Enter the Dragon (1973)

Do I have to say much about Bruce Lee?  He is arguably the most famous martial arts film actor next to Jackie Chan, but has the dubious distinction of starring in a number of films while not actually walking the earth at the time.  Game of Death went as far as featuring footage from his funeral. He made a number of renowned films in Hong Kong prior to Enter the Dragon, created his own martial arts style and tried his best to promote his culture and philosophy to the world at large. 

As luck would have it, the movie he is most known for today was the one he made shortly before his death.  Enter the Dragon was one of the few movies of its type that actually bridged the gap between East and West film making, as even today it is hard to find anyone in Hollywood that can properly film a martial arts fight scene.  They still typically bring in Hong Kong choreographers to do the work. Here, Lee did most of the work, even a good portion of the directing if rumors are true.

Lee (Lee) is a trainee at a martial arts school who is contacted by British Intelligence.  A man named Han (Kien Shih), who used to be a student at the school, has founded his own institution on a private island.  However, rather than teaching martial arts, he appears to be building an army to support his drug and white slavery trades.  Another agent, Su Lin (Angela Mao) was sent to infiltrate Han's fortress, but they fear she may have been compromised. 

Lee agrees to attend a martial arts tournament to be held on Han's island.  Along the way he meets American martial artists Roper (John Saxon), who is hoping to win the contest to pay his gambling debts.  Roper also meets a former compatriot with whom he fought in Vietnam, Williams (Jim Kelly), who had the flee the U.S. after attacking two racist cops that cornered him in an alley.  Roper and Kelly initially take advantage of Han's hospitality, while Lee contacts Su Lin and realizes things are worse than they seem.

Williams has the unfortunate luck of being observed outside while Lee is forced to incapacitate some guards during his investigation, and becomes a prisoner of Han - something that Roper is quite unhappy about when Han shows him around in attempt to get the American to join his operation.  Instead, Roper throws in with Lee, who has his own motivations for revenge; turns out his sister committed suicide to escape being raped by a band of Han's men led by Oharra (Bob Wall), Han's chief henchman. 

There is not a whole lot of plot here, but in the end it isn't really the point.  It's fight the bad guy, get revenge, kind of rescue the damsel, with some of the most famous fight scenes in cinema history.  Han uses a number of attachments on his missing hand to equalize things, Lee relies on his discipline and skill while Roper relies on brute force.  Unfortunately, Jim Kelley, who was extremely skilled in martial arts, is not given enough to do.  Happily, he got a chance to shine in Black Belt Jones, Three the Hard Way and a number of other films that showcased his skills. Here, outside of his fight with the cops at the beginning, he is mainly left to be a plot device to get Roper motivated to do the right thing.

But that's a bit of quibble when we have Bruce Lee punching a cobra (for real), kicking the stuffing out of Oharra and fighting Han in a hall of mirrors.  I don't think the last part has ever been equaled, even in Hong Kong, although it's possible that the Shaw Brothers may have done something its equal.  We may have seen its equal down the line, had Lee lived.  Happily, he did leave us this to cap off his legacy, despite how so many exploiters (including the director of this movie) tried to besmirch it in the quest to milk his memory for cash.

Enter the Dragon (1973)
Time: 102 minutes
Starring: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelley, Kien Shih
Director: Robert Clouse


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more