THE FIGHTING FISTS OF SHANGHAI (1972) * The more pleasant of your first impressions is maybe one to give them credit for taking on racism. The ubiquitous bigotry faced by Chen Lee upon disembarking in San Francisco, and taking the stagecoach to Texas, is no doubt at times a reasonable reflection of that faced by immigrants to the United States-and damn near anywhere else-back in the days. The game is fixed, and if a Chinaman can win against white guys they'll fix it again. It doesn't take much cinematic insight, though, to realize that this lot doesn't particularly care about racism or bigotry, they're just setting up a bunch of assholes to get their asses kicked. Representative of the spaghetti western genre in more name-checking than aspiring to high ideals, and then serving them with sadism and brutality, lousy production values and feeble stunts. Lee remains stoic throughout, though, a tribute to either Confucius or boredom.
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