The 1973 Bruce Lee classic was a genuine education for a white suburban boy growing up in the north of England. Nothing was the same again
It was the summer of 1984 and while most of my friends were engaged in the bitter culture war that was Duran Duran v Culture Club, I was obsessed with a dead movie star called Bruce Lee. Our video store in Bramhall, Cheshire, was a classic early 80s den of rental iniquity, crammed with unclassified horror and martial arts flicks, and I wanted to see all of these morbid and violent treats before someone came along and banned them. My parents weren’t quite irresponsible enough to let me rent Last House on the Left or Driller Killer, but they had an open-door policy on kung fu, so one afternoon I went home with Enter the Dragon and nothing was the same again.
Everything about Bruce Lee’s first American-produced movie (after three pictures made by Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest) is ludicrous and over-stylised in a way only the 1970s could manage. From its amazing orchestral funk soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin (also responsible for the Mission Impossible theme), to the kitsch set designs, it is a black-belt assault on the senses. It is also joyously dumb. Bruce Lee plays a Shaolin master recruited by the British secret service to infiltrate a fighting tournament arranged by reclusive millionaire Mr Han on his island off the coast of Hong Kong. You can tell Lee’s contact is a British agent because he looks like Captain Mainwaring and drinks tea in every scene he’s in. Han is suspected of running a trafficking operation, in which women are being kidnapped, drugged and then sold to rich psychopaths but instead of mounting a conventional intelligence operation, MI6 decides to send in a really violent monk. This all made perfect sense at the time.
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