Yong chun jie quan (Use the Whole Spring Festival) a.k.a. Bruce Lee Secret, a.k.a. Story of the Dragon a.k.a. Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story a.k.a. Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu (Golden Sun Films, The Eternal Film Company, 21st Century Film Corporation, 1974-1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 25) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies. One was a really hacky martial-arts movie made in Hong Kong in the mid-1970’s just after the death of the first international martial-arts movie star, Bruce Lee. A number of other Chinese producers tried to keep the martial-arts cycle going with other male leads, and in this one the male lead was an actor born as Ho Chung-Tao but ultimately given the transparently obvious pseudonym “Bruce Li.” I remember when my then-girlfriend Cat and I were still together in 1980 when an old friend of ours from the San Francisco Bay Area, Jim Smith, came to visit San Diego. We took him for a walk through downtown and passed by the movie grindhouses that were shortly to be torn down for Horton Plaza and the Gaslamp Quarter. I noted that these theatres just showed really cheap films, and Jim said, “You mean Bruce Lee movies?” I said, “Yes, and not even Bruce L-E-E movies. Bruce L-I movies!” This film is so obscure it has no fewer than five titles: its original Chinese name was Yong chun jie quan, which Google Translate rendered as “Use the Whole Spring Festival.” The title on the print TCM showed was Bruce Lee Secret – no punctuation marks – and it’s also been called Story of the Dragon, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story (the title under which TCM’s online schedule listed it) and Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu (its imdb.com page). It’s also not clear just when the film was made: online estimates give the date as anywhere between 1974 and 1977, which would at least put it after the death of the real Bruce Lee in 1973. It was passed off as a Bruce Lee biopic but really wasn’t. It opens in San Francisco – we can tell because the first scene is a stock shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and then there’s a traveling shot of San Francisco’s Market Street as it existed in the mid-1970’s, when I was still living in the Bay Area, that brought back memories.

Bruce Li is supposedly playing Bruce Lee, and once we get past the scene-setting shots we discover him working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. His best friend is a waiter, and he’s tripped by a group of nasty young customers including a heavily Afro’ed Black American who, in a wonderful turnabout scene that’s the one piece of genuine wit in this film, abuses the young Asian waiter with the same racist taunts that whites routinely aimed at Blacks in other movies of this vintage. Bruce whatever-his-name-is exacts revenge by attacking the obnoxious customers with his martial-arts skills, thereby wrecking the place (the customers just happen to be sitting at the one breakaway table in the restaurant) and getting himself and his friend fired by an understandably upset proprietress. They open a martial-arts training school and attract the ire not only of the bad guys from the restaurant but their bosses and the ultimate capo di tutti capi (or whatever the equivalent is in Chinese). The film devolves into a series of martial-arts brawls that, contrary to the “Deadly Kung Fu” title, don’t look particularly lethal on screen. There’s one long-haired Asian fighter who’s supposed to be on the side of the villains but who to my mind was both way hotter physically and more charismatic than Bruce Li. He kicks the shit out of Our Hero, which forces him to regroup and come back with a new style of kung fu which he tries to explain incomprehensibly to his students. Ultimately the film lurches into a series of martial-arts confrontations with only the barest hints of plots between them. Most of the intrigues against Our Heroes are concocted by an oddly wizened-looking Asian man with a voice like James Cagney’s who announces his intent, with a gang of thugs that for some reason includes the obnoxious young men from the opening scene in the Chinese restaurant, to take over the waterfront – which just gives directors Chang Chee and Hua Chen (Hua Chen also co-wrote the script with Hsin-Yi Chang) a chance to stage some of the fight scenes out of doors.

Bruce Lee Secret would have made excellent fodder for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 but au naturel it’s just boring, though the hot guys are at least fun to look at (my favorite was a slender young long-haired white guy dressed in a white shirt and tight-fitting lime-green pants who’s in the opening restaurant scene, but to my disappointment I didn’t recognize him in the rest of the movie, though he could have been in it somewhere). The film is atrociously dubbed from Chinese to English with a sloppiness that would have embarrassed the distributors of the English-dubbed Godzilla movies, and the print we were watching had recognizable image tears as well as a very dirty and grainy scene that was quite obviously a stock shot no one bothered to clean. Wikipedia has a whole page on the so-called “Brucesploitation” films with which the Hong Kong martial-arts movie industry tried to keep going after the real Bruce Lee’s death, generally with young Chinese martial-arts practitioners with only a vague resemblance to Bruce Lee but outfitted with appropriately “Bruce-ian” names – though the sleaziest of these faux “Bruce Lee” movies were the ones made by producers that somehow got the rights to film clips of the real Bruce Lee and did with them what Ed Wood had done to Bela Lugosi in Plan Nine from Outer Space: spliced them into movies otherwise shot with replacements and then advertised them as “Starring Bruce Lee” even though the real Lee was only in a few minutes – sometimes just a few seconds – of the film.