Prospectos en el tratamiento y diagnóstico

The Big Boss’s budget was less than $100,000 which, at the time, wouldn’t have paid for a sixty-second TV commercial in the US.

Initially the star of the film was intended to be James Tien, then a major star in Hong Kong, but Bruce Lee’s strong performance soon relegated Tien to second billing.

The simple plot of The Big Boss concerns the struggle of the Chinese community in Bangkok, who live in fear of Thai gangsters run by a

Japanese boss. Bruce Lee plays Cheng Chao An, who has left behind a troubled life in China to start afresh in Thailand. In turning over a new leaf, Cheng has vowed to his mother that he will not get into any more fights and wears her locket to remind him of his promise. He is met in Thailand by his cousin, played by James Tien, and gets a job in the

local ice factory, where his other cousins work. The factory turns out to be a cover for a drug smuggling operation, and workers who discover the truth, including two of Cheng’s cousins, are murdered. Discovering Cheng’s fighting skills, the ‘big boss’ of the title attempts to lure him into his web with a promotion and prostitutes, but eventually a

showdown ensues between Cheng and the boss.

In the first week of filming, Bruce found it harder and harder to keep his frustration in check. The equipment used for filming was old and in bad repair and the ‘script’ consisted of a few basic ideas scribbled on scraps of paper. The director, Wu Chai Wsaing, had a violent temper

and screamed and ranted at the entire cast and crew until the production manager – the same Mrs Lo Wei who had signed Bruce to the Golden Harvest contract – could take no more. Mrs Lo Wei called Raymond Chow and demanded the director be replaced, and by a happy

coincidence, one of Chow’s other directors, a certain Mr Lo Wei, had just finished a film in Taiwan and was duly dispatched to Thailand.

The new director proved to be no better than the first. A compulsive gambler, Lo Wei was far more concerned with what was going on at the racetrack than what was happening on the film set. Because sound

wasn’t recorded at the same time as the action was filmed, Lo Wei arranged to have horse race commentary booming across the set while the actors attempted to play a scene. Unsurprisingly, Bruce became incensed by Lo Wei’s lack of commitment to the picture.

After Bruce twisted his ankle landing awkwardly from a jump, he was only able to drag his injured leg, so in several scenes he had to be filmed in close-up. A recent cut in his hand had still not healed and he needed rest and injections for back pain after every scene. In addition to this discomfort, he was racked with aches and fever and had

difficulty keeping food down. Lo Wei responded by calling Bruce a hypochondriac and filming continued.

During filming, Bruce kept trying to improve the poor script.

Although Han Yin Chieh, the actor who plays the boss, was the official fight coordinator of the film, Bruce also took control of his own fight scenes, and whenever there was a dispute, he would disrupt the

situation by some little strategy, such as ‘losing’ one of his contact lenses while filming in an ice-cutting factory where there were thousands of tiny ice chips on the floor.

Other scenes were filmed in a local brothel which was both dirty and smelly. With the exception of Thai actress Malalene, who plays Wu Mang, the prostitutes in the film were real prostitutes who were used to being paid less than a dollar a trick.

While Bruce was isolated deep in Thailand, Longstreet opened the autumn TV season in the US to good reviews. At last, Bruce Lee and Stirling Silliphant had realized a small part of what they had been

hoping to achieve together for many years.

Bruce’s episode generated more fan mail than the rest of the entire series, proving that Stirling Silliphant was right when he claimed it was Bruce’s first good film and one of the best martial arts shows ever seen on TV. Tom Tannenbaum immediately tried to track down Bruce to get him to agree to appear in further episodes of Longstreet, but no one could get a message to him as he was filming hours away from the nearest city. In the end, the situation worked to Bruce’s advantage,

since the telegrams meant that Golden Harvest executives weren’t slow to notice that US producers were chasing their new actor.

On his return to Hong Kong, as he ploughed through the pile of

telegrams waiting for him, Bruce found offers to appear in three further episodes of Longstreet for $1,000 a show. Knowing that a second

picture for Golden Harvest was already in the bag, Bruce asked

Paramount to double their offer and they agreed. Linda could now quit her job, but they were still not out of trouble over the house

repayments.

When Bruce returned to Los Angeles, it turned out that the three Longstreet episodes in question had long been written and, in view of Bruce’s surprise success in the first episode, Paramount had quickly tried to work him into further stories. Bruce found himself making brief, hastily written appearances that were little more than walk-on parts, but despite this, there was a feeling that his luck was about to

‘turn’. Paramount made a new option offer for an as yet unspecified television project and, having more or less excluded him from their earlier plans, Warners briefly reconsidered taking the risk of making him the lead role in The Warrior TV series.

More than once Bruce mulled over everything that was happening.

What was the best course for him to take at such a critical point? How were audiences going to react to The Big Boss? Should he keep his options open? There were more questions than these to be considered, yet Bruce felt increasingly certain about one thing: his time had come.

Although Bruce was met only by a local Boy Scout band when he returned to Hong Kong, there was a big enough crowd of journalists to

indicate that even before The Big Boss had opened, his star was rising.

On 3 October 1971, together with Raymond Chow and his partner

Leonard Ho, Bruce and Linda sat and waited for the midnight premiere of the film. They joked a little, trying to ease the apprehension they all felt. Hong Kong audiences would openly jeer at a film they didn’t like and were even known to attack their seats with knives if it was really poor. When the film ended, a stunned silence lasting a few seconds was followed by an outburst of euphoria and complete uproar. Bruce was mobbed as he tried to leave the theatre and the next day’s press was equally ecstatic.

It’s obvious from the opening credits that The Big Boss was made on a shoestring budget, since the credits are drawn by a rather shaky hand and there are enough wobbly camera shots to suggest that most of it was shot without any retakes. In addition to this, canned cocktail-jazz muzak adds a bizarre note to the death scenes, but The Big Boss is still better acted and plotted than any comparable film of the time and a half-credible story line strings the action sequences together.

To Western eyes The Big Boss may have seemed like one more in a long line of cheap exploitation films streaming out of Asia, but in the context of the Hong Kong film industry whose staple fare was

windmilling fist fights and buckets of blood, the film was a

breakthrough. Bruce used his American experience to give his and the other characters some human touches, and what to the West might appear overstated, clumsy or even camp was the closest anyone had come to realism in the Asian film world. More importantly, the

Mandarin audiences had a genuine star. Bruce Lee wasn’t a jobbing actor who’d been put through his paces at Shaw’s drama academy, he had natural charisma. The fight scenes alone would have been enough to make him a star in the East, and to prove they weren’t merely the result of camera trickery or slick editing, Bruce insisted on long takes in which the camera runs for up to half a minute on a single shot.

Though the exaggerated feats of the old-style Mandarin films are not absent, Bruce managed to include the kind of action that had never been seen on film before.

From the audience reaction at the premiere, Bruce knew the film would do well, but he hadn’t anticipated a runaway hit, and neither, of course, had Run Run Shaw, who was left to bemoan his fate. ‘Bruce Lee was just another actor,’ he sighed heavily. ‘How could I know?’

Within three weeks of its release, The Big Boss smashed all box office records, earning over $HK3 million. The film then played 875 performances in Hong Kong before going on to break records

throughout the Mandarin circuit.

While Bruce prepared to make his second film, Golden Harvest provided a small furnished apartment at 2 Man Wan Road, in the Waterloo Hill area of Kowloon. The elevators in the building rarely worked, but rather than have everyone trudge up and down the stairs, Bruce turned it into a game in which they ran up the thirteen flights.

Wu Ngan, Bruce’s ‘adopted’ brother, lodged with the family and soon became Bruce’s steward, then later, when Wu Ngan married, his wife joined them too. Two-year-old Shannon started attending a local

nursery school, while six-year-old Brandon went to La Salle, the school from which Bruce had been expelled some years earlier.

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