What do Charles Bronson, Sonny Chiba, and Charles Dickens have in common? Thank you for asking!
The death in 1973 of Chinese-American martial arts star Bruce Lee set Chinese and Japanese producers and studio heads scrambling to find a worthy heir to the King of Martial Arts Cinema. In Japan, theToei Company found their candidate in Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba. Born Sadaho Maeda in 1939, the son of a test pilot took his professional surname from the prefecture where his father was stationed after World War II. A high school gymnast and Olympic hopeful until a back injury forced him out of the running, Chiba won a Toei talent contest and made his film debut in 1961. Often in collaboration with director Kinji Fukasaku, Chiba made a name for himself in crime films and made his first foray into martial arts cinema in JUDO LIFE (1963). By 1970, Chiba had sufficient name recognition in Japan to start his own school for stuntmen and budding martial arts stars and to be chosen by Toyota as a celebrity spokesman.
Toei’s THE STREET FIGHTER (as GEKITOTSU! SATSUJIN KEN was known internationally) was meant to blow away the competition and it certainly did that. In the United States, the film was initially rated X by virtue of its over-the-top violence, which included among its outrages (but was certainly not limited to) a bare-handed castration, a kung fu vocal cordectomy, and the shattering of a man’s skull as seen by X-ray. (Sixteen minutes had to be cut from THE STREET FIGHTER before New Line Cinema could release it in America with an R-rating.) In Japan, THE STREET FIGHTER and its two sequels — RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER and THE STREET FIGHTER’S LAST REVENGE (both released in 1974) were known as “The Killing Fist Trilogy.” (New Line would distribute the unrelated 1974 martial arts actioner ONNA HISSATSU KEN, starring Chiba and his female protégé Etsuko Shiomi , as SISTER STREET FIGHTER.) Though his character name would change in subsequent films, Chiba would play men of action not too far afield of his STREET FIGHTER antihero Takuma “Terry” Tsurugi – perhaps most notably in KARATE KIBA (1976), which ran on the American grindhouse and drive-in circuit throughout the 70s and 80s as THE BODY GUARD (“Faster than Ali! Meaner than Bruce Lee!”)
Twenty years after his American heyday as the heir apparent to Bruce Lee Chiba was championed by movie geek turned screenwriter/filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. In his original screenplay for Tony Scott’s TRUE ROMANCE (1992), Tarantino set a key scene in a Detroit revival cinema running a triple bill of THE STREET FIGHTER, THE RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER, and SISTER STREET FIGHTER and went the distance to name-check Chiba –through the mouthpiece of Tarantino’s protagonist/alter ego, Clarence Worley — as “bar none the finest actor working in martial arts movies today.” Tarantino later cadged THE BODYGUARD’s precredit allusion to Ezekiel 25:17 (mostly spurious and a seen/heard only in the film’s American cut) for Samuel L. Jackson’s fiery curtain-closing speech in PULP FICTION (1994) and paid Chiba the ultimate homage by casting him in KILL BILL: VOLUME 1 (2003) as legendary Japanese swordsmith Hattori Hansô, who is persuaded to come out of retirement to perfect one last weapon for the film’s revenge-minded heroine, Uma Thurman.
Back to my original question. If you’re confused by TCM’s use of a picture of Charles Bronson in their PR for THE STREET FIGHTER – and you should be — well… that’s due to the fact that Walter Hill’s HARD TIMES (1975), from which this image is taken, went into production under the working title THE STREET FIGHTER but was changed at the last minute to avoid confusion with the Sonny Chiba… and then in the United Kingdom the title was changed from HARD TIMES to THE STREET FIGHTER to avoid confusion with Charles Dickens.
ENTER THE DRAGON was the last movie Lee completed prior to his unexpected death on July 20, 1973 — in fact, the film was released in Hong Kong less than a week after Lee succumbed to a fatal cerebral edema (possibly an allergic reaction to a prescription painkiller) at the age of 32. He starred in only five features, the last of which, GAME OF DEATH (1978), had been begun before Lee made ENTER THE DRAGON and was subsequently cobbled together in the aftermath of his passing and completed using a combination of doubles and very patchy digital camouflage. Because it is big and sparkly, ENTER THE DRAGON has the reputation for being Lee’s best film — and maybe you think it is (I prefer Lee’s WAY OF THE DRAGON, which I saw as RETURN OF THE DRAGON at the drive-in when I was a kid) – but we would need a fight to the death to settle that old argument; in the United States, ENTER THE DRAGON was included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, a fact that would have pleased Lee greatly.
Plus, it has John Saxon in it, so just watch it, okay? Shit gets real Saturday night at 11:15pm PST/2:15am EST.