Film Friday: Enter The Dragon (1973)

In the 1970’s, martial arts became all the rage. There was one reason for this: Bruce Lee. Something about Lee was intensely compelling and audiences just could not get enough. When he died at the peak of his popularity, he became immortal. His peak came with Enter the Dragon, though without Lee, Enter the Dragon really isn’t a very good movie.

Plot

Enter the Dragon opens by introducing us to Bruce Lee. Lee is a Shaolin monk, of sorts, in Hong Kong. His order uses philosophy to give them greater martial arts ability, and he is the best fighter among them.

Lee is asked by British Intelligence to attend a martial arts tournament being given by Han, a drug dealer who owns his own island near Hong Kong. Han has invited the top fighters in the world to come compete and the British want Lee to join them and investigate Han’s island for missing girls. Han addicts them to heroin and then uses them as prostitutes. Lee agrees. He then learns that Han’s henchman, O’Hara, killed Lee’s sister.

Lee’s competition appears to be mainly Roper (John Saxon), an American businessman and compulsive gambler who has blown his fortune gambling and must flee the mob, Williams (Jim Kelly) a black radical who impliedly fights for the poor, and an assortment of others.

After a series of vignettes showing the fighters arriving, we are treated to one of Han’s parties. The fighters are offered food and women. Later that night, Lee begins his investigation. In the meantime, Han kills Kelly because he believes Kelly is spying on him and he offers Saxon a chance to join him. This all leads to a series of showdowns in which Saxon changes sides and helps Lee while Lee is in the fight of his life against Han and his private army.

What Made This Film Special

The Hong Kong film industry has turned out a bazillion martial arts films but few of them have ever reached any level of popularity with general audiences. Enter the Dragon is the notable exception. Enter the Dragon has become a classic. And make no mistake, it is Lee who gives Enter the Dragon its reach with general audiences and its staying power generation after generation.

Indeed, let us be honest: Enter the Dragon is a poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed mess that would be utter crap if given to another actor other than Lee. The lines are laughable. The dialog is primitive. The martial arts moments are ridiculous; they are the equivalent of wire fighting today. The acting is stiff on the one hand and Captain Kirk over-the-top on the other.

Through all of this, though, three things stand out which elevate this film. The first is Jim Kelly who is just badass. Kelly is three parts cool and one part ass-kicking machine. His tough guy appeal is the appeal of manufactured heroes like Jason Statham and Vin Diesel, only he does it without stylized close-ups, without faked whispered dialog, and without elaborate too-perfect one-liners. He is a man you don’t mess with, not a man who calls a stunt double.

Then you have John Saxon. Saxon is hard to believe as being a genuinely good martial artist, but that’s not really his role. His role is the corrupted fighter who redeems himself by finding his moral center again and then dies a martyr of sorts. Saxon is believable in this because it feels like the actor in a nutshell. Saxon is a wannabe action hero who just never felt right as a hero, and that works to his advantage here.

But Kelly and Saxon alone are not enough to elevate this to more than a B movie. That takes Lee. Lee is the reason you watch this film. He is the man who makes it real and makes it interesting. Indeed, stick any other actor in Lee’s role and this film collapses.

What Lee brings is believability first and foremost. Lee makes us believe that the fighting monks of his order are real. How? By believing his own fortune cookie lines (“don’t look at the finger or you will miss all that Heavenly glory”) are genuine philosophy and selling that philosophy as the key to a higher level of martial arts. Indeed, this film feels like you are getting a look into the actual training methods Lee used to make himself such an incredible martial artist.

He brings personality too. Lee does martial arts tricks with such cool that we believe he can do the impossible. He’s funny too. His humor is subtle, but genuine. It’s also very much “common man” humor like when he asks why someone doesn’t just get a gun and shoot Han. This makes him very relatable.

Lee also presents himself as the guy we all want to be. He knows he can’t rely on the government, so he doesn’t: “If I get in trouble, you make a phone call.” He’s moral too. He fights for the people who need help. He’s not cruel either; there isn’t a moment in this film where you think Lee will regret what he did. He takes down bullies, like the New Zealander. He’s clever, as seen in how he takes the New Zealander down.

All of this makes Lee out as a superior being with superior skills, but at the same time someone who strikes us as very much us. In effect, Lee is the person we want to be. That is why we relate to him. And when he tells us this is all real, we believe him in a way we would never believe another actor.

And that is the reason this film is remembered.