Bruce Lee - The Master Collection

Product Information

Archive featurettes including The Hong Kong Connection, Bruce Lee Remembered, Legacy of the Dragon, Dragon Rising and The Grandmaster & The Dragon Newly uncovered deleted scenes from The Big Boss, plus a video essay by Bentley about scenes still missing such as the ‘saw-in-the-head’ kill The Final Game of Death, a brand new feature-length video essay by Arrow Films on Lee’s original vision for The Game of Death, featuring a new 2K restoration of the footage directed by Lee in 1972 Criterion has then recorded new interviews for each film in the set featuring Lee biographer Matthew Polly, who talks about each film and their importance regarding Lee’s career. They last 10-minutes or less each and provide decent intros for each film to newcomers.

Arrow Video announces world exclusive definitive Bruce Lee

New interview with producer Andre Morgan about Golden Harvest, the company behind Hong Kong’s top martial-arts stars, including Lee

There is then a couple of trailers and a collection of alternate sequences, including one alternate opening credits sequence and then three alternate endings. That leads into some deleted scenes which includes another alternate ending where Billy Lo gets arrested, and with a fight scene that would show up in Game of Death II. Then for fun there are some bloopers and outtakes. But the second-best supplement on the disc is a great interview with Robert Wall, who recalls the production while also trash-talking director Robert Clouse as best he can. High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentations of the Hong Kong cut of Game of Death, Game of Death II, Bruce Lee: The Man & The Legend and Bruce Lee: The Legend Featuring exclusive 4K restorations, hours of brand new bonus features and previously unreleased footage, the set will include the extended Mandarin Cut of The Big Boss, now ten minutes longer than any version ever released on video worldwide, and the never-before-seen ‘log fight’ from the original Game of Death shoot. Bruce Lee is at his most awe-inspiringly ferocious in this blistering follow-up to his star-making performance in The Big Boss, which turned out to be an even greater success than its predecessor. Set in 1910s Shanghai, Fist of Fury casts Lee as a martial-arts student who, after his revered master is murdered by a rival dojo of Japanese imperialists, sets out to defend the honor of both his school and the Chinese people, with his fatal fists as his weapon of choice. Elevating Lee to a hero of near folkloric proportions, this historical revenge fantasy blends its stunning action set pieces with a strong anticolonialist statement and a potent dose of the fierce cultural pride that the actor embodied.

Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits | The Criterion Collection

Brand new 4K restorations of The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and Game of Death and brand new 2K restoration of Game of Death IIUHD Blu-ray presentations in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) of The Big Boss, The Big Boss: The Mandarin Cut, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and Game of Death Following this are a few interviews. Andre Morgan talks about the impact Golden Harvest had on the Hong Kong film business, while Grady Hendrix talks about the “Bruceploitation” genre that exploded after Lee’s death (which he considers Game of Death to be a part of). This is accompanied by a collection of trailers for a few notable films in the genre, though only a radio spot for Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death. Another interesting interview segment called Match the Lips features professional dubbers Michael Kaye and Vaughan Savage talking about the art of dubbing. The disc then closes with The Grandmaster & the Dragon, which features Wing Chun Grandmaster William Cheung talking about Lee.

Bruce Lee to Get Definitive Criterion Collection Blu-ray Box Set

Interviews with Linda Lee Cadwell, Lee’s widow, and many of Lee’s collaborators and admirers, including actors Jon T. Benn, Riki Hashimoto, Nora Miao, Robert Wall, Yuen Wah, and Simon Yam and directors Clarence Fok, Sammo Hung, and Wong Jing New interview with author Grady Hendrix about the “Bruceploitation” subgenre that followed Lee’s death, and a selection of Bruceploitation trailers Six audio commentaries: on The Big Boss by Bruce Lee expert Brandon Bentley; on The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, and Game of Death by Hong Kong–film expert Mike Leeder; and on the special-edition version of Enter the Dragon by producer Paul HellerNew program about English-language dubbing, featuring performers Michael Kaye (the English-speaking voice of Lee’s Chen Zhen in Fist of Fury) and Vaughan Savidge

Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits Review :: Criterion Forum

Released five years after Bruce Lee’s death, this eccentrically entertaining kung-fu curio combines footage from an unfinished project directed by and starring Lee with original material shot by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse to create an entirely new work that testifies to the actor’s enduring place in the pop-culture imagination. Using stand-ins, doubles, and archival footage to compensate for Lee’s absence, Game of Death follows a martial-arts movie star who, when he is threatened by a cutthroat crime syndicate intent on controlling his career, must take his skills from the soundstage to the streets. It all builds to an exhilarating climax that is pure Lee: a tour de force of martial-arts mastery in which the legend himself, clad in an iconic yellow jumpsuit, fights his way up a multilevel pagoda, with the towering Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among his formidable opponents. The third disc houses The Way of the Dragon, which, like the previous two titles, also offers some alternate opening credits (one using the alternate title Return of the Dragon) along with a collection of trailers and a radio spot. There are also a collection of interviews including one for Jon T. Benn, who talks about his role in the film. The best feature on here is Legacy of the Dragon, a 47-minute documentary on Bruce Lee’s life that ends up getting into a great amount of detail around Game of Death, the film he was working on after The Way of the Dragon before going off to Hollywood to do Enter the Dragon. The theatrical version of Enter the Dragon is then found on disc four, and this is the only disc of the first five to not sport an audio commentary. It does feature the 30-minute making-of Blood and Steel that was initially produced for Warner’s 2-disc special edition DVD in 2004. It gathers together a number of people around the film’s production (along with James Coburn) to talk about the film and Lee. The disc also features a couple of other Warner features, including 16-minutes’ worth of interviews with widow Linda Lee Cadwell, a 7-minute EPK featurette, and the 19-minute Bruce Lee: In His Own Words, which showcases archival footage of Lee talking about his philosophies before closing on a montage accompanied by an incredibly cheesy song. There are then a collection of trailers, TV spots, and a radio spot. Criterion also includes a 2-minute archival interview with actor Tung Wai, who plays the young student at the beginning (this interview was found in some of the Shout! releases for the other Lee films). Sadly, Criterion was not able to carry over the lengthier documentaries found on some of the previous Warner editions, Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey and The Curse of the Dragon. Multiple alternate cuts on most films, including the extended Mandarin Cut on The Big Boss, English export cuts of The Big Boss and Fist of Fury, the Japanese cut of The Way of the Dragon and Hong Kong cuts of Game of Death and Game of Death II (aka Tower of Death) The Criterion Collection has officially announced Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits, which will be released on July 14. The 7-disc Blu-ray box set will showcase 4K digital restorations of fist-flying films, The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Game of Death, and The Way of the Dragon. Additionally, Lee’s signature film and iconoclastic actioner, Enter the Dragon, will also be included in this set; an eye-opening addition, since the film—as a co-production of Warner Bros. and Lee’s Concord Productions shingle—is typically left off the vast array of budget releases and box sets for Lee’s films. Indeed, Enter‘s presence here is two-fold, with one presented as a 2K digital restoration of 1973’s original 99-minute theatrical version, and the other as a new 102-minute 2K-restored “special edition.” Also included is a high-definition version of Game of Death II, the 1981 sequel film, which, in its opening, utilized archived footage of Lee before turning the film over to a new protagonist.Newly translated optional English subtitles, plus subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing on the English dubs Considering Game of Death’s unorthodox production (made after Lee died to make use of footage he had begun shooting for a film of the same name) it should be no surprise that this disc, disc five, ends up offering some of the more interesting features in the set. The big one would be Game of Death Redux, which is a new edit (Shout! included something similar on their releases) of the footage Lee shot, running 34-minutes. It’s an impressive edit, expertly dubbing in dialogue and making excellent use of John Barry’s score. But what’s most impressive about it is that it does feel like, at the very least, a complete section of a film. The context is missing, obviously, as it only shows three of the five planned fight scenes and is only able to explain the basic plot through a text intro, but it’s well put together all the same. Brand new interviews with actors Malisa Longo and Colleen Camp, plus hours of archive interviews with Lee’s former co-stars, colleagues and friends, including Nora Miao, Dan Inosanto, Bob Wall, Yuen Wah and many others Disc two holds Fist of Fury, which also comes with its own set of alternate opening credits, which either present different titles (like the alternate The Chinese Connection title) or a slightly different opening, like the Japanese version (which seems to try to lessen the anti-Japanese sentiment found in the film through the opening title card). This disc also features interviews actors Nora Miao, Riki Hashimoto, Jun Katsumura, and Yuen Wah. It closes with four theatrical trailers.