In Bruce Lee's first starring role, we find him playing a young man named Cheng who moves from the city to a small town where his cousins live so that he can work with them at the local ice factory. Cheng, before he leaves the city he grew up in, makes a solemn oath to his family to never fight again, no matter what.

Cheng is forced to break this promise though, when a few members of his family start to mysteriously disappear once the y have a run in with the management of the factory. It turns out that the men in charge of the plant are in fact drug dealers, and after the ill effects that this has on his family, Chegn decides to take it upon himself to break his promise and take down the slime balls who are causing so many problems for his family at the factory.

This one takes a little while to pick up steam, but once it does, boy howdy, watch out. Lee shows the world in his feature film debut why he is the baddest of the bad and the Big Boss himself is really no contest to this little man here, a man who is pissed off enough to take matters into his own hands and solve them once and for all. In short, here Lee is an instrument of vengeance sticking up for his family and for those who have been wronged by organized crime, something that would prove to be a recurring theme throughout his short career.

REVIEW:
The Big Boss was Bruce Lee’s debut film, or rather his first martial arts film. He had actually appeared as a child actor in a number of Hong Kong films before he relocated to America. Already popular in Asia for his role on the television series The Green Hornet, Lee exploded on the scene with this violent Lo Wei film and set the framework for his image as the world’s first and most popular martial arts film star.

Judged on its own merits, this simplistic tale of a man fighting to avenge the death of his co-workers at the hands of their criminal boss is nothing remarkable. The fight choreography ranks below what you’ll find in Lee’s subsequent films and hardly stands up to the kind of elaborate workouts seen in Golden Harvest’s late ‘70’s classics of kung fu. Aside from one brief scene, Lee doesn’t even fight for approximately the first 40 minutes. The film also follows the trends of the day by exposing a fair amount of exploitive content such as Ma La Lene’s knockers. But then, Lee’s films were really about one thing, Bruce Lee and his smoldering personality. He was an icon who made a film his, regardless of how bad any of the content was.

In the film, Bruce initially takes a back seat to James Tin, an established Hong Kong star with adequate martial arts skills. He would co-star with Bruce again in Fist of Fury (1972), but was able to have a slightly more commanding presence here. James plays Chen, a worker at an ice factory who helps Cheng (Bruce Lee) get hired there. Two random fights take place with Chen stepping up to be the hero while Cheng looks on. On Cheng’s first day at the factory, he mistaken drops a block of ice on the floor and two workers find a suspicious package inside. The two workers are brought before the boss and basically told to take a sum of money and keep their mouths shut about the drugs. Not only are they naïve enough to not recognize a drug smuggling operation in the first place, but once they do they don’t consider the consequences of refusing the money. They are killed and Cheng, who acts as the leader of the workers meets with the boss to find out what happened to them. Hong Kong film fans with recognize a young Lam Ching Ying as James Tin’s partner. The two meet with the same fate, but after a fierce struggle. Suspecting their manger of foul play over the disappearance of their co-workers, the remaining factory workers riot and Cheng gets sucked into the fray despite his promise to his mother to never fight again. Of course, Cheng knocks the stuffing out of the factory foreman and his goons. In a move to stave off further dissent, the boss promotes Cheng to foreman and bribes him with women and wealth, much to the chagrin of Maria Yi who plays his would be girlfriend. A rift also grows between Cheng and the workers who feel betrayed. Then Cheng is warned about the true nature of the boss by a prostitute (Ma La Lene) and finds his missing friends have been put on ice, literally. Already alerted, the boss’s thugs kill more workers and attack Cheng at the factory. Bloodied but still alive, Cheng confronts the boss at his palatial home.

Truly, the only credible reasons to watch this film is for the fights and simply to see Bruce Lee. So any further discussion about the flawed story filled with generalities and plot holes would be a waste of time. Most of the trademark elements of Lee’s later films are present here. He tastes his blood from a fresh wound, gets a superficial cut to the stomach, he frowns, smirks, and emits an incredible intensity leading up to his fights. The only things missing are the nunchaku and a worthy opponent. I mean no disrespect to Han Ying Chieh, who plays the boss and Lee’s final opponent. He was the “official” action director on the film and contributed to a number of excellent films in the genre including A Touch of Zen (1971) and Back Alley Princess (1973) with Polly Shang Kuan. Ying Chieh is also a fine character actor and kung fu proponent, but he’s simply no match for Lee on screen and everyone knows it. Part of this reason may be due to a variance in styles, but Lee’s speed and power is undeniable. Nevertheless, Lee’s final move which involves impaling Ying Chieh with his fingers is morbidly satisfying. (This scene is cut from UK releases.) The best fight actually takes place in the ice factory and has Lee using various props and tools lying about. It’s a memorable fight, made all the more so by a comical shot of Bruce slamming a thug through the factory wall, leaving a hole that perfectly matches the shape of his body!

The Big Boss could be described as the lesser of Lee’s films, although I personally prefer it over Enter the Dragon which cost a lot more, but was even more inconceivable. The rough, low budget feel of the film enhances Lee’s performance and his raw intensity seems to be at home in this environment. On the audio front, the Cantonese track features sampled music from the likes of Pink Floyd, but works reasonably well. Lee’s trademark howling is off and doesn’t necessarily match what’s happening on screen. But Bruce Lee fans generally won’t care too much about all of these niggling gripes. Like everything he did, it’s worth watching just to bask in the fierce glow of his charisma.

Bruce plays Cheng who travels to Thailand looking for work. He soon finds a job in an ice packing factory where a number of employees have mysteriously disappeared. When the workers become restless, demanding answers, the company bosses bring in a bus load of thugs to quell the uprising. Cheng springs into action, singlehandedly defeats the gang and is elevated to the status of champion for the workers. This is shortlived however when Cheng naively accepts an invitation to dinner from the factory manager. Realising he has been duped Cheng turns his attention back to investigating the disappearances of the ice factory workers and uncovers a drug trafficking conspiracy.

When I first watched this I had already seen Fist of Fury and so Big Boss was a little disappointing, for a 13 year old, as you didn't really get to see Bruce do anything until the last 40 minutes or so. Bruce's character wears a jade pendant as a reminder of his promise to his mother to avoid trouble which stops him from getting involved in any fighting. When the jade is accidentally ripped off by an assailant Cheng is then free and able to take on the villains.

Watching this now I can appreciate what the director was doing in allowing a slow build up to heighten the anticipation of the action to come. It also emphasises the contrast between Bruce's almost balletic style of fighting and the standard kung fu choreography of the time. For the first half of the movie the fighting is typical of early seventies kung fu movies looking rather less than graceful with lots of flailing arms and primitive editing. However when Bruce finally takes centre stage it is a completely different story and there is a sense of drama in Bruce's fights that is really absent in the other scenes. There is also, of course, the difference in martial arts competence between Bruce and anyone else in the film.

Essentially there are three Bruce Lee fight scenes in this movie. The first is where Bruce loses his jade pendant and takes on a gang of thungs sent to beat up the factory workers. This scene contains one of my favourite Bruce Lee moments as he kicks a knife out of an attackers hand and then follows it up, with incredible speed, with a kick to the head. The second fight scene comes where Bruce breaks into the ice factory at night, discovers the heroin and dead bodies in the ice, and is then confronted by the main villain's son and a gang of henchmen. This fight again contains some wonderful moments, especially when the fight moves outside and you get a wide view of Bruce surrounded on all sides. Finally there is the film's climax where Bruce goes to the villains mansion and fights the big boss of the title (Han Ying Chieh).

Its these fight scenes that carry the whole movie as the Lo Wei's direction cannot really be described as special and without Bruce the film would have been ordinary in the extreme. Although Han Ying Chieh was credited as being the film's action choreographer it is obvious which scenes he was responsible for and where Bruce took over.

As a vehicle to introduce Bruce to the world, 'The Big Boss' did its job perfectly and changed Hong Kong cinema forever. Essential viewing for Hong Kong film fans.