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.