missing ingredient needed to transpose Western and Swashbuckler plots into the modern day. The hero could no longer shoot the hat off a man’s head or cut a Z into his shirt, but he hit a guy in the jaw with a lightning fast sidekick. It was this movie along with Dirty Harry and the car chase classics Bullitt and French Connection that became the three pillars of the modern action movie. Every actioner in America between the ‘70s and early ‘80s leaned on at least one of these movies.
Getting back to Return of the Dragon, this movie is packed with more Western tropes than Silverado. After Tang Lung makes his appearance the bad guys try to ambush him or overwhelm him with numbers. When that doesn’t work they call in three “hired guns” to fight him with karate including Chuck Norris who plays a character named Colt. And their battles with Tang Lung are staged like classic western gunfights; with two opponents facing each other before exploding into action.
This is topped off by the famous showdown between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in the Coliseum adding a reference to another once popular but at the time dying action genre, the sword and sandal epic.
This movie set the standard for modern actioners in other ways. Whereas police bureaucracy and modern civil rights were a major stumbling block in Dirty Harry, here the police are non-existent. They don’t show up until the final scene. The criminals’ motivations and methods are very simple and don’t hold up to tight scrutiny. Why do they want that restaurant so badly? It can’t be doing that well. Who the hell goes to a Chinese restaurant when they’re in Rome?
But also Bruce Lee himself is very much a pioneer in this movie. He’s playing a very different character here, one with a lot of humor to him. He’s anticipating the late ‘80s mugging for the camera action heroes like Willis and Schwarzenegger.
Return of the Dragon/Way of the Dragon is one of the best kung fu movies out there. It’s exciting, fast paced and contains some of the best fight sequences ever filmed. But it doesn’t get enough credit for shaping action cinema. It provided a lot of the key ingredients for future action movies.
Next Up: The 5 Shaolin Masters
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