Return of the Dragon

[June 1972]   My one appearance on the silver screen was as a villain getting thrashed by the late Bruce Lee in a low-grade 1970s gung-fu flick.  There is some confusion about the name of the movie.  It started out with the Chinese name Meng Long Guo Jiang  — “Fierce Dragon Crosses the River.”  (Lee’s Chinese name meant “Little Dragon,” and “cross the river” is an idiom for “go abroad.”  The movie is supposed to take place in Italy, though my scenes were shot in Hong Kong.)  They stuck the English name Way of the Dragon on it for Hong Kong release.  After that, Lee went to Hollywood and made another movie, which the Hollywood folk titled Enter the Dragon.  When this was a success, U.S. distributors imported Meng Long Guo Jiang but re-christened it Return of the Dragon.   So it turns up under both titles.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me, either, but movie people work by their own rules.  

I was in a single fight scene, which I have cut down here to two brief clips, called "Clip 1" and "Clip 2."  To view the clips, pick a format from the list below, then click on each clip in turn.  If you have a slow internet connection, use one of the smaller formats.  The file sizes are in parentheses after each clip.

That’s me in the striped T-shirt & all the hair (this was my hippie-oriental phase), going for the gun.  It was fun working with Lee, who was a really nice guy.  Among the foreign devils in this movie, the only genuine actor is Chuck Norris, and I think he’s a bit ashamed of it now.  The rest of us were just bums, willing to do anything for a day’s work — including, as you see, hurling each other backwards over the furniture.  I nearly broke my neck.  I wrote up the experience for National Review Online here.