To Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood was an excellent model for how to proceed with his Hollywood plan. With one being a kung fu star and the other being an American actor known for appearing in westerns, there’s no question that Lee and Eastwood came from different worlds, but for the former, there was still something to be learned from Eastwood's career path.
Both Lee and Eastwood are considered icons in their respective genres, with Eastwood also having a reputation as a celebrated director. As for Lee, it’s no secret that he had to go through a number of obstacles to get noticed. For Hollywood studios, Lee’s role as Kato in The Green Hornet was far from enough for them to pay him much attention in the late 1960s. As a result, Lee spent a significant amount trying to land parts in movies and shows, shopping around ideas of his own, and teaching martial arts to earn income. Suffice to say, Lee’s career didn’t take off in the way he had originally hoped.
It wasn’t until Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong and started making kung fu movies with Golden Harvest that things started to look up for him. Thanks to the success of his first two movies (The Big Boss and Fist of Fury), Lee instantly rose to stardom in Hong Kong. In the book, Bruce Lee: A Life, Lee biographer Matthew Polly cites friends of Lee, including James Coburn, when explaining that Lee’s ideas about making movies in Hong Kong were shaped by the career decisions of Clint Eastwood. As noted by Polly, Eastwood shared the struggles that Lee had with transitioning from the small screen to the big screen. When this didn’t work out for Eastwood, he went to Italy and starred in spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Fistful of Dollars, and For a Few Dollars More, all of which being directed by Sergio Leone.
Despite being foreign films, Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns gained a ton of respect and praise from American audiences, who right away took to the actor and his “tough guy” image. Before long, he was landing roles in high-profile Hollywood westerns and war movies, such as Hang ‘Em High, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Where Eagles Dare, Dirty Harry, and more. Lee noted how Eastwood leveraged a foreign film industry to get noticed by American audiences, and the martial artist realized that he could repeat Eastwood’s success in Italian westerns with his kung fu movies in Hong Kong. Coburn says that Lee often talked about this, while another of his friends claims that Lee said he was going to come back from Hong Kong a “superstar like Eastwood.”
Looking back at Lee’s career, it’s clear that the actor’s Clint-Eastwood-inspired plan wasn’t a bad one by a long shot. After the release of Way of the Dragon and during the shooting of Game of Death, his dreams finally came to fruition when Warner Bros. worked out a deal with him to star in Enter the Dragon, the movie that transformed him from Hong Kong kung fu sensation to international superstar. In the end, it looks like Bruce Lee was right.
