Word: fu
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...Chinese take Kung Fu seriously," observes Run Run Shaw, one of two Chinese brothers who produced the current smash-hit film Five Fingers of Death. "Americans see it as comedy." Not that Run Run minds, as long as customers pay. "We're here to make money," he happily admits. Comic as it may seem, Five Fingers, made in Hong Kong for a mere $300,000, has grossed $3,800,000 in only eleven weeks in the U.S., not to mention $4,100,000 in other foreign countries...
Five Fingers is a kind of chop-suey western exploiting Kung Fu, one of the Chinese martial arts of man-to-man combat. Instead of six-shooters, the actors use their hands, feet and heads to show who is the fastest draw in the East. Besides kicking, jumping and batting their heads together, they like to yell and grunt...
...plot of Five Fingers, such as it is, involves the rivalry between two schools of Kung Fu: the good guys are handsome, the bad guys ugly. Dubbed in a kind of pidgin hip-"Hey, whadda you guys doin' here?" the hero asks at one point-the film makes no attempt to synchronize speech to lip movements, and a character can go on talking long after his mouth has closed. Not that it matters, considering the low level of the dialogue. Still, the picture is harmless fun, and the violence seems no more real-or scary-than the POWs...
...much of Asia. From 46 acres of outdoor sets, sound stages and pagodas overlooking Hong Kong's Clear Water Bay, Run Run, 67, the creative half of the team, churns out about 40 films a year at an average cost of $ 180,000, many of them Kung Fu kickers like Five Fingers. Runme, 73, then shows them in their 141 theaters...
FISTS OF FURY is such a shambles that Five Fingers of Death, the other Chinese battle hymn to Kung Fu that is currently cleaning up in the U.S. (TIME, May 14), looks by comparison like The Seven Samurai. The fights, which are plentiful but somehow lackadaisical, are all generated by the disappearance of several brothers who work down at the icehouse, where envelopes of white powder are frozen in the middle of each cake. Pressed to explain this, the plant manager says guilelessly: "There's no profit in ice. In dope, plenty." The hero, Bruce Lee, may be furious...