Big Boss: Mandarin Cut, The (1971) Review

“The Big Boss” Chinese Theatrical Poster

Director: Lo Wei
Producer: Raymond Chow
Cast: Bruce Lee, Maria Yi, James Tien Chun, Han Ying Chieh, Nora Miao, Lee Kwan, Anthony Lau, Lam Ching Ying, Billy Chan Wui Ngai, Peter Yang Kwan
Running Time: 115 min.

By Ian Whittle

The Big Boss remains a rather intriguing oddity. Golden Harvest’s first contemporary martial arts movie, it was released the same month as Shaw’s also Thailand filmed Duel of Fists. But whilst that film is a glamorous promo for Thailand, with cosmopolitan Bangkok playing host to Shaw stars David Chiang and Ti Lung enjoying Muay Thai bouts and water festivals, The Big Boss feels more like a precursor to horror films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, as Chinese far-from-home find themselves getting dismembered in a run-down backwater burg. The martial arts battles are for the most part clumsy and crude, with industrial tools and knives frequently drawing garish gouts of blood. If notorious 60s gore-auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis made a martial arts film, it would probably resemble this!

I’ve often likened The Big Boss to another of my favourite movies: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Both films were cut down soon after their premieres, both re-scored numerous times (and yes, I would love Giorgio Moroder to re-score The Big Boss with Bonnie Tyler songs, thank you for asking!), both feature beautiful girls called Maria… and thankfully, both now nearly restored to their uncut status after many decades only being available in truncated versions. Whilst the original cut of Metropolis turned up in South America in an archive, amusingly it seems Golden Harvest had the longer version of The Big Boss all along. All anyone had to do was ask… and Arrow Films did!

So let’s take a look…

(this is not an exhaustive breakdown of every bit of recovered footage, just the highlights)

The music

The Mandarin audio for The Big Boss was quite hard to find for a long time. Wang Fu-ling’s score (mostly acquired from several Japanese movies, including Ifukube Akira’s score for period monster film Daimaijin) was dropped, apparently for being too “Oriental”, in favour of a wonderfully OTT original score by German composer Peter Thomas for Western markets. Then when the film was dubbed into Cantonese in the early 80s (which also resulted in the original Mandarin dubber’s fighting cries for Bruce Lee being replaced with audio from his later films), a “new” score was prepared. This was a bizarre mix of the title theme to 50s’ monster flick How to Make a Monster (1958), cuts from Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”, cues written by Joseph Koo for the Japanese release of The Big Boss in 1974, some decent 80s cues, and a truly irritating chiming melody every-time Bruce Lee looks at his locket.

Wang’s score started to appear on home video in the mid 00s, and it’s an odd affair. Whilst the film itself is very 1971, the music sounds considerably older at times, evoking the 1950s. Although at times atmospheric, it frequently undersells the on-screen action and lacks personality. When compared to the Thomas score, and Joseph Koo’s scores for Bruce Lee’s next two films, it can’t help but be found lacking. Bruce being crowd-surfed to “Danse Macabre” (a horror movie staple, and later the theme for UK TV series Jonathan Creek) remains an amusing novelty.

On a related note, the opening credits are now in-sync with the animation behind them. On the Cantonese reissue prints, Nora Miao’s credit obscured “The Big Boss” title card!

James Tien was robbed!

So the first major surprise in the newly discovered footage is… more of James Tien’s first fight! And it’s surprisingly better than anything else he does in the film – much more brutal and direct kicks, a mean posture, and he does some serious damage to his opponents. Quite why this was removed is a mystery – it’s probably Tien’s only real moment to shine, and makes his character seem less bland and squeaky clean. Given he was stuck in supporting roles there afterwards (the very mediocre-looking The Shaolin Boxer excepted), no wonder he refuses to discuss his career these days. One wonders if this scene was cut as it features a rare example of bad acting from Bruce Lee – you’ll know it when you see it.

All in the family

The extended family of cousins now get introduced to the audience before they are introduced to Bruce. A very brief scene, but cute to have.

The cart scene

Yep this famous lost scene is now back… and it turns out there are two carts and neither is on fire. This scene, and the subsequent restored recap of it back at the family home (present in the extant trailers), is clearly padding, but it does allow us more time with the characters before everything goes to hell, in particular the old uncle who gets a nice comic moment.

More Nora Miao

A very brief scene of Bruce walking past Nora’s stall (glimpsed in the theatrical trailer that’s been around on home video for a few decades). More Nora is always nice to have!

The Thailand Buzzsaw Massacre

Although the shot of a body being sliced by the buzzsaw is abruptly cut, there is now a remarkably ghoulish shot of the factory manager tossing a severed head into a vat! It’s hard to tell if this was cut for censor reasons or because the head has obviously been purloined from a department store.

Tony Liu was robbed!

Just like James Tien’s first fight, Tony Liu’s intro fight where he trains with the boss’s henchmen was trimmed for the shorter version so that you don’t get to see him do any impressive moves. Was Bruce tinkering with the fight scenes to remove the competition?

Han Ying-chieh was robb…actually maybe not

We also get more of the boss fighting, but conversely, here less is more. For some reason I can accept Han Ying-chieh flying 10 feet in the air, but not him throwing half-a-dozen burly men off him.

Blood is thicker than water

Previously seen in one trailer, the shot of James Tien’s head gushing like a burst pipe is now back. As with the extended buzzsaw sequence, it’s hard to tell if this was removed for censorship reasons or because it’s quite funny.

The saw-in-the-head…

…is still missing, sorry folks! As is a shot contained in some trailers of a third body in the ice.

Death in the family

The bloody aftermath of the massacre of the family now shows the face of the first body, Kam Shan’s character, that Bruce finds – not sure why this was cut, considering what was left was already brutal. Heck, they left the kid’s corpse in!

Down by the river

The scene of Bruce contemplating revenge now runs much longer with flashbacks to the dead bodies found in the previous scene. Probably a case of less is more, as the scene now feels overlong, and Bruce’s defiant “I must get revenge!” is somewhat negated by the next scene…

Porky’s 2: The Next Day

The final key missing scene referenced in the original trailer, we now see Bruce return to the brothel. The POV shot of him picking out a prostitute (actually an actress) is rather alarming in its starkness, looking like something from an Italian mondo film as the genuine prostitutes wince from the off-camera spotlight trained on their faces. Bruce’s subsequent sex scene is about as erotic as those old war-time VD warning films, but at least we get to see where he got the crackers from.

The final stand-off

For some reason trimmed down for the HK reissue print (and otherwise censored in the US), Bruce’s final killing of the Boss is now intact. And I think he gets an extra punch in!

I can’t underestimate how thrilling it has been to see all this previously rumoured footage with my own eyes… plus some extra surprises I wasn’t expecting! And to think it was sat safely on a shelf! Does anyone want to ask Fortune Star/Golden Harvest if they have any of the Doctor Who serial Marco Polo? Or the long-lost vampire silent London After Midnight? Or the cure for Alzheimer’s? If we don’t ask, how will we know?

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 8/10