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How Stephen Chow and Donnie Yen reinvented Bruce Lee’s classic Chen Zhen in their own ways
Fist of Fury 1991 with Stephen Chow and TV series Fist of Fury with Donnie Yen saw two different versions of Bruce Lee’s famous character
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Chen Zhen, a fictional character first played by Bruce Lee in the 1972 film Fist of Fury, became a cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong because of the way he stood up to the Japanese in Shanghai in the early 1900s.
A scene in which Chen makes students at a Japanese karate school eat the paper on which they had written “China is the sick man of Asia” was especially popular, as was the scene in which Chen smashes a sign outside a Shanghai public park reading “No dogs or Chinese”.
Here, we look at two very different retellings of the Chen Zhen story.
Fist of Fury 1991 (film version, 1991)
The idea of Stephen Chow Sing-chi, then at the height of his success as a mo lei tau “nonsense” comedian, playing a role inspired by Bruce Lee is not as odd as it sounds. Chow admired Lee, and possessed some basic kung fu skills that could be manipulated to look good on screen.
Chow had been a fan of Lee since childhood.
“Like other children of his age, he was fascinated by Bruce Lee,” wrote film historian Ryan Law in an essay. “In 1971, when Lee’s The Big Boss opened in Hong Kong, Chow was nine years old. He began to study kung fu, and made his friends call him Little Dragon [Bruce Lee’s nickname].”
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