The Chinese Connection (1972) on Netflix
Chen Zhen returns to Shanghai to wed Yuan Li'er and learns his teacher Huo Yuanjia is dead. At the funeral, men from a Japanese dojo insult the Jingwu students and challenge them.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.2/1037,744 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Trailer
Plot summary
Chen Zhen, a student of the Jingwu School, comes home to Shanghai to marry Yuan Li'er and finds his master, Huo Yuanjia, dead. At the funeral, Wu En, the translator for the Japanese dojo of grandmaster Hiroshi Suzuki, slaps Chen and challenges him to take on one of Suzuki's trainees; the visitors also bring a sign that calls the Chinese the sick man of East Asia. Fan Junxia, the school's senior student, holds Chen back. Chen carries the sign back to the Hongkou dojo by himself and beats the students there, making them chew the paper. In a park, a guard turns him away because a sign bans dogs and Chinese; when a Japanese man tells him to behave like a dog, Chen fights him and his friends, and onlookers help him get away.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Chinese Connection (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
In the original script, Chen Zhen survived the ending, but Bruce Lee insisted his character die at the conclusion, believing the death was needed to show the consequences of his vengeance.- Bruce Lee disliked director Lo Wei's direction; according to Jackie Chan the two had a verbal altercation that nearly turned physical, with Lo hiding behind his wife until she calmed Lee down, after which Lee directed The Way of the Dragon himself.
- Jackie Chan worked on the film as an extra, and doubled for Japanese villain Hiroshi Suzuki, played by Chikara Hashimoto, in the final fight scene where Lee kicks him and he flies through the air.
- Several scenes were censored from the Japanese release of 20 July 1974 because producer Raymond Chow worried how Japanese audiences would receive the film's anti-Japanese sentiments.
- The sequence in which Chen Zhen is barred from a park by a "No dogs or Chinese allowed" sign was based on the real Huangpu Park in Shanghai, which catered only to the non-Chinese residents of the International Settlement and was seen as typifying China's "century of humiliation".
- In 2021 the film was dubbed into Noongar, becoming the first film ever dubbed in an Indigenous Australian language.
- Made for a tight $100,000, the film grossed an estimated $100 million worldwide and held the record as the highest-grossing Hong Kong film until Bruce Lee's own The Way of the Dragon.
- Robert Baker, a student at Lee's Jeet Kune Do school in California, was invited by Lee to appear in the film; it was his acting debut and biggest role, and he made only two minor films afterwards.
