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When Chuck Norris fought Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon in 1972, it looked like the clash of two mythic archetypes. For all his power, Lee appeared boyish and almost slight, his body as smooth as marble and clenched with defined muscle like an anatomical illustration – the ascetic young master of Asian fighting philosophies. Norris was bigger, bulkier, shaggier and hairier, and basically more American; he was just as fast as Bruce (or almost), a master of taekwondo and jiujitsu and his own discipline of Chun Kuk Do, but with a body that looked as if an ounce or two of old-fashioned fat – the byproduct of the odd porterhouse steak – would be neither here nor there (although in later years Norris dialled down the red meat).
Norris was a rip-roaring action hero in the stacked form also popularised by Sly, Arnie and later Jason Statham; he was basically in the tradition of occidental action, a western-style fighting man who had also absorbed the eastern arcana of unarmed combat into a persona that was also confident with heavy weaponry. The combination made him a lead like Clint Eastwood’s man with no name (and in fact his 1985 actioner Code of Silence, about a cop on the edge, was originally developed as a Dirty Harry vehicle). But Norris had something rangier and less enigmatic: you could call him the master of his own kind of whitesploitation ass-kicking spectacular.
Norris could easily be cast as part of the US military and he had real-world experience – serving with the US Air Force in South Korea in the 1950s, where his martial arts training began. He had a breakthrough in 1978 in Good Guys Wear Black, playing Maj John T Booker (a character revived in The Expendables 2) a special forces hombre betrayed (as per usual on these occasions) by the duplicitous pinko politicians in Washington DC. Perhaps Norris’s high point came in the much-loved 80s action movies of Steve Carver. In An Eye for an Eye in 1981, Norris is San Francisco detective Sean Kane who avenges his partner’s death after being forced to hand in his gun and badge in time-honoured style; he infiltrates a drug cartel run by the Triads and busts out some serious martial arts moves in indoor spaces where the furniture is reduced to matchwood. Richard Roundtree and Christopher Lee play alpha-grade supporting roles as Kane’s glowering police chief and the newspaper editor who supports his campaign for retributive justice.
Two years later, Norris was in Carver’s Lone Wolf McQuade, playing opposite David Carradine; perhaps this is his meisterwerk, a film with a title that tells you everything you need to know. Norris is a Texas Ranger called JJ McQuade who is theoretically part of modern-day law enforcement but is as detached from external constraints as a medieval samurai. He lives in the middle of nowhere and packs that firearm beloved of Clint and Travis Bickle: a whopping .44 Magnum revolver. At one stage he is buried alive by the bad guys in his Dodge but bursts free by revving his racer-type supercharger cylinder and driving up and out of the dirt: an outrageous image of car-worship and muscular action heroism that made Norris’s fans adore him even more.
For Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Cannon Group, Norris starred in solidly profitable pictures and became a staple of Friday night entertainment on VHS. These included The Delta Force in 1986, a workmanlike and robust action adventure inspired by a real-life brutal and chaotic plane hijacking, but given in fictional terms a happy ending; Norris starred opposite the 63-year-old Lee Marvin in his final appearance, who played his commanding officer Col Alexander.
For Cannon, Norris also starred in the Missing In Action trilogy. Like Rambo, they were Vietnam films whose keynote was the idea of a missing-in-action prisoner of war who could escape or be rescued, thus salvaging a heroic lone-warrior victory from the wreckage of US military disaster. Norris and his outrageously phallic weapon was at the centre of it all, roaring defiance in the melee. And before the debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, there was Invasion USA in 1985 in which Norris has to resist a full-tilt invasion of Miami from Soviet-backed Cuban communists, culminating in a massive shootout in a shopping mall where people are buying their Christmas presents.
Norris went on to have huge success on TV and as a meme hero, but it’s in the sweaty world of 80s action that he had his apotheosis.
