1980 Week: The Big Brawl

          Like many American moviegoers of a certain age, I first encountered Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run (1981), which featured the Hong Kong actor in a minor comedic role. Yet Chan actually made his first big play for U.S. notoriety the previous year, starring in the partially comedic martial-arts picture The Big Brawl for director Robert Clouse, who made Enter the Dragon (1973). After The Big Brawl and The Cannonball Run failed to create excitement around Chan, he returned to making films in Asia until finally conquering the U.S. in the late ’90s. Watching The Big Brawl now, it’s easy to see what 1980 audiences missed—and why they missed it. Clouse has a ham-fisted touch for comedy that undercuts Chan’s meticulously rehearsed illusion of effortlessness, and the marketing materials accentuated violence. Viewers expecting straight-up chop-socky savagery must have been disappointed by all the silliness on display. That said, The Big Brawl is a mildly entertaining adventure that makes sense within the context of Chan’s subsequent career: This flick represents an early attempt at finding the synthesis between fighting and funny bits that distinguishes Chan’s most successful films.

          Opening in Depression-era Chicago, The Big Brawl—which is occasionally known as Battle Creek Brawl—concerns Jerry (Chan), an ambitious young man who dates a nice white girl, Nancy (Kristine DeBell), and works part-time in his immigrant father’s Chinese restaurant. Against his father’s wishes, Jerry trains in martial arts with his uncle, Herbert (Mako). After making enemies of a big-time gangster, Dominici (José Ferrer), Jerry is coerced into entering a huge citywide brawl in Battle Creek, Texas, where dozens of combatants box and wrestle until the last man standing wins a cash prize.

          Powered by one-dimensional characterizations and predictable twists, the plot is forgettable. What makes The Big Brawl fun to watch, at least periodically, is Chan’s astounding physicality. In a lengthy roller-derby scene, he leaps and rolls like he’s made of rubber, using found objects and lightning-fast strikes to wipe out opponents. And during the brawl—which consumes a good 30 minutes of screen time—Chan runs the gamut from physical comedy to serious ass-kicking, even though the fight scenes all have a certain Hollywood falseness. Among the supporting cast, nobody excels beyond Chan and the always-dynamic Mako. However, the film has some great bursts of energy thanks to Lalo Schifrin’s memorable score. Laying Ennio Morricone-style whistles over a slinky jazz groove that would’ve made Henry Mancini proud, Schifrin locks into Chan’s playful frequency more than Clouse ever does.

The Big Brawl: FUNKY

Darker Than Amber (1970)

          The first of numerous manly-man adventure flicks directed by Robert Clouse, Darker Than Amber is a grim piece of business filled with macho stoicism, nasty fistfights, and sexy babes. It’s escapism with a melancholy stripe, too brutal and tragic to pass for the average Saturday-matinee fluff, even though it’s not actually deep or probing. Beefy Australian Rod Taylor drives the piece with his appealing performance as quasi-investigator Travis McGee, a creation of prolific mystery novelist John D. MacDonald. McGee lives on a houseboat and shares adventures with his portly buddy, Meyer (Theodore Bikel). Although McGee claims to work only for a 50% finder’s fee whenever he recovers something a client has lost, he’s really a man of idiosyncratic but steadfast principles. Accordingly, the minor enjoyment of Darker Than Amber is watching how romantic entanglements with beautiful women draw McGee out of his shell and transform him into a violent crusader. Also noteworthy, of course, is the procession of 007-style spectacle and thrills, from mysterious dames hanging around gambling parlors to nefarious killers testing McGee’s mettle in personal combat. No viewer is likely to encounter anything in Darker Than Amber that he or she hasn’t seen before, but it’s a tasty slice of pulp fiction nonetheless.

          Things kick off when hulking thug Terry (William Smith) tosses unconscious beauty Vangie (Suzy Kendall) off a pier with a heavy weight tied to her legs. Unbeknownst to Terry, McGee sees the fall from a nearby boat and misinterprets it as an attempted suicide, so he rescues Vangie. This draws him into not only a love affair with the beautiful blonde, but also a dangerous mystery. Things get episodic very quickly, so there’s not much in the way of forward momentum, but most of the vignettes are interesting. For instance, a long passage of McGee getting dragged into a remote swamp by a would-be killer has an Elmore Leonard-esque sardonic edge. Kendall’s seductive quality bounces nicely off Bikel’s courtliness and Taylor’s swagger, while Smith, with his massive biceps and absurd bleach-blonde hair, channels villainy with characteristic focus and intensity. Better still, Clouse keeps things edgy and moody even when the story lags, finally shifting the movie into high gear with the brutal showdown between McGee and Terry that concludes the film.

Darker Than Amber: FUNKY

The Amsterdam Kill (1977)

          A soulless thriller directed with palpable indifference by Robert Clouse, The Amsterdam Kill tells the uninteresting story of an ex-DEA agent who sorta-kinda teams up with a Chinese drug lord in order to dismantle a heroin cartel operating in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Along the way, the duo’s exploits reveal corruption among law enforcement, so by the end of the whole mess, the antihero ex-DEA guy incarnates that hoariest of clichés, the Last Honorable Man in a Dishonorable World. The presence of venerable big-screen bruiser Robert Mitchum in the leading role would seem like reason enough to watch the picture, but the combination of Mitchum’s bored performance and a periodically incoherent storyline drains vitality from The Amsterdam Kill. Only the noisy intrusion of a violent action scene every few minutes keeps The Amsterdam Kill from seeming like an outright waste of film. Perhaps the best one could say is that the picture is agile and brisk but also hopelessly generic and pointless.

          Things get started when aging drug dealer Chung Wei (Keye Luke) decides to retire and sell information about his competitors to the DEA. His exact motivation for doing so is never satisfactorily explained. Rather than dealing directly with the agency, Wei contacts Larry Quinlan (Mitchum), a disgraced former agent. Quinlan selects Hong Kong-based DEA agent Howard Odums (Bradford Dillman) as his middleman. Also part of the mix is Amsterdam-based DEA agent Riley Knight (Leslie Nielsen). Each time Wei gives Quinlan a tip, Quinlan and his associates arrange a sting operation, but early maneuvers go badly, revealing a leak in the DEA’s operation. Eventually, circumstances throw Quinlan’s motivation into question, as well, particularly once he becomes obsessed with plugging the DEA leak. How is that his problem? Very little of what happens in The Amsterdam Kill makes sense, but a lot of it is colorful and manly. Hell, Mitchum even gets to use heavy construction equipment as a murder weapon during the finale.

The Amsterdam Kill: FUNKY

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

          Something of a precursor to the Mad Max franchise, this interesting but problematic sci-fi/action picture follows a principled mercenary in postapocalyptic New York City. Written and directed by Robert Clouse of Enter the Dragon fame, the story suffers from underdeveloped characters, so it unfurls as a series of incipient notions stretched out to feature length and padded with chases and fights. Had a little more brainpower been devoted to the script, the movie could have evolved into something special; as is, the picture loses momentum somewhere around the two-thirds mark and never fully recovers.

          In The Ultimate Warrior’s grim futuristic vision of New York, small factions of people band together for survival. One group, which resides inside a heavily fortified apartment building, is a pacifistic enclave led by the Baron (Max von Sydow). The Baron’s son, Cal (Richard Kelton), has genetically engineered seeds for growing vegetables—which were nearly wiped off the planet during a nuclear war—so the Baron has fantasies of relocating his group to a safer environment where they can restart civilization. Also operating in New York is a roving band of killers and thieves led by the brutal Carrot (William Smith); Carrot’s crew looms outside the gates of the Baron’s facility as a constant existential threat. Enter Carson (Yul Brynner), a muscular fighter who offers his services to the highest bidder. The Baron woos Carson with an offer of extra rations and female companionship, so Carson engages in a series of battles with Carrot’s people before leading a desperate escape mission.

          In principle, this basic storyline should work just fine—good versus evil, with a morally ambiguous avenger caught in the middle. Unfortunately, the narrative is riddled with plot holes. Carson seems to be the only mercenary working the circuit. Security at the Baron’s place is ridiculously weak. Carson proves ineffective at preventing tragedy, basically undercutting the entire premise of the movie. Carrot’s thugs behave nonsensically, threatening the very people whose agricultural experiments could ensure their survival. Worse, a number of subplots about friction within the Baron’s crew show promise, only to be discarded in favor of a trite mano-a-mano showdown between Carrot and Carson. The Ultimate Warrior isn’t awful, by any stretch, thanks to tasty production design and a zippy score by Gil Melle, to say nothing of Von Sydow’s gentle performance. However, the picture isn’t nearly what it could be, Brynner’s impassiveness gets tiresome after a while, and B-movie stalwart Smith is underused.

The Ultimate Warrior: FUNKY

Game of Death (1978)

          As is true for James Dean, the legend of martial-arts superstar Bruce Lee revolves around a surprisingly small body of work. In fact, Lee starred in only one English-language feature, Enter the Dragon (1973), the release of which he did not live to see. Left unfinished in the wake of Lee’s death were various projects including Game of Death, an allegorical action film whose production was suspended when Lee got the chance to make Enter the Dragon. Several years after Lee’s death, however, Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse was hired to build a film around the extant Game of Death footage. Game of Death is as exploitive, ghoulish, and tacky as most attempts to collateralize the public’s affection for a dead actor—here’s looking at you, The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)—but Game of Death still has significance for Lee fans. For a good 10 minutes during the climax, when the real Lee is visible kicking and punching his way through a trio of fight scenarios, Game of Death becomes a “lost” film rediscovered. Unfortunately, everything else about Game of Death is highly problematic.

          After sneakily opening the movie by repurposing a famous screen fight between Lee and Chuck Norris (from 1973’s Return of the Dragon), Clouse employs stand-ins, occasionally punctuated by shots of the real Lee from Enter the Dragon outtakes, to simulate the star’s appearance. This technique doesn’t work, especially when chintzy optical effects are utilized to, say, superimpose a towel around Lee’s shoulders. By the end of the movie, Clouse blatantly cuts back and forth between vintage Lee footage and new shots of stand-ins, with the stand-ins’ faces plainly visible. It’s all quite insulting and ridiculous—adjectives that could just as easily be applied to the plot, about a movie star (Lee) who fakes his death so he can seek revenge against a mobster. In extensive English-language scenes, indifferent American actors Dean Jagger, Hugh O’Brian, and Gig Young deliver boring exposition while earnest American starlet Colleen Camp tries to fabricate a relationship with a phantom costar. The middle of the movie, in which the Americans and the stand-ins carry the plot almost completely, is borderline interminable. On the plus side, the folks behind Game of Death spent lavishly on post-production, commissioning a 007-style opening-credits sequence and hiring top-shelf composer John Barry (deepening the 007 association) to give the picture a fuller musical voice than it actually deserves.

          The best material in Game of Death doesn’t arrive until the finale, when Lee slips on a yellow tracksuit (later referenced in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies) to square off against opponents including a giant temple guard played by basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabar. The sight of comparatively tiny Lee battling the towering Jabar is hard to shake, as is, of course, the sheer charisma and elegance that Lee exudes whenever he’s onscreen. Lee is so commanding, in fact, that one wishes his Hollywood swan song was more fitting than this hack job. The makers of Game of Death trample so clumsily over Lee’s dignity that they even include a shot of the real Lee’s corpse, which was displayed publicly during a wake in Hong Kong.

Game of Death: LAME

Golden Needles (1974)

          The first 10 minutes of this actioner from Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse are wonderfully trashy. Over a shot of a primitive golden statue, a narrator explains hokey lore about how the statue’s design reveals secret acupuncture points—used properly, these points release incredible sexual pleasure, but used improperly, they lead to instant death. Hence the statue’s name: “The Golden Needles of Ecstasy.” Cut to a decrepit, wheelchair-bound Chinese man getting escorted into a modern-day acupuncture parlor for a session with the needles. Once the session is completed, the man rises to his feet, magically invigorated and ready for private time with his young female escorts—until two bad guys enter the parlor carrying flamethrowers. The assailants torch the old man, his ladies, and the acupuncturist before absconding with the statue. That’s how to get the cinematic party started, folks!

          Although the remaining 80 minutes of Golden Needles pale by comparison in terms of energy and verve, the movie has an appealing quality of loopy escapism. The picture combines Far East exotica with mysticism, sex, violence, and a slew of lively performances that border on camp. Golden Needles is ridiculous, but that’s why it’s fun to watch, even though the overwrought plotting eventually slows things down. The gist of the story is that various parties in Hong Kong want to acquire the “Golden Needles” statue. Dan (Joe Don Baker) is a towering American who knows his way around the local underworld, so he’s hired by visiting American Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley) to steal the statue, in exchange for cash and sex. (Dan drives a hard bargain, wink-wink.) Eventually, Dan finds himself in the midst of a caper that involves a kooky American crime boss (Burgess Meredith) and various representatives of the Hong Kong mob.

          Given his previous success with martial-arts pictures, Clouse hits the chop-socky button every so often, with kicks and punches thrown by Baker, Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones), and sexy Asian actress Frances Fong. Yet Golden Needles is only marginally a martial-arts flick, because the action scenes tend to focus on bare-knuckle brawls and death-defying escapes—at one point, Dan gets trapped in a factory into which a bad guy has released dozens of snakes. (An exciting score by Lalo Schifin helps pull together the random story elements.) Golden Needles won’t meet anyone’s criteria for quality cinema, but for sheer silly excitement, it’s hard to beat a movie that features a pervy Meredith licking his lips while his giant black manservant receives potentially lethal acupuncture, or that features man-mountain Baker leading pursuers on an epic chase through an overcrowded Hong Kong harbor and the surrounding area.

Golden Needles: GROOVY

Enter the Dragon (1973)

          A pulpy blend of martial arts and James Bond-style intrigue, Enter the Dragon suffers from predictable plotting, cardboard characterizations, and action sequences that border on self-parody. Plus, the less said about the acting, the better. Nonetheless, Enter the Dragon is fascinating almost entirely because of its leading man, Bruce Lee. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Lee became a pop-culture icon by dying young—he passed away at the age of 32 days before Enter the Dragon, his first English-language starring role, premiered. Like his fellow tragic legends, Lee justifies his enduring appeal with a peerless onscreen persona. During fight scenes, Lee makes things that shouldn’t even be possible look effortless through his unique combination of grace, power, and speed. Therefore, even though the movie’s combat is accompanied by the campy sound effects that dominated ’70s martial-arts pictures coming out of Asia, Lee emerges as a cinematic badass of the highest order.
          As for the picture itself, Enter the Dragon is pure escapist silliness. An international criminal named Han (Shih Ken) holds a martial-arts tournament on his private island. Government agents ask Lee’s character (who is also named Lee) to participate so he can sneak around the island and determine whether Han is up to something nefarious. Also invited to the tournament are Americans Roper (John Saxon), a white man in debt to the mob, and Williams (Jim Kelly), a black man running from charges of assaulting police officers. Lee, Roper, and Williams participate in the tournament by day and discover Han’s criminal activities by night, leading to a giant confrontation as good guys, accompanied by legions of freed prisoners, battle Han and his minions during an island-wide martial-arts showdown. The movie’s zippy climax involves a duel between Han and Lee in a hall of mirrors, with Han wearing a set of metal talons in place of his missing left hand. Ken, who starred in dozens of martial-arts movies before appearing Enter the Dragon, makes a formidable opponent for Lee.
          Although Enter the Dragon wasn’t the very martial-arts story to find success in America—TV series Kung Fu debuted in 1972, and the 1971 indie Billy Jack made a mint when it was re-released in 1973, just a few months before Enter the Dragon hit theaters—the fact that Enter the Dragon was a U.S./Hong Kong coproduction ensured the film was steeped in genre tropes most American audiences hadn’t seen before. Furthermore, director Robert Clouse shot Enter the Dragon’s fight scenes in such an enjoyably cartoonish manner that the picture became a major inspiration the ’70s kung fu craze. So, while it’s easy to identify the picture’s campy faults (many of which were mercilessly satirized in the 1977 comedy flick Kentucky Fried Movie), Enter the Dragon is unquestionably one of the defining movies of the ’70s.

Enter the Dragon: GROOVY

The Pack (1977)

          Nature-strikes-back pictures were all the rage after the success of Jaws (1975), but most rip-off projects stretched credibility too far (killer bees, killer rabbits, killer octopi, and so on.). Therefore it’s great fun to find a Jaws-influenced thriller with a story that actually works. In The Pack, based on a novel by David Fisher, a tiny resort island gets overrun by stray dogs when summer people abandon their pets; the animals turn vicious after several days of exposure and starvation, and when their leader gets infected with rabies, the pack becomes a nightmare for the handful of locals left on the island. As written for the screen and directed by B-movie stalwart Robert Clouse (Enter the Dragon), The Pack is a no-nonsense shocker in the classic mode, keeping nettlesome details like characterization and nuance to a bare minimum while focusing on gruesome dog attacks.

          To the picture’s great credit, many genre clichés are avoided, so instead of a callous local official trying to keep a lid on the danger lurking in the woods, the townies do everything they can to protect people. Furthermore, there’s only one instance of characters stupidly wandering into a part of the island where they might be attacked, but even that scene is defensible because at the time the characters venture off, they’re not yet aware of how bad the puppy problem has gotten. (A bigger hiccup is the battle sequence during which the heroes miss obvious opportunities to take out their attackers with close-quarters gunplay.)

          The movie’s hero is fish-and-game guy Jerry (Joe Don Baker), a recent transplant to the island who is building a family with his girlfriend Millie (Hope Alexander-Willis) and her two kids. Jerry’s local compatriots are sardonic innkeeper Hardiman (Richard B. Shull) and crusty seaman Cobb (R.G. Armstrong). Enduring the ordeal along with the locals is a late-season tour group headed by a bank president (Richard O’Brien) who hopes his sad-sack adult son (Paul Wilson) will get laid with the good-time gal (Sherry Miles) brought along expressly for that purpose.

          The Pack follows the standard creature-feature playbook, beginning with isolated attacks and escalating toward greater intensity as the animals become more brazen and their potential victims become more desperate, so there aren’t many narrative surprises. That said, The Pack delivers the goods with effectively staged scare scenes, and there’s a bittersweet undercurrent to the movie since the dogs are themselves victims. The movie is aided tremendously by the work of composer Lee Holdrige, an industry veteran with hundreds of credits for features and TV; his Jerry Goldsmith-style score uses taught strings and percussive rhythms to jack up suspense in a highly entertaining fashion. And while acting doesn’t matter a whole lot in a project like The Pack, everyone does just what he or she is supposed to do, and Baker cuts a reassuring figure with his easygoing demeanor and ever-present shotgun. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Pack: GROOVY