Shaft (1971) and Enter the Dragon (1973) are in their own way as important as The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) to the history of cinema. Remove Shaft and we might never have had blaxploitation and the more recent responses to it from the likes of Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and the Hughes brothers. Remove Enter the Dragon and the martial arts movie may well have developed in a very different way.
With Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft was the first movie to present a black hero in the same way as white heroes had been for decades. Even Sidney Poiter's Virgil Tibbs character in In the Heat of the Night (1967) and its sequels wasn't accorded all the privileges of his white counterparts - he wasn't allowed to be smart, tough and sexy. Shaft and Sweetback were. But there are important differences the two heroes. Shaft is essentially a good guy. He's a black, early 70s version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. (This was of course before Chinatown (1974) had exposed the shabby reality of the myth of the private detective.) While the police are a hindrance to Shaft's investigations, ultimately he - and the audience - knows that they're all on the side of right and justice whatever the differences in the colour of their skin. If the cops and white society are guilty of anything it's ignorant prejudice. Sweetback is much more of the anti-hero. Full of righteous rage he's a pimp who decides he's had enough ill treatment at the hands of "the man". The cops and white society are rotten to the core with racism. Or compare some respective slogans from the two films - Shaft's "hotter than Bond, cooler than Bullitt" and "who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks" and Sweetback's "rated X by an all white jury" and "Watch out. A bad ass nigger is coming back to collect some dues."
Future movies - Superfly, Black Caesar (both 1972), Detroit 9,000, Hell up in Harlem (both 1973) and The Candy Tangerine Man (1975), to name but a few - would draw equally from both sources. As most were essentially white productions made for a black audience (hence the blaxploitation tag) they tended to lack the fierce politics of the independently produced Sweetback. But they did favour its anti-hero over the whiter-than-white black hero (if you see what I mean) of Shaft. Yet the overall style of Shaft was more in evidence. With its avant-garde borrowings Sweetback can be a tedious film to watch - interminable montages of Sweetback on the run, sometimes double-exposed, while the soulful soundtrack keeps on repeating the same refrain of how they broke his father, they broke his brother etc. Shaft, however, provided a consistently entertaining template - plenty of action, a wah-wah soaked funk soundtrack and some seriously cool styles on display.
If Shaft made an invaluable contribution to the establishment of a genre, the importance of Enter the Dragon and its star Bruce Lee was in changing the course of an already existing genre.
Martial arts films had been around in eastern cinema for years BL (before Lee). But these BL films rarely made it to the west. They tended to have historical settings and Shaolin-based plots. Lee's films, meanwhile, showcased his own spectacular jeet kune do or "way of the intercepting fist" fighting style in contemporary settings. So, other than the incredible action sequences there's not that much in common thematically or stylistically between, say, Lee's first feature The Big Boss (1971) and King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1969): One is a cheapskate gangster tale, the other a lavish fantasy spectacular with Buddhist pretensions.
Like blaxploitation martial arts films offered Hollywood a way of making big profits from small investments. Having had success with the imported King Boxer (1972) Warner Brothers made a deal with Raymond Chow, head of the Hong Kong studio Lee worked for. The result, Enter the Dragon, has even less in common with the traditional martial arts films than Lee's previous outings.
In The Big Boss, Fists of Fury (1971) and The Way of the Dragon (1972) - Lee had at played a fairly conventional character type, the little guy who defends the oppressed with his martial arts powers. In Enter the Dragon he played more of a James Bond type character. An agent of the authorities, he's charged with bringing the criminal mastermind Han to justice. It won't be easy as Han is well guarded in his secret island base, but the fact that Han is hosting a martial arts tournament gives Lee the chance to infiltrate. While Lee has a personal motive for the mission as well - Han's henchman was responsible for the death of Lee's sister when she committed suicide rather than submit to him - you get the feeling that this is secondary. In a more traditional martial arts film it would have been primary.
Interestingly, then, it's the black martial artist, Williams, who plays the traditional defender of the oppressed type character in Enter the Dragon - early in the film he beats up some racist cops and in the Hong Kong slums comments sadly that "Ghettos are alike all over - they stink."
Whatever its merits vis-à-vis the earlier martial arts films the huge success of Enter the Dragon combined with the tragic death of Bruce Lee shortly afterwards ensured that it came to define the genre. Throughout the 1970s a martial arts movie meant a Bruce Lee clone in dumb all-action movie. Since then only Jackie Chan has succeeded in establishing a new formula, that of the martial arts comedy.
I'll end by making a couple of recommendations for those with an appetite for bad cinema. As should be obvious from Lalo Schifrin's funky score and Williams's Afro in Enter the Dragon blaxploitation and martial arts go well together. Track down The Human Tornado (1976) and Black Dragon Revenges the Death of Bruce Lee (1975). In the former overweight black comedian Rudy Ray Moore displays his inept, speeded up, martial arts, while in the latter black martial artist Ron Van Cliff tracks down those supposedly responsible for Lee's death.
Programme note by Keith H. Brown
October 1998