Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest Limited Edition 4K UHD [Blu-ray] [Region Free]

Product Information

This definitive collection, featuring fresh and exclusive 4K restorations by Arrow Video from the best available film materials, hours of brand new bonus features and previously unreleased footage - including 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 - is the ultimate tribute to Bruce Lee's enduring legacy and fruitful collaboration with Golden Harvest.

The Way of the Dragon however looks softer, likely in part due to being taken from an interpositive and not the OCN as with the previous films (the IP was used on the recent Criterion release and with Arrow’s careful wording of its restoration, it’s an easy assumption to make). But Enter the Dragon lit the fuse of kung-fu cinema across the globe and it remains a hugely entertaining romp, barrelling along at a pace thanks to Lee’s white hot star power.

Hits from Criterion, as well as any number of other releases in various regions that have come out through the years. and yet upon its premiere in Hong Kong, the crowd erupted over it and Lee, instantly recognising the birth of a major star. The highlight of the piece is a new 2K restoration of all two hours of Lee’s original dailies from a recently-discovered interpositive. Most already know the history of the production, which severely altered Lee's original tale into a straightforward revenge flick involving the mafia, a fiancée (Colleen Camp) and apparently, a restaurant designed like a pagoda.

NEW Meet the Italian Beauty (HD, 26 min) is a recently recorded interview with actor Malisa Longo reminiscing on the production and working with her husband Riccardo Billi. Ignoring Enter…, Game of Death is somewhere between the two sets of images – with so much overt optical manipulation to work around the absence of Lee, and with the heavy use of shadows as an actual mask, the film veers between some near pristine first-generation footage of the likes of Colleen Camp and Hugh O’Brian and most of the added material (where fine detail levels are approaching that seen in the first two films), to some fairly rough inserts that manage to look even worse than Way… Mostly however, the image looks decent enough, again with no detail in Arrow’s material on the restoration, stating its from original film ‘elements’ hints at another IP used as a source. Background details are crisp and well-defined while the music comes with a good deal of warmth and presence. That’s not to say that the rest of the supplementals aren’t as good – they really are, including that staggering amount of archival and legacy features previously released.Wanting to ape not only the changing style of new Hollywood at the start of the 70s, but also the hyper kinetic and excessive stylings of the spaghetti westerns he also admired, Lee moved his film to Italy, with a film less interested in the sociopolitical issues of his first two, and more interested in flexing its visually creative muscles. For my main watches, the Mandarin track was the primary listen with various selections of the other tracks sampled. And as a curio, it’s fascinating – the stand-in’s look nothing like Lee, the film hilariously constructed around obvious attempts to hide the face of the various doubles in shadow and behind huge sunglasses at all times.

insanely charismatic, even when doing literally nothing, his fighting style favouring speed and absolute precision. At the end of the day, however, none of that matters because fans are here to watch the actual footage of Lee ascending the pagoda and go one-on-one with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Despite that, you see his progression as an actor, and by Enter the Dragon (undeniably his best film) they are getting better in both story and action. We reviewed the Region free UK Ultra HD Blu-rays and region B locked Blu-Rays included in this release of Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest on a JVC-DLA N5 Ultra HD 4K projector and a Panasonic DP-UB9000 Dolby Vision HDR10 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player. NEW Scene Commentary (HD, 26 min) is an interview conducted by Michael Worth where actor Piet Schweer shares his memories of being on the set while his scene plays on screen.It's a great, memorable moment that blatantly renounces bigotry and clearly establishes the plot's anti-colonialism theme. Compression is very well done across all the films, with bitrates averaging in the mid-80s mpbs consistently across all the films, with no visual anomalies or issues resulting.