OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

Diana DeGette and the Rise of the DSA in 2026

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO)

On Tuesday, Rep. Diana DeGette lost her primary bid for reelection, becoming already the fifth incumbent Democratic House member to lose her reelection bid in a primary to Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros.  This is on top of a near-record 58 incumbents in the House (24 of whom are Democrats) that will be leaving, setting the stage for (should the Democrats win the majority), a very different caucus for Hakeem Jeffries to lead than what he currently runs.  DeGette's loss, though, also opens up a lot of questions about the DSA's growing influence on the Democratic Party...a party they seem to openly despise.

I will start by saying, transparently, I've always really liked Diana DeGette.  Her predecessor in the House was Pat Schroeder, a legendary congresswoman who ran for President in 1988, and is one of my heroes (there's a framed photo of her hanging on my wall in this room), so I will own that part of this is biased in the sense that I am sad about this loss.  DeGette is a deeply reliable Democrat, very much someone you would've historically considered a liberal.  Her record on abortion rights is perfectly pro-choice, she is a strong advocate for gun control, and in particular, is a leading politician on healthcare issues (including Medicare for All).  She is not, as has been labeled on her, a "moderate" in any sense of the word.  Her voting record would be largely indistinguishable from, say, someone like Elizabeth Warren, whom most people feel pretty comfortable saying is a liberal.

DeGette's primary against Melat Kiros is largely predicated on just a few issues, because by-and-large their viewpoints were pretty much identical from a practical standpoint.  The biggest was around Israel.  DeGette's record on Israel has been called "mixed" but it's less mixed and more nuanced.  She has pretty consistently (since the attacks on October 7th) stated that she supports Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas, but has largely refused to vote for standalone bills providing funding to Israel due to the genocide (my word, not hers, which was also a sticking point) in Gaza.  It should be noted that DeGette did vote for a humanitarian bill in April 2024 that provided some funding to Israel as part of a compromise package with the House GOP, as it also provided funding to Gaza, Ukraine, & Taiwan.  173 Democrats voted for this bill, while 37 (and 21 Republicans) voted no (to match the comparison above, Elizabeth Warren also voted for this bill, as did noted Senate liberals like Tina Smith & Tammy Baldwin).

This was, by-and-large the only major issue that the two disagreed upon in the primary, and much was made over the fact that Kiros was considerably younger than DeGette (Kiros was born the year that DeGette entered Congress), but I will note that these DSA challenges oftentimes focus on just a handful of issues: Israel, age, & stylistic approaches to politics.  I will also own that I hate primaries largely based on style, especially in solid blue districts.  I say this as someone who already admitted to having a framed picture of a politician on my wall, but I think that ultimately the best politicians are ones who actually get the job done and I don't need my politicians to be flashy.  I am aware that on occasion you need to invest in a politician that feels like a national candidate, as I have learned from watching Al Gore & John Kerry lose that Americans will rarely pick someone on their merits if they don't want to go to a bar with them, but I don't need flashy politicians to be happy.  I want politicians who actually work in the real world, and do the job of getting their work done.  Like everyone, I approach my life with some complaints, and will complain on occasion (or more if it's the right audience)...but I hate people who are defeatists, and who just talk about their problems without actually fixing them, and so I have a lot of respect for people like a Diana DeGette, someone who has done the work, consistently putting out legislation to try to make the country better, without caring about their following on cable news or social media.

I also think that these primaries tend to gloss over the very real, sometimes glaring, faults of the challenger because they're younger and more exciting (because the media, and many grassroots people are more interested in flashy people, the latter in part because they're so angry and they want to feel seen through their politicians).  Kiros, for example, has made past statements refusing to condemn attacks at a Jewish Community rally in 2025 as being "antisemitic" even though they clearly were.  Combined with her campaigning with Hasan Piker, a noted far left figure with a large following who regularly trades in antisemitic language & conspiracy theories, a lot of the closing arguments were over Kiros not being strong enough on the rising tide of antisemitism in the far left, which you see pop up in things like the attacks on State Sen. Scott Wiener this past month (as well as in October 2024) in public protests that feel less about Wiener being pro-Israel (he's really not, he supports a two-state solution) and more so on Wiener being Jewish, as we see disproportionately large attacks on this issue against Jewish politicians.

Kiros is not the only far-left figure who has taken on an "establishment" (a more accurate if much vaguer term than "moderate" for someone like DeGette) and won while also having a host of controversial statements.  Darializa Chevalier recently beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York, despite having said in the past that she doesn't believe in the prison system (even refusing to back prisons for murderers) and has called for the end of all deportation & an open borders policy with immigration even for those accused of crimes in the United States.  And we've spent way too much time on this blog this year talking about the many, many controversies of Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner, but know they're definitely an indication of this same wave of candidates.

Unlike El-Sayed or Platner, Kiros & Chevalier are in super blue districts-they are going to win and become congresswomen next year.  But I will own that it saddens me that the Democratic Party, which has a largely strong record of running serious-minded people, ones who are focused on actually making incremental and real improvements in the lives of Americans, are succumbing to challengers who seem less inclined to govern and more inclined to get the most likes on Twitter.  Also, as an historically yellow dog Democrat, it freaks me out to have multiple candidates for Congress I'd struggle to be able to vote for flying under our banner.  Diana DeGette was a good congresswoman, and I say that as a pretty progressive-minded person, one who actually took steps to pass legislation into law, and not just legislate through voice alone.  Kiros & Chevalier seem more like, well, Bernie Sanders-definitely making a principled stand, but one that never seems to go beyond that with little signed bills to their credit.

Saturdays with the Stars: Harrison Ford

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Bruce Lee, an actor who (like Steve McQueen before him) died relatively young and forged a type of movie star that hadn't really been seen before.  This month, as promised, we are going to start a six-month run of actors who made virtually all of their successful films post-1975.  To start that, we'll begin with the one guy who did have two big movies before 1975 (American Graffiti & The Conversation), but who would become synonymous with two characters that would reshape the cinematic landscape after Jaws, and make him the movie star's movie star, an action hero that the whole family could root for, even if his prickly public demeanor might bristle at such superlatives.  This month's star is Harrison Ford.

Born in Chicago, Ford (like Bruce Lee last month) had a clear path before him if he followed his parents' footsteps into show business.  His mother was a radio actress, and his father a former actor & advertising executive.  He grew up in a mixed faith household, his mother being Jewish while his father was Irish-Catholic, and both were quite progressive, something that Ford would carry for the rest of his life (the rare action film star of the modern era that is very much a Democrat).  Though incredibly handsome, Ford's initial forays into entertainment were middling, getting bit roles in westerns while George Hamilton & James Caan (both roughly the same age as Ford) got top-billing in the same pictures.  So frustrated with acting was he that he had a side gig as a carpenter (one of his clients included writer Joan Didion), and were it not for George Lucas seeing his potential in American Graffiti, he might have made that his life.

But Lucas saw something in Ford that soon the entire world would, as he put him as Han Solo in Star Wars, a movie that would make him a household name, while Lucas (as a producer) a few years later would give Ford the role he might be most synonymous with, Indiana Jones.  These two movies launched highly lucrative franchises for Ford, but they were hardly the only movies that really commanded the public's attention.  Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Ford was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to launching action franchises.  So famous is Ford that part of me almost didn't want to include him here because I struggled to come up with four major films that I hadn't seen of his (according to Letterboxd, I have seen 28 of his films).  So while we won't review Star Wars and Indiana Jones (as I've seen them all many times), we will talk about them, alongside some of Ford's other biggest pictures of the era, including two forays into more serious acting.

Game of Death (1978)

Film: Game of Death (1978)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Gig Young, Dean Jagger, Colleen Camp, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Actors dying during or after the production of a film is not uncommon, and it's actually relatively normal for directors/studios to use creative ways to meld together clips, body doubles, & whatever you can think of to piece together one last movie with a popular star.  Everyone from Carrie Fisher to Philip Seymour Hoffman to Heath Ledger to Paul Walker all had films released after they died that they had been filming at the time.  But no actor in the history of movies has ever continued to work as much in the years after his death in the same fashion as Bruce Lee, to the point where there became a name for it: "Bruceploitation."

The films that happened after his death in 1973 run the gamut, from re-editing two movies from old episodes of Lee's time on The Green Hornet to actors using Lee's name or film titles to conjure allusions to the late actor.  Films with names like Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (likely the tackiest of the bunch) were relatively common in martial arts films of the 1970's.  Even Jackie Chan, who would eventually succeed Lee as the biggest name in martial arts films, would get an early start with New Fist of Fury, a spin on Lee's 1972 film that we profiled earlier this month.  Producers, having seen gargantuan paydays with The Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon, weren't willing to go quietly and admit that Lee had only really starred in four films, and their gravy train had passed away.  This greed was most encapsulated by today's film and its inexplicable sequel, perhaps the most horrifying movie I can remember seeing given its backstory.

(Spoilers Ahead) Game of Death follows a relatively standard (for a Lee picture) plot, with Billy Lo (Lee...occasionally) fighting against a racketeering syndicate who is threatening he and his fiancee (Camp) as they want a piece of his new movie star success.  Billy, after being shot in the face during a film production, decides this is a good time to go into hiding, and in hiding exacts revenge on those around him, in an attempt to get them back for essentially ruining his career (and eventually, because they kidnap Colleen Camp).

This is the plot of Game of Death...which you will not care about during the movie, as the plot of this movie is very obviously "Bruce Lee is dead."  This is because with the exception of about 12 minutes toward the end of the movie, Bruce Lee the living person is not in the film despite prominent top billing.  He is instead being portrayed by a series of stunt doubles & stand-ins, many of whom have their face onscreen, and are clearly, visibly, not Bruce Lee.  That is, of course, when they decide to even do that.  There's an actual scene (and I had to rewind, which if you know anything about streaming movies on Amazon Prime, is a feat) but there is literally a shot of this movie where they have taped a headshot of Lee onto a mirror, with it clear that a cardboard cutout is serving as the face of the stand-in to make him look more like Lee.

Most famously, Lee himself does appear in the film earlier on in the picture...but as a literal corpse.  That is because, in a shameless scene where we see Colleen Camp screaming & crying while attending the fake funeral of Billy Lo, we see cutaway footage of the actual funeral of Bruce Lee, at one point for a second or two seeing the open casket visage of the actually dead Lee on the screen.  Other than a scene stolen from The Way of the Dragon where he fights Chuck Norris imposed into the beginning of the picture, this is the first time you see the real-life Lee in the movie, making it all the more jarring.

Game of Death is, by my estimation, grave-robbing.  Despite having proper actors like Camp and Oscar-winners Dean Jagger & Gig Young (this being his final film before he murdered his new wife & killed himself, which in literally any other review would be the real-life headline), the only thing worth watching here is Lee.  The scenes, especially his fight with basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabber, where he battles in a skin-tight yellow jumpsuit, are splendid.  Lee is wry, agile, funny, & sexy-as-fuck.  I will own at this point that I have developed not just a heart-fluttering crush on Lee but also a talent one on him (I will 100% be completing his five film set at some point, as I am a true fan), and so on his behalf, the fact that this movie (and somehow a sequel that patches together even more past footage of Lee) exist is an abomination.

I will note, though, that it also opens up an uncomfortable door into the other legacy of Lee: his son, Brandon.  The younger Lee was also an actor (in fact both of Bruce Lee's children would become film performers), and in the 1980's he was doing some version of Bruceploitation, making films like Legacy of Rage which was released in Asia to try to capitalize on his father's still potent legacy.  Lee, though, didn't have much success, even after getting a chance in some American action films in the early 1990's.  But The Crow would end up being (in terms of box office) his big break.  The gothic superhero film was a smash hit in 1994, but similar to half of the films of his father, it was released after his death.  Eerily like his father's character in Game of Death, Brandon Lee would die from an accident involving a prop gun, in this case accidentally firing a live round that had been trapped in the barrel, shooting Lee in the abdomen, and killing him.  Unlike Game of Death, most of the younger Lee's performance was completed (he only had three days left on production, so most reviews don't note the clear real-life issues with this production coming through on the screen), and so after some jostling between Paramount & Miramax, the latter used a stand-in and CGI (which would later become more common) to complete Lee's performance.  Father and son would eventually be buried next to each other in Seattle.

Next month, and for the remainder of the year, we are going to start writing about the "true" modern action stars and not just the pioneers who forged the way, all six of whom would enter into action movie fame throughout the late 1970's, and especially in the 1980's & 90's, the heyday of the action movie genre.  Our first star, though, is going to be someone who, for much of the 1970's, felt like he was headed in a different direction than action, and it was only a chance twist of fate (and eventually billions of dollars) that would make him one of the Grand Tetons of the genre.

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Film: Enter the Dragon (1973)

Stars: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Ahna Capri, Bob Wall, Shih Kien, Jim Kelly

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to be doing double duty with Bruce Lee this week since I missed one of his Saturday's earlier this month, and we're starting with Enter the Dragon, which for Lee was also the end.  Enter the Dragon was released in Hong Kong six days after Lee's death to rapturous audience reception (and box office).  Some of this had to have been attributed to the mystery surrounding the martial arts icon's demise.  Lee's health had been, despite seemingly being in peak physical condition (he has the body of a modern Olympic athlete in Enter the Dragon, basically unheard of given the training techniques for actors in the 1970's) in a risky position-he had suffered a collapse attributed to a cerebral edema during recording sessions for Enter the Dragon a few months before he passed away.  He was supposed to meet with film producer Raymond Chow about an upcoming picture he intended to make but he had a headache, and took a painkiller & a nap, and when he didn't show up for the planned meeting, Chow went to his house, where he tried to revive Lee, but it was to no avail-Bruce Lee, then one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, was already dead at the age of just 32.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is a weird juxtaposition against Enter the Dragon (we'll get into more of his death in a second) given this is just a grand movie for him, and likely would've opened up a new level of fame for the actor with global audiences.  For starters, this was his first film since Marlowe (in which he had a bit part) to have an American leading man opposite him.  While John Saxon is not as famous as James Garner, he had headlined a number of B-grade pictures, and was about to have a solid run as a featured player in horror classics like Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Having two leading men that feel at-odds with each other in terms of acting styles helps Enter the Dragon, a really solid action film, one with sensational fighting sequences (and not always featuring Lee), and a plot that feels a bit more rooted in consistency but not repetition.

My favorite part of Enter the Dragon is the way that it incorporates elements of Blaxploitation into the movie.  At the time that subgenre was also part of the action/crime genre in the same way martial arts were, and having these two stylistically against each other works really well.  It helps that Jim Kelly is in the film, a Black man who was about to have a brief stint as an action leading man, as he has some terrific one-liners (there's an admittedly problematic but still funny joke about halfway through where he picks out four women to have sex with, and apologizes to the remainder for not having sex with them too, primarily because he's "had a long day" as if four women alone won't be a challenge at all).  Kelly, Saxon, & Lee are stylistically really different in their approach to acting, but that fuses together to make something interesting-this is the rare film of this era where combining a lot of styles and approaches in one film actually works and doesn't feel messy.

Lee's death would quickly be followed by a funeral (where action stars Steve McQueen & James Coburn would serve among the pallbearers) as well as a mountain of conspiracy theories.  The official cause of death for Lee is what is known in Britain (remember, Hong Kong was then part of Britain) as "death by misadventure" which insinuates that it's an accidental death caused by a risk taken by the deceased.  In this case, it was taking a medication that, in combination with the cerebral edema that Lee already knew he had, caused his brain to swell, killing him quickly.

This is probably what happened, but that doesn't mean that the public, juxtaposing the seemingly banal death with a man they saw look basically immortal onscreen, didn't want to make up new ideas.  They range from other medical theories, one seemingly compelling one indicating it was heat stroke (Lee had recently had his sweat glands removed because they didn't look attractive onscreen) or an undiagnosed case of epilepsy.  Some have said that he may have had a bad reaction to cannabis, but that was addressed by his physicians at the time, and they said that was not possible.

But the most commonly discussed conspiracy theory about Lee is that he was murdered.  There is no concrete evidence of this, but the suspects in the potential crime run the gamut from the Hong Kong triads (killing him for refusing to pay them off or for exposing martial arts secrets) to accusations he was killed by a jilted lover (he passed away in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei, whom some have alleged he was having an affair with at the time) to the truly insane theory that he was killed in a martial arts fight by a rival martial artist using the move "dim mak" (aka the touch of death).  I will own, on a personal level, that none of these make sense as a theory, and all of them (quite frankly) feel, charitably, far-fetched.  But they are a part of Lee's legacy as a celebrity, and to ignore them felt irresponsible, particularly given that if you look at Lee's post-death existence, mysterious tragedy would become something of a trend as we'll discuss later today.

The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Film: The Way of the Dragon (1972)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Tony Liu, Chuck Norris

Director: Bruce Lee

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said when I kicked off this month, trying to get a gage on Bruce Lee's stardom is really challenging.  After Lee's time in the United States making The Green Hornet, his presence in the United States, specifically, is extremely challenging to timeline.  This is best-evidenced by The Way of the Dragon, which was a massive hit in 1972, at the time becoming the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, and becoming a behemoth at the US box office, making $5 million during its initial run and at one point becoming the number one movie in America.  By the spring of 1973, Bruce Lee was a major Hollywood box office star, at this point approaching actors like Brigitte Bardot & Sophia Loren in the previous decade as the rare actor who could open a subtitled film in the United States.  His next few films would be highly anticipated, and they would indeed make a lot of money in the US...but they would happen after Lee's death.  Bruce Lee would die just seven months after the lauded release of The Way of the Dragon.

(Spoilers Ahead) This makes The Way of the Dragon, the only film Lee made during his lifetime that he had complete creative control over, a very special film in his filmography, and I will note right off of the bat that it reads as quite distinctive.  The movie is about Tang Lung (Lee) a young martial artist who comes to Rome and struggles to acclimate to the new culture, feeling less cosmopolitan than his frequent companion Chen (Miao), a weirdly beautiful woman who, for all intents-and-purposes, is not Tang Lung's love interest; there is little indication, other than a mild flirtation toward the end, than what would've been assumed from a female lead in an action film in this era (i.e. she's there to fall in love with the hero) is part of The Way of the Dragon, and this is partially because, as we see as the film progresses with Tang Lung's connection to a restaurant that a mob boss is trying to take over, he's meant to be a loner, someone who cannot handle this modern world and must walk the earth solo.

This sounds better than what it is, mostly because The Way of the Dragon is (tonally) a bizarre movie.  Part of this is trying to parcel through an over fifty-year-old film, one that wasn't originally in English, but one that has a very distinctive set of humor.  The first twenty minutes it's important to know that Tang Lung is something of a country bumpkin (which I didn't catch at first...I just thought he was odd), but even with that context, the fact that action legend Bruce Lee's only full directorial effort includes multiple (I think it happens three, possibly four times) moments of him insinuating that he needs to defecate because he ate an aggressive amount of soup at an airport restaurant, is as strange as it sounds.

The movie doesn't work because of these shifts, and a lot of bizarre plot twists that feel like the script was being written as the movie was being made, but it does include a truly incredible action sequence at the end of the picture.  In 1972, Chuck Norris (who would go on to actual Hollywood fame with the success of Walker, Texas Ranger and then meme infamy for decades to come afterward) was best-known as a karate world champion, which would spark debate (that Norris would occasionally prod, despite a friendship with Lee) in the years that followed over whether or not Lee would've defeated Norris in an actual fight...in the film he kills him, in a one-on-one battle in the actual Colosseum (yes, you read that right...Lee managed to bribe his way into having one of the most legendary battles in the history of martial arts films in the actual fighting arena of ancient Romans).  This scene is stupendous...it's just that the rest of the film doesn't live up to it, insisting on humor & oftentimes soap opera-esque approaches when really...all you need is two action stars duking it out to the death in the most famous places on Earth.

Fist of Fury (1972)

Film: Fist of Fury (1972)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Nora Miao, Chikara Hasimotot

Director: Lo Wei

Oscar History: No nominations

Saturdays with the Stars: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I apologize I missed last week (June is one of the few months of the year that Minnesotans actually leave their houses as it's neither too hot nor too cold, so I've been busy), but know that in the coming two Saturday's I will find a way to make up for it and get us all four of our movies this month.  Bruce Lee's filmography is odd, because while it is filled with a number of notable action films, they were released in rapid succession given his death at such a young age (only 32) and many of them were released posthumously, at least in the United States.  Also, more so than even Errol Flynn earlier this year, Lee's celebrity history extends well past his death, and so there's a lot more to tell after it.  We'll focus today, with one of his earliest films, Fist of Fury, by talking about his brief foray into Hollywood prior to finding proper success in Hong Kong.  First, though, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fist of Fury is a story of two competing dojos, one Japanese and one Chinese, the latter now led by Chen (Lee) after the recent death of his teacher Huo Yuanjia.  The film follows the two as the fighting escalates, frequently along racial lines (there is a shocking amount of really racist language from the Japanese characters in the film toward the Chinese characters, though given that this film was made predominantly by Chinese filmmakers, it's hard not to feel like both directions are getting a pretty rough cut here).  The movie itself, I'm going to be honest, is pretty repetitive after this, with increasingly violent altercations between both sides as Chen seeks vengeance on behalf of his fallen master, as well as against the men responsible for his master's death.

The movie itself isn't good-the scripting, dubbing, and other performances in it are really rough and bordering on one-dimensional (I tried to find this film without it dubbed, but I couldn't...and given that's how most American audiences experienced this initially, I figured at least one of his films needed to be viewed this way).  But Bruce Lee...there's something there.  Strikingly handsome in a way I honestly wasn't expecting (it's worth remembering that Lee was quite young and in incredible physical shape when he made these movies, and so he looks good...you get why he became something of a sex symbol in the 1970's), he commands the screen with an almost magnetic sternness, which (while not great acting) definitely has a movie star quality that you can't look away from.  My worry headed into this month was that I was going to get a lot of movies with sensational action scenes but little decent plot...but I didn't count on Lee being this watchable.  I'm curious as we move closer to his death (and the ensuing health issues) if that will grow or change his style, but I could easily watch three more movies of this type of performance.

All-in-all, it's hard not to wonder why Lee didn't do better with this kind of pull in the United States.  Lee had largely given up his initial goals of becoming a movie star when he began teaching martial arts in Oakland in the mid-1960's, but a chance meeting with TV producer William Dozier (at the time riding a wave of success in the wake of the Adam West-Batman) led him to be cast as Kato in The Green Hornet, a show that only lasted one season but has taken on a cult status in the years that followed, and would remain the most important work that Lee would make while in Hollywood.  Lee would work behind the scenes on a handful of studio films, including The Wrecking Crew which we watched a few years back for our month on Nancy Kwan, and even have a bit part in the James Garner noir Marlowe (and depending on whom you believe, he had a hand in creating the TV series Kung Fu, and auditioned for the role that would make David Carradine a leading man), but by-and-large The Green Hornet was really the only Hollywood property where he had a chance at traditional fame in America.  It wasn't until his martial arts films, though, that Lee would do what he was born to do: star in movies, and even become a success at the US box office.