Long-lost unseen footage of the celebrated “log fight” scene from the Bruce Lee film Game of Death is to be released in a new box set marking the 50th anniversary of the famed actor and martial artist’s death.
Lee, who shot to fame around the world with the 1973 film Enter the Dragon, died on 20 July 1973 before he could complete shooting on Game of Death, which eventually emerged in 1978, incorporating some of the original footage in a largely reshot and rewritten version.
The log fight scene, so called because of the large piece of wood that one of actors wields at the start of the sequence, is part of the approximately 100 minutes of raw footage that Lee shot in 1972, before production was halted to enable Lee to take up Warner Bros’ offer to make Enter the Dragon. The scene features Chieh Yuan, as one of Lee’s allies, in combat with Dan Inosanto, who plays a master of Filipino martial art eskrima.
The log fight scene was known from photographs taken on the set, and from very brief excerpts used in the 1978 version. It appears to have become separated from the rest of the Game of Death footage after Lee’s death, and was discovered in 2016 in the Hong Kong archives of film studio Fortune Star, which now owns the catalogue of Game of Death producers Golden Harvest.
Arrow Films producer James Flower, who led the creation of the new box set, says: “This scene has long been a holy grail for Bruce Lee fans. Its existence has been little more than a rumour for decades, so to have found the actual footage was amazing.”
Game of Death was planned as Lee’s fourth feature film, following The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon, and featured US basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Inosanto among its co-stars. The plot involved a former martial arts champion who has to fight his way up several levels of a Korean pagoda, but was put on hold after Lee began filming Enter the Dragon in early 1973. Production was abandoned after Lee’s death in July 1973, but Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse was enlisted to create a new film, using some of the earlier footage but adding substantial newly written sections filmed using stand-ins.
