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A Man Called Tiger
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (26th August 2024). |
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The Film
 Chinese immigrant Jin Fu (Master of the Flying Guillotine's Jimmy Wang Yu) arrives in Kyoto and sets about riling up the area's local criminals and going so far as to introduce himself and tell them where he is staying. When he knocks out the Shigen Hayashi (The Big Boss' Han Ying-Chieh) for hassling young singer Yoshida Ayako (Okada Kawai) for protection money, his boss Shimizu (Kuro Mitsuo) takes Jin Fu up on the offer and summons him in order to hire him to be part of his gang of debt collectors to wrest back control of local businesses from rival boss Yamamoto (King Boxer's Tien Fang). Jin Fu eagerly accepts, puzzling Ayako who initially saw him as a kindred spirit in her and her mother's search for her missing father who came from Hokkaido. Equally surprised by Jin Fu's change is Liu Hanming (Righting Wrongs' James Tin Chuen), a former pupil of Jin Fu's father whose own father's restaurant is in debt to Shimizu. When Jin Fu sends Ayako with money for Hanming to cover the damage he caused, both start to wonder if Jin Fu has ulterior motives for getting in deep with the local gangs. When Jin Fu learns from Shimizu that his father – who supposedly committed suicide after gambling away donations from Chinese locals to send back home – may have been cheated by Yamamoto who then took over his father's school to turn into an amusement park, Jin Fu starts plotting his revenge by sabotaging a high stakes dice wager between the two bosses; however, Shimizu is more involved than Jin Fu suspects and he may have a target on his back before he even plays his own hand. Better known than seen as the film Bruce Lee walked off of to make Way of the Dragon after falling out with producer/director Lo Wei, necessitating his replacement by Wang Yu just before the rush to find a new Bruce Lee in the aftermath of his sudden death the same year. Originally released at just under two hours, trimmed of a few minutes upon re-release, and then chopped down by nearly a half-hour for the 1978 Hong Kong reissue and subsequent export, the film is sad to say boring at any cut. In the longer version, the editing is listless while the streamlined shorter cut actually removes some of the major fight sequences while trying to still tell a "coherent" story that was always needlessly complicated. The film pads out the simple avenging a dead father scenario with some interminable song numbers by Ayako as well as giving the protagonist multiple love interests, from virginal Ayako for whom Jin Fu may or may not be attracted to the hotel landlady Miss Zhang (The Vampire Doll's Minakaze Yuko) who is also "in bed" with Shimizu's gang, Yamamoto's moll Keiko (Fist of Fury's Maria Yi Yi) – possibly unintentionally but nevertheless offensively called "Leiko" in the English dub – and even the innocent daughter (Gamera vs Guiron's Kasahara Reiko) of Yamamoto's crooked dealer (The Skyhawk's Hsiao Yin-Fang). The fight scenes have some occasional stylistic verge courtesy of the framing and lighting of cinematographer Chen Ching-Chu (A Queen's Ransom) but Wang Yu's brutal "basher" style of fighting does not really compare to the choreography of a Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan fight sequence, so the climactic big fight is a bunch of people in a large conference room running into each other and few of the "meaningful" deaths actually resonate. Lo Wei gives himself an brief but important role late in the film, and it easy to see why Wang Yu also fell out with him and would also later help Jackie Chan out of his restrictive contract with the producer/director. 
Video
Released in 1973 in Hong Kong at 112 minutes, A Man Called Tiger may have circulated in that cut in Asian-American theaters as well as Golden Harvest's Canadian and Hawaiian theaters or in a slightly shorter 104 minute cut; but it was not released in the United States until 1981 by World Northal – along with a 1982 reissue by 21st Century Film Distribution Corp. after the shutdown of the former company – in its 1978 Hong Kong reissue version which ran just under eighty minutes. When Fortune Star released the film on VCD in Hong Kong, it was in the aforementioned 104 minute version in a horrid-quality print with burnt-in English/Chinese subtitles that were hard to read, while their subsequent DVD featured a cut even shorter than the reissue version at just over 76 minutes, and this cut was also what was provided to Shout! Factory for their The Jimmy Wang Yu Collection, meaning that the only place to see some of the missing footage was on the Embassy VHS or TV recordings of the "Black Belt Theater" broadcasts. For Wang Yu completists, Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray is a godsend featuring 2K restorations of both the original Hong Kong theatrical release (112:55) and the re-release version (79:58) – the latter with the export credits sequence – and visually both presentations are richly colorful when it comes to the seventies wardrobe, art direction, and the spinning color gel wheel that accompanies Ayako's musical performances – along with one sequence involving a broken bottle to the face already bathed in angry red lighting – with the usual falloff in sharpness at the edges of the Dyaliscope anamorphic lenses during some wide shots. 
Audio
Shot just before Hong Kong cinema transitioned to predominantly Cantonese-language soundtracks, A Man Called Tiger was post-dubbed in Mandarin. Fortunately, the 112 minute version was intended for export and fully dubbed into English, so we get both tracks in LPCM 2.0 mono for both cuts of the film. The Mandarin elements, however, were incomplete and Eureka had to resort to VHS material for some of that track on the 112 minute version, meaning that there are drops in quality at times; however, they are ultimately negligible and some of the audio splices are actually the result of fine tuning of the 112 minute cut at the time of release as explained elsewhere. Optional English subtitles are provided for both cuts of the film. 
Extras
The longer cut is accompanied by a pair of commentaries. The audio commentary by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and Michael Worth starts off the running theme of both tracks, the interest of seeing the longest version of "the film Bruce Lee never did" over the film's weaknesses. Djeng and Worth note the mix of genres, starting out like a spaghetti western with Jin Fu coming to town and provoking the gangs, settling into a yakuza thriller crossed with a bit of Eurocrime for the middle, and then becoming a gambling film for the climax. They discuss the differences between the cuts of the film, noting that the shorter version dispense with the opening action-packed fight in favor of the nightclub scene, and revealing that the film was actually shot on location in Japan despite the predominance of the Mandarin language in the film and few recognizable backdrops. They discuss the actors familiar to Lo Wei productions and other Hong Kong genre cinema including a young Lam Ching-Ying (Mr. Vampire) in a background role and comic relief by Lee Kwan (Fearless Hyena), but also provide background on the Japanese actors, Wang Yu's fighting style, and summing up the needless plot additions as an overarching "sins of fathers" theme. The audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema covers a lot of the same material while also providing more of the pair's recollections about working with or meeting some of the performers, how the landscape and culture of Hong Kong (and Japan) in this case have changed since the production – noting the biker gang sequence and how Japanese bike gangs were originally World War II fighter pilots who nevertheless adopted American rockabilly and greaser culture – Wang Yu's private life which is more interesting than the film (noting that Wang Yu's own gangland connections made him more intimidating than what he faced in the film and may have been why the actor's people did not let them make a documentary on him when he was alive), and joking about the emphasis on feet shots including Wang Yu's habit of putting his feet up on the desk as the reason why Quentin Tarantino loves the flim. In "Cutting Tiger, Hidden Subtitles" (6:55), Brandon Bentley reveals that the English subtitle list that Fortune Star provided shows that there is evidence of more footage cut before the 112 minute release. Utilizing the poor quality VCD edition, Bentley gives a reading of the lines where they were intended to appear. Since the subtitle list only includes the dialogue, viewers have to guess who says what in the context of the surrounding material.  The disc also includes music videos for "Do You Know What Sadness Means?" (2:39) and "Because I Have Your Love" (2:09), the textless opening (2:04) from the 112 minute version, and the Hong Kong theatrical trailer (3:44).
Packaging
The disc is housed with a reversible sleeve featuring original poster artwork, while the first pressing includes a limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling, a reversible poster featuring original poster artwork, and a collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by writer and critic James Oliver, and a short essay by Brandon Bentley about the versions of the film presented on this release. 
Overall
While the restoration of the original cut of A Man Called Tiger, "the film Bruce Lee never made" is a godsend to Wang Yu completists, it is actually quite a boring film in any cut.
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