The martial arts film for people who don’t even like martial arts films. This movie is the equivalent of the Big Bang theory: the start of everything. Ben Johnson closely studies a film which most martial artists regard as their favourite movie of all time, starring the legendary Bruce Lee.
Year of Release: 1973; Origin: United States, Hong Kong; Studio: Warner Bros., Concord Productions.
Director: Robert Clouse; Producer: Paul Heller, Fred Weintraub, Raymond Chow Man-wai, Bruce Lee; Script: Michael Allin; Action Director: Bruce Lee; Cast: Bruce Lee (Lee), John Saxon (Roper), Jim Kelly (Williams), Shek Kin (Han), Ahna Capri (Tania), Robert Wall (O’hara), Angela Mao Ying (Su Lin), Bolo Yeung (Bolo), Roy Chiao Hung (Abbot).
Alternative Titles: Long zheng hu dou (Hong Kong: Mandarin title); Operation Dragon (European title); The Deadly Three (USA working title)
Trailer: Click below to view the trailer for Enter the Dragon
Plot Synopsis
Hong Kong, present day: Lee (Bruce Lee) is one of Shaolin’s best fighters who somersaults his way into the periphery of the British government (an overseas agent named Braithwaite) who trundles over to Asia to offer Mr. Lee a top secret assignment that clearly nobody in London could be arsed with: to infiltrate the forbidden island of Han (Sheck Kin), an ex-Shaolin monk who now lives a life of scandalous debauchery on his own secluded island which doubles as a drug haven and prostitution racket. His ticket into Han’s impenetrable fortress is a martial arts tournament held once every three years where the best fighters in the world compete for the master’s evil intentions. But Lee enrols for far greater ambitions than working for Her Majesty: he hopes to stoke out Han’s evil bodyguard Oharra (Robert Wall) to settle the score for driving his sister to commit suicide.
The buddy aspects are cemented by relations with the tournament’s two fellow, ex-Nam protagonists: Roper (John Saxon), a sly womaniser with gambling debts escaping cronies in the States who are eager to put one over him, and Williams (Jim Kelly), a Karate enthusiast who hot foots to Hong Kong to avoid the FEDs. The island turns out to be full of tennis courts doubling as tournament arenas, and things get underway once Han creeps out the competition with a rambling speech at the welcoming banquet (“Gentlemen… You. Have. Our. Gratitude.”). Roper hooks up with Han’s favourite prostitute, Tania (Ahna Capri), while Williams lays claim to the rest, unsettling the island’s proprietor in the process. Han seems convinced that Williams has been leaving his chambers in the evenings and investigating his top secret opium racket in the basement, when the night crawler turns out to be Mr. Lee all along. Bolo Yeung cripples the palace guards just to make sure that the visitors get the picture.
As the tournament continues, Lee meets his sister’s nemesis O’harra and jumps on the poor vagabond, silencing him for good so that he can continue his espionage trail with less of a heavy heart. Token black sidekick Williams is the first of the three to face Han’s wrath (“Man, you come right out of a comic book”) - he is bludgeoned to death by Han’s prosthetic iron hand in a room full of doped up hookers and wrapped in chain mail in his dungeon. Roper is disgusted by Han’s underhand tactics and the rebellion begins: Lee triggers the alarm system in Han’s drug plant and fends off a cavalcade of adversaries with hands, feet, sticks, poles and nunchakus. He’s captured, but not for long, when Roper kills Bolo, Tania unleashes the prisoners (made up of “lost drunken men who no longer care where they find themselves”), and the whole island explodes in a fury of fisticuffs. Lee tracks Han back to his museum of horrors and pounds the OAP with a succession of high kicks, culminating in a neat mirror trick finale where the two play cat and mouse in a hall of reflections before the old bastard is impaled on his own spear.
Review
Bruce Lee’s incarnation from cocky, self-assured country bumpkin to a suited and booted kung fu version of James Bond met with certain unease when the film was released in his native Hong Kong, where it failed to make as big of a splash as his other native output. Across the rest of the globe, however, Enter the Dragon had a monumental effect, the shock waves of which can still be felt today.
Put simply, this is the film that not only pricked the ears of the US mass marketing potential of the new kung fu craze, but it also introduced to the world a new icon to spearhead the movement. To add to the mysterious phenomenon of this brand new culture, its leader would tragically die three weeks before the release of his most successful film. Bruce Lee’s death was met with national mourning in Hong Kong, but general indifference in the States, until Enter the Dragon was released and the tragic repercussions of Lee’s untimely demise could truly be realised.
Not that this has done Enter the Dragon a disservice. If anything, it has merely acted to heighten the film’s importance and cult appeal. The film is designed as a star vehicle for its posthumous star in more ways than the title suggests: attempts to package Lee as a more aesthetically western protagonist become slightly protracted in the martial arts sequences, which remain the film’s most original aspect. His unique physical and athletic prowess far transcends any contemporary comparison with a Western cinematic hero, as every action hero that had been before (Roger Moore, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, John Wayne) had all relied on a heavy handed, macho bravado backed up by plenty of ammunition. Lee uses no guns (it is stipulated early on that Han has forbidden the use of firearms on his island) and he moves with the grace of a ballet dancer, far removed from the hulking power of Wayne. His fight scene with Robert Wall, complete with Ali shuffle and trademark Kiai battle cries, is the best representation of Lee’s supremely cocky and assured style of film fighting, and shows Lee in his purest form, beating off the shackles of his commercial straightjacket. Director Clouse intended to ‘beat the strut’ out of Lee’s fight scenes which were evident in his previous Hong Kong films, as it was felt that his arrogant style of combat would not translate well to an American audience. When he’s fighting Wall, Lee magnifies his cockiness ten-fold, and appears all the more natural and charismatic for it.
Lee speaks with his feet, leaving most of the dialogue down to B movie actor John Saxon and the supporting players. Many regard Lee as a great facial actor, yet here he is performing in English for the first time. (A fluent English speaker, Lee would end up re writing a large part of his dialogue after falling out with the film’s script writer Michael Allin, who had allegedly included an excessive amount of names and words which featured the letter R into Lee’s speech knowing that the actor would have trouble pronouncing the desired phrase). Director Robert Clouse has since commented that the only reason the film was completed at all was due to Lee’s wife, Linda, who had to push and encourage her husband to beat his mounting anger and nerves to continue the project: Lee was taunted and challenged by the extras on set, and the escalating pressure of being the leading man in an American film meant that he was pushing his body to the absolute limit. The last fight scene he would film is Enter the Dragon’s opening scene with Sammo Hung, where a thin, gaunt-looking Lee can be seen in the throes of an extreme regime in which – in order for him to ‘move quicker’ - he had started to starve himself.
But Lee (acting as the film’s fight choreographer), would battle through the process to create a glorious symbolism to the film’s action scenes, where he had clearly spent time to imbue the character’s idiosyncrasies into their fighting arts: Williams’ streetwise character is perhaps the film’s most dated aspect, yet his arrogance does not extend to his fight scenes in the same way that Lee’s does. He is shown to offer remorse and sympathy through his loyalty to Roper and his appreciation of the tournament’s other combatants, and only meets his grisly end after defending his friend’s honour. Han is depicted as treacherous and untrustworthy through the medium of an artificial hand, which is used to its desired effect in combat with an assortment of different lethal attachments. Bolo, his main bodyguard (and a former Mr Hong Kong), is aptly suited to the brute force role and his crushing of Han’s guards is depicted as a gratuitous rendition of severe atonement. Roper fights mostly with his mouth, sweet talking his female conquests as well as negotiating with his syndicate enemies, and yet he is just as undesirable a character as the others: despite their loyalty to each other, the film’s three main fighters are all connected to dubious backgrounds, apart from the pure Buddhist element of Lee’s character, who in order to win the tournament and fight for his life he has to, inevitably, kill a heck of a lot of people, making him perhaps the most rubbish Buddhist ever.
But the film never loses sight of its genre specifications, with running themes of revenge, self-sacrifice, honour and retribution. Martial arts films are, predominantly, the champions the underdog, and even if it never seems likely that Lee is ever going to lose this battle, the film would prove quite revolutionary in setting up these conventions for the Western market, adapting the hippy Buddhist mentality of TV shows like Kung Fu and combining it with a brand new pin up who’s suave sophistication and lethal chops would be plundered from already recognisable set ups, like Ian Flyming’s James Bond (even the legendary mirror finale was adapted from scenes in Dr No).
The repercussions of Enter the Dragon are hard to quantify, as given that Western interest in martial arts cinema was growing rapidly at the time, it is safe to assume that if Enter the Dragon wasn’t the first breakthrough success of its kind, then something else would have been. Yet given Lee’s death, the film remains a purely unique testament to a man who has been frozen in time at the peak of his prime, and this reason alone seems to have held the key to the film’s continued appreciation and longevity. It would take Hong Kong and the rest of the world a long time to step out of the shadow of Lee’s death, but once the mourning was over, the infrastructure had already been prepared by Bruce Lee, ready for a whole new generation of martial arts actors to capitalise in the mainstream market, among them being Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Chuck Norris.
The martial arts film for people who don’t even like martial arts films. This movie is the equivalent of the Big Bang theory: the start of everything. Ben Johnson closely studies a film which most martial artists regard as their favourite movie of all time, starring the legendary 
Review 
Lee speaks with his feet, leaving most of the dialogue down to B movie actor John Saxon and the supporting players. Many regard Lee as a great facial actor, yet here he is performing in English for the first time. (A fluent English speaker, Lee would end up re writing a large part of his dialogue after falling out with the film’s script writer Michael Allin, who had allegedly included an excessive amount of names and words which featured the letter R into Lee’s speech knowing that the actor would have trouble pronouncing the desired phrase). Director Robert Clouse has since commented that the only reason the film was completed at all was due to Lee’s wife, Linda, who had to push and encourage her husband to beat his mounting anger and nerves to continue the project: Lee was taunted and challenged by the extras on set, and the escalating pressure of being the leading man in an American film meant that he was pushing his body to the absolute limit. The last fight scene he would film is Enter the Dragon’s opening scene with Sammo Hung, where a thin, gaunt-looking Lee can be seen in the throes of an extreme regime in which – in order for him to ‘move quicker’ - he had started to starve himself. 
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By: normaengage (Registered IP 86.152.7.50) on 28-07-2008 14:57
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