Game of Death (1978)

“It is better to die a broken piece of jade, than to live a life of clay.”

I shouldn’t like this movie as much as I do! The story is nothing like the late actor and martial artist Bruce Lee’s original vision, the body double and stunt double who play his character for most of the actual movie look nothing like him, the use of actual funeral footage was pretty exploitative, there are extremely obvious and distracting errors like that one infamous cardboard cutout… yet I still really like this movie: both the original Bruce Lee martial arts duels up the tower, and the rest of the film that was added on later including the motorcycle chase scene.

As of writing, Rotten Tomatoes gives Game of Death a 38 percent critic score compared to a 63 percent audience score, which tracks. Some parts of the plot were silly and over-the-top, but you can turn your brain off and enjoy the wild ride. While major aspects of this film are just objectively bad, other aspects were great, and I think it’s a bit more sophisticated than it gets credit for.

A little backstory, for those unfamiliar: Bruce Lee was a martial artist, actor, and filmmaker who is widely credited with popularizing both Chinese martial arts and Hong Kong cinema in the United States. He was a dual citizen of the United States and British Hong Kong. In the early 1970s, Lee starred in several Hong Kong films by the Golden Harvest production company, founded by Raymond Chow. He was working on the original version of Game of Death when he took up Warner Brothers’ offer to star in Enter the Dragon directed by Robert Clouse, a film widely considered to be the best of the Bruce Lee movies. However, due to Lee’s sudden death in 1973 shortly after completion of that film, he never got to return to Game of Death.

Golden Harvest Productions brought back Robert Clouse to direct another movie with the incomplete Game of Death footage and stand-ins for Bruce Lee’s character, and the resulting 1978 film had a completely different plot from what was intended. Most of the footage was new too — with several minutes of Bruce Lee’s original early 1970s Game of Death footage toward the very end, and other random Bruce Lee shots inserted throughout. The latter is very jarring, especially since the stand-in actors look nothing like Bruce Lee, but this article from The American Reader makes a pretty convincing argument that these apparent flaws may have been a deliberate artistic choice on the themes of identity and stereotypes. The film was a commercial success, at any rate. Here is the United States theatrical trailer:

Reviewing this movie, I’ll start with the Game of Death intro theme by John Barry (yes, that John Barry of James Bond music fame). It is awesome! And the opening visual title sequence that goes with it is awesome too. The casino and playing card imagery has nothing to do with the actual plot, which is, I suppose, a metaphorical game of revenge. But who cares, it’s awesome! And it somehow fits the feel of the movie perfectly!

(It makes me wonder what John Barry might have composed for an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale if Eon Productions had the rights to do a serious film of it in the 1960s or 1970s. Because I’m a huge nerd, I sometimes like to go on YouTube and play the muted visuals of the 2006 Casino Royale intro with the audio of the 1978 Game of Death theme, or the muted intro of Game of Death with the Casino Royale intro song “You Know My Name,” and they actually fit pretty well!)

The end of the intro music segues into actual footage from the 1972 film The Way of the Dragon, where Bruce Lee’s character fights Chuck Norris’s character in the Coliseum. It turns out that Game of Death takes place in a world very similar to our own, where the star of the real-world Bruce Lee films is a fictional character named Billy Lo. The intro trolls you with the standard disclaimer that any similarities to real-world people are totally coincidental and unintentional. Not!

I grew up with the John Barry intro, but I didn’t realize there was a different opening for the Mandarin and Cantonese releases made with visuals of screens and lenses. On top of that, the Cantonese and the Mandarin versions each had their own theme music by Joseph Koo, another great composer. The media-related visuals are more literally relevant to the plot, which is of course about a movie actor and has themes of public image and personal integrity. And again, with the troll disclaimer at the end. Any resemblances to real people are unintentional, we swear!

The story begins as Billy Lo (mostly played by Bruce Lee stand-in Kim Tai-chung in the new footage, with stunts by Yuen Biao) wraps filming and is almost killed by a falling object. The “accident” was totally not set up by a criminal syndicate, led by the Bond villain-like Dr. Land (Dean Jagger) and his right hand man Steiner (Hugh O’Brian). These racketeers control famous entertainers, artists, and athletes all over the world, and are now trying to intimidate Billy Lo and his singer girlfriend Ann Morris (Colleen Camp) into bending the knee to the mob’s “protection.”

So I’m not sure whether the prominently placed “no real people depicted” disclaimer is a cheeky satire (since the movie’s protagonist is so obviously based on the real Bruce Lee), or just sincerely emphasizing that the other characters are fictional — no one is being called out, the criminal syndicate is just a story, no need for conspiracy theories.

Billy goes to get advice from his uncle Henry Lo (Roy Chiao), a stage actor in traditional Chinese opera. Billy does not want either of his only two apparent options — which are to join the syndicate willingly, or get forced into it. His uncle says Billy will have to be proactive in maintaining his integrity, and go after the syndicate first:

“When you get to the top, you understand how far it is to fall. But if you think very little of yourself, then you can be pushed off and fall very easily. What is your opinion of yourself?”

“I believe I deserve to be where I am. I’ve worked hard for it.”

“Then don’t let them push. They will never let you rest. YOU push.”

Billy says his line about preferring to die a broken piece of jade than live a life of clay, in another scene with older friend Jim Marshall (Gig Young, in his final film role before committing murder-suicide).

Here Be Spoilers

Billy tries to persuade Ann to leave for the United States before he takes on the syndicate. But before he can, the syndicate itself makes the next move in the game of death. When Billy is filming a gunfire scene — the ending of Bruce Lee’s real film Fist of Fury — he is shot and presumably killed by a real bullet from Stick (Mel Novak), a mob henchman sneaking onto the set.

(In a tragic coincidence, the real Bruce Lee’s son Brandon Lee was killed in real life by a similar firearm accident while filming The Crow in 1993.)

Billy survives the gunshot — a secret shared only with his doctor and Jim Marshall — although he is ostensibly disfigured by it and will need both reconstructive surgery and a disguise on top of it. They plan for Billy to make a surprise attack on the syndicate: faking a death certificate, widespread media announcements of his demise, even a public open-casket funeral with a lifelike statue. (The movie uses actual footage from Bruce Lee’s funeral procession, including his actual body in the casket.)

Ann Morris is obviously distraught — and the good guys as well as the bad guys are keeping her in the dark, as Billy thinks she would be in particular danger if she knew the truth. She believes the love of her life is dead, and she knows the syndicate did it — she saw Stick shoot Billy with real ammunition. Ann Morris has her own character arc as a Cassandra type figure who is being gaslit from all all angles, as everyone is aware but no one wants to publicly acknowledge the mob’s obvious existence. When Jim says that police would like to catch the perpetrators but there is no way to prove it, Ann retorts in anguish: “Don’t you understand anything? Everybody looked at them. But not one person could see anything!” She subsequently has to go to a mental hospital — from the grief, obviously, but also because it’s the lone truth-teller who gets labeled as having a problem.

Steiner says to Stick, “Your face did something for her.”

Then, in the next scene, Billy says he is giving himself a new face.

Soon afterward, he is blending in with a traditional Chinese street parade with elaborate costumes — so there is definitely a recurring theme of faces and masks and disguises, and maybe there really is something to the theory that the movie’s dissimilar casting and awkward edits were deliberate choices.

Billy begins his campaign of revenge — first going to Dr. Land’s residence in disguise and fighting the guards, then going to a boxing match where the syndicate-affiliated pugilist Carl Miller (Robert Wall) is allowed to severely injure his opponent with obviously illegal moves. But of course no one is going to call that out when the criminal mob is involved. Wearing an old man disguise this time, Billy reveals his real identity when he catches Carl alone in the locker room. Away from the flashing of the cameras, the doomed syndicate boxer can’t win a fair fight.

A break in the action has some quiet reflection and subtle angst as Billy is by himself, looking in the mirror and taking off his glasses. He later talks to Ann in the shadows, not wanting her to see him. Even as she tries to assure him it is all right, he replies: “Not to me, it isn’t. Maybe later, but I have to get used to myself first.”

When Ann gets kidnapped, the action resumes and Billy confronts the gang of motorcycle minions in the warehouse where she is being held. The rain, the music, the atmosphere — this is an example of the non-original part of the movie having strong scenes in its own right, and shows where the Billy Lo character ended up in the famous yellow tracksuit. Billy dispatches the minions and gets Stick to tell him the location of Dr. Land — a multi-story building where we finally get the sustained footage from the original unfinished Bruce Lee film.

Easily the best part of the movie, Bruce Lee’s character fights his way up successive levels of the pagoda building with several opponents showcasing various martial arts styles. The fight choreography in the newer, main part of the movie was already good, but the last few minutes with Bruce Lee himself really stand out. Hardly any camera tricks, just great and brutally realistic performances by world class athletes: Dan Inosanto, Ji Han-jae, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There’s no gore or anything — but exactly because the fighting is so embodied and realistic and drawn out, it felt really disturbing each time Bruce Lee’s character killed his opponents.

Much of Bruce Lee’s original footage did not make it into the 1978 Game of Death movie, leaving out dialogue, characters, philosophy, and context of the initial intended story. However, more footage has been released since then and clips can be found online.

The movie transitions back to the newer footage when Billy Lo reaches Dr. Land at the top level. The villain fakes his own death, but Billy sees through the wax decoy right away, jumps through a mirror hiding the way outside, and chases Dr. Land, who falls to his death.

Multiple endings were made — the main international release typically seen in the United States swirls straight from Dr. Land’s demise to the end credits with John Barry’s music and a loving montage of Lee’s earlier films and career. Another version ends with Billy Lo being arrested afterward — apparently a requirement in some markets. Yet another version has a happy ending with Billy and Ann saying goodbye to Jim and leaving on a ferry together.

It’s a broadly appealing type of “picking on the wrong guy” story: a hard-working protagonist wants to be left alone, is continually threatened and harassed by bad guys making unreasonable demands, and appears to be killed by them in retaliation for refusing to give in. He secretly survives, albeit scarred, and the forced alteration to his appearance is something he uses to his advantage as he secretly turns the tables and pushes the pushers.

In an interesting twist, the scars may be all in his head — there are so many continuity errors, it is hard to tell what Billy Lo is canonically supposed to look like, both before and after the injury and surgery. At any rate, by the end at least he seems totally normal! All that angst of not wanting his girlfriend to see his face, but this is not Deadpool — his character was never ugly except the strategic goofy disguises.

It’s one aspect of the movie where I’m not sure if it’s sloppy filmmaking — that the director who made a good Bruce Lee movie earlier just made a dud afterward — or the continuity errors actually have an intentional point to make about public image and self-image.

Either way, Game of Death is an influential movie and a great watch with lots of intense action accompanied by a perfectly matched score. The yellow tracksuit has inspired many media homages, including the main character’s outfit in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The concept of fighting a different henchman up successive levels was an inspiration for video games using that same idea. The film was a major commercial success bringing further popularity of Hong Kong action films to the rest of the world.

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