Enter the Dragon (1973)
Director: Robert Clouse
Country: Hong Kong / United States
Length: 99 minutes
Type: Kung Fu, Action, Spy-Movie
The poor transfer on the old
'Enter the Dragon' blu-ray (one of the earliest of the format) and it only being available in an altered version has put me off re-watching this more often. Thankfully Criterion have finally been the first to put out the original theatrical cut in HD and it looks marvellous, grainy, richly coloured and detailed. Good God is
Bruce Lee fast, sure sometimes they've subtly under-cranked it and/or snipped out a few frames but more often than not it's the opposite and they're having to slow things down to make his moves register. Lee has a crazy physique, he's got muscles where I didn't know the human body had muscles. Thankfully for the two supporting American characters they made the decision to cast actors who had done some martial arts already.
John Saxon's skills are good enough but
Jim Kelly holds his own next to Bruce, the speed and force with which it looks like he's taking down Han's henchman is great. Flashback sequences for the trio of heroes have you rooting for them before they put one foot on Han's island. Everything the say and do in the first act is designed to make you love them, not a moment is wasted, it's a well constructed script.
In the scene with Han's henchman, Kelly says
"Man, you come right out of a comic book" to Han but
"you come right out of a Bond movie" would be more accurate. I hadn't noticed before how much EtD is riffing on spy-movies and the proven Bond formula in particular. Han basically is
Dr. No. He dresses like Dr. No, he's got his hands missing, replaced by black metal ones and he's doing that 'being courteous to your enemies' villain thing. He's also got an island fortress/underground lair, a private uniformed army and is pictured stroking a white Persian cat just like Blofeld, he's only missing an underground monorail! Lee is recruited by the British government in Hong Kong to spy on crime lord Han. The standard mission briefing scene makes a point of showing that Braithwaite, Lee's handler, is the kind of hard drinking old gentlemen that populates the world of Bond. He repeatedly offers Lee a drink, which Lee conspicuously declines, also refusing gadgets and guns (so there's no need for a Q character) and later shows none of Bond's lust for women. He's kinda the opposite of Bond, he's controlled, lacks ego and doesn't go looking for confrontation. So much so that he would be in danger of being boring but for Bruce Lee's electric charisma, plus his two bad boy co-stars have enough vices, flaws and attitude to spare, keeping things entertaining and amusing.
EtD also smoothly integrates elements of the Blaxploitation genre into the Kung Fu mix, something that the Bond franchise had also done more overtly earlier that same summer in
'Live and Let Die'. The Bond producers were no doubt aware that EtD had stolen a march on them (raking in comparable boxoffice to L&LD) by inserting their own Spy formula into the Kung Fu genre. They made an attempt to catch up the year after with
'The Man with the Golden Gun', featuring a Kung Fu sidekick for
Roger Moore but it's a bit cheesy, where as EtD is stone cold cool. A sequel to EtD was planned before Lee's untimely death which would have teamed him up with former Bond actor
George Lazonby and
Sonny Chiba. It was retooled without Lee or Chiba as 1974's
'Stoner' aka
'The Shrine of Ultimate Bliss'. The final confrontation in a hall of mirrors idea had been done in
Orson Welles' 1947 film
'The Lady from Shanghai'. The aforementioned 'The Man with the Golden Gun' did it too, with less success. To complete the spy-genre feel they hired
Lalo Schifrin to do the score, who had done the theme to
'Mission: Impossible' and scored episodes of
'The Man From U.N.C.L.E'. He was also hot off
'Bullitt' and
'Dirty Harry', two more films that defined late 60s/early 70s cool. EtD is one of the all time great soundtracks to listen to with, or without the film. 'Enter the Dragon' is the perfect east-meets-west co-production (Golden Harvest and Warner Bros.), nailing absolutely every element of the multiple movie genres it's combining. It's so iconic, actors and filmmakers just have to do little gestures and we instantly know it's a homage to Bruce Lee's performance, from
'The Matrix', to
'The Phantom Menace'.
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Serpico (1973)
Director: Sidney Lumet
Country: United States
Length: 130 minutes
Type: Drama
Top-class biopic of NYPD whistle-blower Frank Serpico from Director
Sidney Lumet. Coming off his star making turn in
'The Godfather',
Al Pacino is at his prime (back when it wasn't all shouting). Filmed on location in the "mean streets" of New York, Lumet makes the city look like a crumbling, rat-infested toilet, as physically corrupt as the force that patrols it. Greek composer
Mikis Theodorakis (discovered by
Michael Powell) delivers a prominent and emotional score to rival the best of
Ennio Morricone.
'Serpico' suggests that being the one sane person in a world of madmen can make you lose your mind.
