Tragedy Only Fuels Its Success

In 1971 Bruce Lee finally got the headline a motion picture, something he’d been trying to do for years. By 1973, he was dead, due to cerebral edema (likely caused by a chemical overdose and hyponatremia, a lack of sodium in the blood). His death was unexpected, and it left him with a number of films that hadn’t even been released when he died. The star died at what was just the beginning of a legendary run, with each of his films making more and more money (while all produced on fairly economical budgets). Who knows where his films could have gone or what he might have done next. All we can point to is what he created and the legacy he left behind.

Among most fans of his work, Enter the Dragon is considered his best film. It’s the first of his releases in what was expected to be a partnership between his production company, Concorde Production, Inc. and Warner Bros. Financed on a budget of just $850,000, it was released to much acclaim, soaring to over $100 Mil at the Box Office the year of its release (and continuing to make more and more upon several rereleases, with the film currently sitting at $400 Mil total, making it one of the most financially successful films, budget-to-gross, ever). Would it have been that successful if Lee was still alive when it came out? Probably not.

The film itself is good, a solid bit of martial arts exploitation made for the American and Hong Kong markets. It’s got goofy style, it’s got plenty of action, and it’s even got a plot easy enough to duplicate that plenty of later martial arts films (Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive) have copied it verbatim. But it is the legacy of where this film stands in the actor’s oeuvre, the last movie he got to see completion before his death, that makes it the one everyone goes to. If Lee had lived long enough for his last complete film to be Game of Death then that would likely be the movie everyone would talk about. Or, if he had lived on for many more years it’s probably that Enter the Dragon would be one of the many beloved films from the actor, but that we’d have other, greater works to speak of. Enter the Dragon is a solid Bruce Lee film, but it’s considered special because it’s also the last.

The film stars Bruce Lee as Lee, a shaolin monk with incredible martial arts skills. He’s called in by a British special-ops unit to work as their undercover agent at a martial arts tournament hosted by Han (played by Shih Kien, voice dubbed by Keye Luke), a criminal gang boss. Han specializes in illegal weaponry, opium, and white slavery, but this secret intelligence organization (for all they know about Han) can’t take him down without hard evidence. They need Lee to go to Han’s tournament, held on a remote island that Han also uses as his headquarters, and gather the hard evidence required to bring Han down.

While Lee is there, though, he also comes across two other fighters: Roper (John Saxon), avetern and inveterate gambler, and Williams (Jim Kelly), Roper’s former squadmate. The three of them prove themselves to be formidable foes in the ring, each taking out their opponents with ease. But once Lee starts looking around, and Han becomes suspicious that there’s someone digging for dirt on the island, things turn nasty. One of the fighters will wind up dead, and the other two will have to fight for their lives to defeat Han and stop the evil criminal enterprise once and for all.

When it comes to Lee’s library of films, Enter the Dragon sits in a weird place for me. I don’t think, story wise, it’s the best of the lot. The plot itself is pretty shallow, without any moral quandaries for the characters to worry about. Han is evil, we’re told he’s evil, and we’re even told all the evil things that he does. Our hero (and the friends he makes along the way) will have to bring Han down, and that’s all there is to it. There’s no mystery, no real suspense, just, “this guy is bad, so go out and stop him, would ya?”

The characters, as well, don’t really have much going on. I like Roper and Williams but that’s only because the actors playing them, Saxon and Kelly respectively, are charismatic leads that put a lot of heart and soul into their performances. They aren’t written with any depth, but the actors do what they can with the material given. Lee is less impressive here, despite being the nominal lead, with his character (also named Lee) being a stoic and pretty boring hero. His performance lacks the comedic joy we felt in his past movies, like Way of the Dragon and Fist of Fury. He’s just a dude there to stop a criminal, and that’s as much character development as he gets.

You can actually tell that the film doesn’t really know what to do with Lee, outside of fighting, because it pretty much ignores him otherwise. The fun character moments go to Roper and Williams, with them bantering with each other, or suckering fools into wagering on their fights, or just adding the needed comedy to every scene they’re in. They get the good bits, the enjoyable character moments outside the margins of the plot, while Lee is stuck on the plot and has to trudge through it alone.

The times that Lee comes alive in the film are when he’s fighting and, of course, he does that very well. I would argue that his fights here aren’t as good as in Way of the Dragon, but a lot of that is down to the way the film is shot and edited. The director for the film, Robert Clouse, hadn’t directed martial arts films before this movie, and though he would go on to make those works his bread and butter following Enter the Dragon, this film feels rough, like Clouse didn’t really know what he was doing. Action is shot on tight angles, obscuring some of the fighting, and the edits obscure the motion and ruin some of the experience. We know Lee could handle himself, and the other leads, Saxon and Kelly, were trained fighters as well, so I don’t think the film had to worry and work around them. I think this was all down to the direction and editing. They weren’t prepared for what this film needed.

Still, there are some solid set pieces. There are a few good fights early, especially for Kelly and then Saxon. And when Lee gets to do his thing, the film does sing. The last section, with a battle between Lee and Han in a room of mirrors, is iconic, a masterful setting for the film that adds real tension. Sure, when you think about it, the room is nowhere near big enough to cause the kinds of distracting mirror effects and illusions the film makes, but you get swept up in the moment and are able to ignore that. It’s fun.

That’s what works best about Enter the Dragon: it’s fun. While it may not be Lee’s best film when it comes to showcasing the fighting or giving him real acting to do, the film does at least find ways to insert enough fun to be watchable. For my money Way of the Dragon is a better film, but that doesn’t make Enter the Dragon bad. It’s a little creaky, working a tad hard to get all the pieces in place, but once it has characters doing their thing, and a whole lot of fighting, it works. Had Lee survived past this movie I don’t know if it would be considered the classic it is today but, then, that’s the legacy of tragedy. This film had extra weight put on it because of what happened and, in the end, that’s what helped sell it to the masses, making it the cultural touchstone it is today.