David Carradine Faced Off Against An Action Legend In A Forgotten 1983 Neo-Western

David Carradine came to prominence playing a martial arts master so it was only right that he eventually found himself in a duel with the great Chuck Norris. As Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu,” Carradine traveled the Old West facing down all manner of challenger. But he never reckoned with the might of a solitary Texas Ranger with a deadly aim — that is, until 1983’s “Lone Wolf McQuade,” which saw Carradine and Norris do battle in what was one of the better projects of the 1980s for both actors.

By 1983, Carradine had come a long way from his TV debut in the short-lived Western series “Shane.” Having become a household name thanks to “Kung Fu,” the actor tried to subvert audience expectations by appearing in a number of exploitation flicks and B-movies. More well-known 1970s examples include “Cannonball,” “Death Race 2000,” and “Deathsport.” In the 1980s, however, Carradine was basically churning out direct-to-video fare, and in “Lone Wolf McQuade” he came face to face with the king of schlocky DTV actioners, Chuck Norris.

The neo-western was directed by Steve Carver, who’d worked at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures at the same time Carradine had fronted several of the studio’s features in the 1970s. With “Lone Wolf McQuade,” Carver paid homage to the Spaghetti Westerns that had helped move the Western genre into its revisionist era. As such, there was a self-aware aspect to the movie, which knew exactly what it was and wasn’t about to apologize for it. The final showdown between its two stars was emblematic of its excess and was, it turns out, a lot more real than you might imagine. In fact, Carradine and Norris seemingly gave everything they had to their climactic battle and ended up injuring themselves.

“Lone Wolf McQuade” isn’t the type of ’80s actioner that gets mentioned alongside such legendary features as “First Blood” or “Die Hard.” But it’s also not the kind of movie that should be lumped in with the worst examples of the decades’ bombastic nonsense. In fact, it’s easily one of the best Chuck Norris movies, and in its unapologetic embrace of the uber macho ethos of the era and its reverence for the great Spaghetti Westerns, manages to turn it into a sort of paean to both the golden age of action cinema the influential films that preceded it.

That’s not to say the film is some sort of artistic masterwork. This is, at the end of the day, a film in which Norris and David Carradine beat each other senseless for our entertainment. “Lone Wolf McQuade” stars the former as Texas Ranger Jim “J.J.” McQuade, an ex-Marine who is the epitome of the ’80s action stereotype: a lone wolf lawman who routinely flouts the rules and lives a solitary existence in the wake of his divorce. Oh, and he also literally has a pet wolf.

The film follows McQuade as he tangles with David Carradine’s Rawley Wilkes, an arms dealer who also happens to be a martial arts expert. It seems Carradine’s Kung Fu specialist is selling weapons to terrorists, and J.J. isn’t about to let that go unpunished. When Wilkes captures his daughter, Sally McQuade (Dana Kimmell), he all but guarantees a confrontation with J.J., which is exactly what we get in the film’s climactic moments. That particular battle is a protracted slog in which Norris and Carradine go all out.

In a 1990 issue of Psychotronic Video (via archive.org), David Carradine recalled his showdown with Chuck Norris in “Lone Wolf McQuade.” Neither actor opted to use a stunt double, making for what sounds like a brutal on-set experience. “We worked on that fight for four days,” he said. “We shot it for four days. And we were little old men by the end of it. All our old injuries came back, we got new injuries, and we were stumbling around like little old men.”

According to the actor, he and his co-star needed canes and crutches by the end of shooting their fight, which in Carradine’s recollection was the result of Norris wanting to outdo his famous showdown with Bruce Lee in 1972’s “The Way of the Dragon.” “We were actually trying to go beyond that,” continued Carradine. “I think we did. I think photographically we didn’t. But as far as the fight was concerned, the combination of the two styles, you know, because I was very flowing and loose, and he was very solid and hard, I think we accomplished what we set out to do.”

I’m fairly confident in saying that Jim “J.J.” McQuade vs. Rawley Wilkes was not, in fact, quite as memorable as Tang Lung vs. Colt. But it was an impressive ending to one of Norris’ best films and reminder of the physical talent that had made Carradine a star a decade prior.