When one thinks about martial arts films, names such as Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li immediately spring (or leap) to mind. Many U.S. Baby Boomers got their first exposure to karate and kung fu from seeing Lee as Kato in the 1966 TV series The Green Hornet. The genre’s rich tradition goes back much further, of course. What is generally considered the first such motion picture, the Chinese-made action-fantasy serial The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, debuted in 1928, kickstarting an international craze for “wuxia” (swordplay) sagas.
International, that is, except for the United States. Hollywood was slow to pick up on the centuries-old fighting traditions of Asian cultures, and some of the first depictions of judo and karate on American screens turned up, ironically, during World War II. What’s more, the men behind the moves were generally not considered “action stars,” even though one of them was a real-life judo student.
While it’s not definitively the first, an early film to feature judo in its fight scenes was a 1942 M-G-M crime thriller, Eyes in the Night. Burly character actor Edward Arnold, best known for playing flint-hearted businessmen, starred as blind detective Duncan ‘Mac’ Maclain. Aided by his German Shepherd guide dog Friday, his heightened remaining senses (shades of Daredevil!), and some well-placed judo flips, Mac investigates the murder of an actor who was pursuing an old flame’s daughter. What he finds is a Nazi espionage ring.
When he’s captured by the spies and locked in a basement, Mac is able to even the odds by breaking the lights and using the darkness he’s familiar with to his advantage. Based on a novel from a series of Maclain mysteries by author Bayard Kendrick, Eyes in the Night proved to be a modest success for the studio and was followed by a 1945 sequel, The Hidden Eye, also starring Arnold (and Friday).
1945 also saw the premiere of Blood on the Sun, an rather jingoistic actioner set in 1930s Japan and starring James Cagney as incorruptible American newspaper editor stationed in Tokyo. When one of his reporters uncovers the infamous Tanaka Memorial papers, documents which were claimed to detail a Japanese plan to take over China, the Pacific, and the U.S., Cagney must battle Imperial officers as well as anti-war factions within the country as he tries to get the plans to American officials and prove that an attack is imminent.
A scene early in the film finds Cagney’s Nick Condon taking part in a martial arts class, while a key fight sequence near the climax features Nick and Japanese secret police captain Oshima trading judo tosses. Oshima is played by John Halloran, who before turning to acting was an LAPD officer/judo teacher named Jack Sergel. Sergel was hired by Cagney’s brother William to teach the legendary screen tough guy–who insisted on doing his own stunts–how to take a tumble and make it look convincing. Cagney later recalled, “I grew so fond of judo I used it to keep in shape until a back injury I picked up doing something else put me on the sidelines.”
The third member of this early Hollywood dojo was none other than Spencer Tracy. In director John Sturges’ 1955 drama Bad Day at Black Rock the Oscar-winner played George Macreedy, a one-armed WWII veteran who arrives in the isolated title town on a personal mission to repay a debt. Macreedy’s presence in the desert hamlet threatens to expose a deadly secret, leading local rancher Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) to send henchmen Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Lee Marvin) after the stranger.
A confrontation in a café, with the beefy Coley goading Macreedy into fighting, takes a surprising turn when the disabled veteran uses karate chops and judo flips to send his opponent right out the front door. Interestingly, Production Code officials originally refused to permit the use of karate in the movie, saying they didn’t consider Tracy’s martial arts moves “fighting heroically”. They relented after they were reminded that his character was fighting with just one arm.