Enter the Dragon

The film that made Bruce Lee a global star

Warner Bros. co-produced Enter the Dragon with Concord Production, the company Bruce Lee and Raymond Chow had set up in Hong Kong. It was one of the first partnerships of its kind between Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema. The shoot cost about $850,000. Lee died on 20 July 1973, aged 32, six days before the Hong Kong premiere, and never saw the film's worldwide success. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2004.

Real fighters in the cast

Lee staged the fights himself. They show his jeet kune do, the method he formalised in the late 1960s: light footwork, straight strikes, fast kicks, intercepting rather than blocking. The opening bout pits him against Sammo Hung, later one of Hong Kong's leading fight choreographers, in shorts and open-fingered gloves, a scene often seen as a forerunner of MMA. Jim Kelly, an American karate champion, plays Williams. Bob Wall, a karateka and friend of Lee, plays O'Hara. Bodybuilder Bolo Yeung is Han's enforcer Bolo, and a young Jackie Chan turns up, uncredited, among the guards.

What a martial artist will notice

The scene on the boat, where Lee describes "the art of fighting without fighting", sums up his thinking in a few lines. The fight with O'Hara shows his hand speed, his control of distance and the way he returns to guard after every attack. The hall of mirrors has been borrowed by countless action films since. Lee's fights reward slow-motion viewing: feints, changes of rhythm, kicks thrown with almost no chamber.

Purists will point out that the tournament is more show than regulated competition, and that some supporting players move far less well than the leads.

Reception

Lalo Schifrin's score and the island sets give the film a James Bond feel, which goes some way to explaining its success with Western audiences. It holds an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Fifty years after its release, Warner reissued it in a 4K restoration.