It was here that he met Bruce Lee, who was already a star in the West thanks to The Green Hornet. After hitting it off with Norris, he cast him as a mortal rival in 1972\u2019s The Way of the Dragon. This became the highest-grossing Hong Kong film in history, earning back its $130,000 budget 1,000 times over, and immediately establishing Norris as a grindhouse icon. The climactic battle between Lee and Norris, which ends with the latter\u2019s death after he bitterly refuses Lee\u2019s offer of mercy, remains one of the great martial arts showdowns.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, its depiction of a non-white hero defeating a Caucasian villain was a sight then virtually unseen in Western cinema. This made it especially popular in American inner-city movie houses, whose predominantly black clientele seized on this moment of popcorn catharsis as racial tensions flared. Indeed, it could be argued that Norris\u2019s presence in the film was instrumental in the early ingraining of martial arts into hip-hop culture: \u201cIt\u2019s thanks to Chuck Norris that we got the Wu-Tang Clan\u201d sounds as if it should be one of the jokes above, but it might not be.<\/p>\n
It was on the advice of Steve McQueen that Norris pursued a film career after this, and over the next decade he carved out a niche. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone might have outgrossed him considerably, but there was a simplicity to Norris\u2019s military or law enforcement screen personas that out-streamlined even his most image-conscious contemporaries. Long after this heyday had faded, Stallone sportingly invited Norris to make an extended cameo<\/a> in The Expendables 2 in 2012 \u2013 in which, true to form, he shows up, saves the day single-handedly, then leaves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was here that he met Bruce Lee, who was already a star in the West thanks to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[172461,5337,5343,168438,96,2332,44184,123,33514,2839,2285,172462,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":["post-486634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-action-films","tag-comment","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-film-industry","tag-hollywood","tag-martial-arts","tag-movies","tag-obituary","tag-robbie-collin","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}