Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick:
One of the most popular martial arts movies ever made, 1973’s Enter the Dragon has remained a major influence for virtually every form of media, from movies to comics to video games to music and on and on.
With its larger-than-life heroes and villains, its secret-island-tournament-to-the-death narrative hook, and its bevy of iconic fights from the Shaolin temple opening to the mirror maze climax, arguably no martial arts film has ever been so important to Western audiences until maybe Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000.
Enter the Dragon also firmly established Bruce Lee as an international icon, achieving what a long, often humiliating stretch in Hollywood failed to. Tragically, Lee suddenly and shockingly passed away at the age of only 32 right before the film was set to release. Lee’s legacy remains a major part of the cultural conversation, in everything from Quentin Tarantino’s controversial fictionalized version in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to this summer’s massive Criterion box-set and a multi-part documentary about his life aired on ESPN.
While Lee would appear in numerous films in the years after his death, often utilizing out-takes, deleted scenes, or body doubles (of WILDLY varying quality levels) Enter the Dragon was his final completed movie.
Directed by Robert Gymkata Clouse, Enter the Dragon stars Lee as…um…“Lee”, a Shaolin master recruited by British intelligence to go undercover in an exclusive martial arts tournament hosted on the island lair of the mysterious criminal mastermind Han (Shih Kien, dubbed by Keye Luke).
Also competing in the tournament are cocky Vietnam vet Williams (Jim Kelly) and desperate gambler Roper (John Saxon). Across a series of duels, the men circle each other and draw closer to the evil Han and his sinister plans, heading towards a deadly confrontation.
While Lee was the film’s clear lead and center (a position he stridently protected) Kelly also exited Enter the Dragon as a movie star, credited as the first black martial arts movie star. He starred in a series of blaxploitation movies across the ’70s, including Black Belt Jones, before succumbing to cancer in 2013.
The last survivor of “the Deadly Three” was John Saxon, who passed away last week at the age of 83. Saxon was a veteran character actor with twenty years in the film industry under his belt before Enter the Dragon.
While never a leading man, Saxon continued to work steadily throughout the ’70s and ’80s, always bringing the best of his abilities to even the smallest roles. Many of his films enjoy ongoing popular and cult followings, including Black Christmas, Battle Beyond the Stars, and Dario Argento’s Tenebrae.
In 1984, thirty years into his career, he landed perhaps his most well-known role: Lt. Donald Thompson, the father of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy in Wes Craven’s genre-redefining slasher classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Saxon appeared in a couple of the better Elm Street sequels and continued to pop up in genre fare, like From Dusk Til Dawn. Upon his passing, there was a massive outpouring of love and affection for his work across the decades as a character actor who brought legitimacy to every role he was tasked with.
And so we say goodbye to Mr. Saxon and prepare, once more, to Enter the Dragon.
Next Week’s Pick
For our next film club pick we’re both celebrating the life of Hollywood legend Oliva de Havilland and highlighting a film that’s a very beloved favorite among our film club regulars. Please join us for The Adventures of Robin Hood, available streaming on HBO Max!
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
The Team
So, this week I’ve watched a few John Saxon films and I’ve got to say that I’m really happy he left us with a fun legacy of good roles in fun genre fare. While my favorite this week was my umpteenth rewatch of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, it’s safe to say that this was right behind it. And, as far as roles go, I think he does more and does it better here.
While this quarantine period started with me going heavy into the Shaw Brothers catalog and watching some other solid Kung Fu films, I haven’t watched many in the past month or two. Moreover, Bruce Lee is a pretty big blindspot for me. Enter the Dragon is definitely one of his most well known films, so it’s ridiculous that I have never properly watched it, though this viewing confirmed that there were many iconic scenes I’ve seen throughout the years and a few shots that emblazoned many a poster I saw at Sam Goody or Hot Topic.
I truly enjoyed watching this one and will make sure this is a jumpoff point into diving further into his filmography in the coming weeks and months. In other words, Kung Fu Quarantine is back, bitches! (@thepaintedman)
A lot of times when Hollywood slams together a bunch of disparate popular elements, the results are such a tangled, instantly-dated mess, that it’s hard to understand how anyone could have believed those flavors could go well together (or tasted good at all).
But Enter the Dragon is that rare programmer where all the elements gibe together and just straight-up work. The James Bond-y spy shenanigans provide a perfect cartoonish framing device for all the martial arts action, and Clouse delivers on the promise of his premise by giving Lee, Kelly, Saxon, and the myriad of stunt performers ample room to impress.
Lee was reportedly at least somewhat paranoid that the studio would try to snake his own movie out from under him and make the white guy the star (as they had with Kung Fu), but as is the duo balance each other perfectly. Lee is a blazing sun, a movie star coming fully into his own and operating at the height of his powers, while Saxon does a character actor’s busy-work and keeps what could have been the grinding scenes of plot advancement humming along with his charming low-life.
While Enter the Dragon isn’t one of my own personal favorites in the martial arts canon, its iconic status is well-earned and the movie stands the test of time as an engaging and exciting time. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my original viewing of Enter the Dragon many years ago wasn’t just a continuance through the amazing filmography of Bruce Lee. His costars also let a big impact. It was the perfect introduction for Jim Kelly, coinciding with my burgeoning interest in blaxploitation fare, and also to John Saxon, who became an actor I’d come to greatly appreciate and delight in seeing pop up in random movies, from mainstream appearances on Elm Street to oddball genre obscurities like The Glove.
The impact of Enter The Dragon is incalculable. Beyond all the Brucesploitaiton and parody, the film certainly paved the way for kung fu stars to command global audiences, and set the template for fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken, which brazenly steal its plot. Few things can make be feel more robbed than to think that Bruce Lee exited this plane at the height of his powers, after his biggest breakthrough. It’s almost better not to imagine what could have been, a world where Enter the Dragon was simply “early Bruce Lee”. (@VforVashaw)
Iconic and record shattering in every way, there’s no doubt that Enter The Dragon is the film most Bruce Lee fans immediately associate with him and which largely introduced him as a superstar and cultural icon in the western world. In and of itself, I’d argue that Enter The Dragon lives up to that hype today and stands out on its own as a top notch action/martial arts film at just the right time in history to really push the envelope. Bruce Lee would never live to see the cultural impact the film would have, passing away from a shocking cerebral hematoma that simply took his life without warning. Bruce Lee has passed into legend; a star, a philosopher, a martial artist, a teacher. Would Enter The Dragon have become the film it did had Bruce Lee not passed away before its release? We’ll never know. But my point in bringing up Lee’s death at this time is simply to state that Enter The Dragon is a damn fun film and while it isn’t as distilled of a vision as The Way Of The Dragon was, this is the only time we get to see a Bruce Lee film with a pretty sizeable budget, in English, loaded with western stars and slick James Bond-like production value. (@Ed_Travis)
-Read Ed’s full breakdown of the Bruce Lee boxset from Criterion HERE.
Next week’s pick:
https://play.hbomax.com/feature/urn:hbo:feature:GXjS6Hg8UKo7CZgEAAAXd