The One Martial Arts Star Bruce Lee Wanted To Surpass

The One Martial Arts Star Bruce Lee Wanted To Surpass

In the kung fu movie industry, there was one martial arts star in particular that Bruce Lee saw as a rival he intended to surpass: Jimmy Wang Yu.

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The One Martial Arts Star Bruce Lee Wanted To Surpass

In the kung fu movie industry, Bruce Lee saw one martial arts actor in particular as a rival he intended to surpass: Jimmy Wang Yu. While there’s no question that Lee is the biggest name in martial arts movies, he’s certainly not the first actor to star in a kung fu film. There were others stars in the business before he came along. One of them was Taiwanese actor Jimmy Wang Yu, who had worked at Shaw Brothers since the mid-1960s.

Shaw Brothers, the biggest action movie studio in Hong Kong, made a star out of Wang Yu by casting him in several of their biggest pictures. After rocketing to stardom with his performance as the vengeful protagonist of The One-Armed Swordsman, Wang Yu starred in several other movies, including The Return of the One-Armed Swordsman, The Assassin, and Golden Swallow alongside Cheng Pei-pei.

One particular movie that Wang Yu made that drew the attention of Bruce Lee was the 1970 film The Chinese Boxer, which is typically credited as the first true martial arts movie. Unlike the sword-fighting films that he and Shaw Brothers had worked on previously, The Chinese Boxer focused on well-choreographed hand-to-hand fighting. For the Hong Kong box office, it was an instant hit. Lee reportedly saw the movie at a special screening, and became interesting in eclipsing Wang Yu’s fame.

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In the book Bruce Lee: A Life, biographer Matthew Polly recounts an interesting story from Golden Harvest executive Raymond Chow in which Lee called out Jimmy Wang Yu’s biggest movie. While discussing a potential contract, Lee asked for Chow’s thoughts on movies that the latter had been involved in, specifically The Chinese Boxer. When Chow referred to it as one of the best films he had helped make, Lee remarked, “I can do better.” Given that Wang Yu was the director, writer, and the star of the movie, it’s clear that this was as a jab at him, and a sign that Lee sought to surpass him. According to Polly, Wang Yu’s fame in Hong Kong and status as its top action star had triggered Lee’s “hypercompetitive nature” and caused him to work hard at becoming “bigger and bigger” than him.

Lee seeing him in this way isn’t necessarily surprisingly, especially when taking into account his rivalry with A-list Hollywood actor Steve McQueen. In his efforts to become successful in the movie business, Lee made no secret of his ambitions in becoming the greatest star in Hollywood, and has said in the past that he would supersede McQueen’s popularity. It appears that he had a similar goal when he transitioned from Hollywood to Hong Kong, where Jimmy Wang Yu was king.

Looking at what came next for both of their careers, it’s not hard to see that Lee ultimately did get what he wanted. When he burst onto the scene with Golden Harvest’s The Big Boss in 1971, he quickly became a sensation in Hong Kong, and things only got better for him from there. As for Wang Yu, it unfortunately became increasingly difficult for him to remain relevant to the martial arts genre (despite the part he played in starting it). Regardless of his reputation and his ground-breaking use of kung fu in The Chinese Boxer, he was held back by the fact that he wasn’t actually a trained martial arts expert in the same vein as Bruce Lee, Ti Lung, and the other rising stars of the early 1970s. Though he continued to play leading roles in sword-fighting costume pieces and kung fu flicks, his days of being the number one star didn’t last.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/bruce-lee-jimmy-wang-yu-martial-arts-beat/

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