“It,” Levene said, “is nothing but money.” “What do you think of it?” Greenfield asked after it ended. When their distribution manager, Leo Greenfield, got the King Boxer print into the New York office he called one of his sub-distributors, the colorful exploitation genius, Terry Levene, to come take a look.
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And its title was Five Fingers of Death.ĭirected by Chung Chang-Hwa, a Korean hired by Hong Kong’s massive Shaw Brothers studios, the movie was considered a B-list picture on their slate that didn’t even crack Hong Kong’s box office top ten, but Dick Ma, Warner Brother’s Head of Far East Distribution, picked it up because the studio had just signed a deal with a Chinese-American actor with only a single failed television show to his credit in the States, Bruce Lee, and they wanted to test the market because Warners had committed to this guy’s new movie, a disaster being shot in Hong Kong called Enter the Dragon. But its star wasn’t Bruce Lee, it was Lo Lieh. It was the first major kung fu movie released in America and it changed the film business forever. People went back to see it again and again. After the hero stumbled off into the sunset in the final 15 seconds, bloody and scarred, with no one left to fight because they were all dead, the audience erupted into applause, then rushed the merch table in the lobby and stripped it bare. Fighters tore out eyes, smashed hands into bloody hamburger, and split foreheads with iron-hard fingers, sending bright red Shaw Brothers blood ejaculating across the screen in pornographic spurts.
The audience sat, riveted, even during the talky parts. No one had ever seen anything like it before. Suddenly, the 63-year-old actor leaps into the air and kicks two of the kids in the skull at once before taking the gang apart with his bare hands. The lights went down, the sleek Warners logo hit the screen, and immediately a gang of young thugs surround an old man on a dark street, mayhem on their minds.
Tonight, the crowd jamming the 1100 seats were young, mostly black and Hispanic, predominantly male, and they were cynical - the first few minutes would determine whether they’d get their kicks from watching the movie or mocking the movie.
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New York’s brand new country western station WHN had been giving out free tickets and no one did that anymore, so the crowds gathered, not knowing what to expect from this “Martial Arts Masterpiece!” that was “Stunning the Entire World.”Įxactly one year earlier, the State had hosted Henry Kissinger and Ali MacGraw at the star-studded world premiere of The Godfather.
On a chilly night in March, 1973, the lines outside the State Theater in Times Square wrapped around the block. 21 release, we present an exclusive chapter from These Fists Break Bricks, telling the story of a pivotal moment in the genre’s popularity. As they say, it tells stories such as “CIA agents secretly funding karate movies, The New York Times fabricating a fear campaign about black ‘karate gangs’ out to kill white people, the history of black martial arts in America, the death of Bruce Lee and the onslaught of imitators that followed.” Ahead of its Sept.
In These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World, a new book from Mondo Books, the publishing arm of the pop-culture-friendly art brand, authors Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali tell the story of martial arts films in America.
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