Entertain the Dragon
Enter the Dragon has numerous flaws. The first flaw is that it would have made more sense for Williams to be sought for recruitment given that he is an outlaw for beating up corrupt policemen who are racist. Roper, by contrast, isn’t a wanted criminal for simply being in debt with gangsters. Perhaps Bruce Lee should have brought back Jim Kelly so that the Hong Kong version could have his character survive, and perhaps have John Saxon’s character killed by way of a stand-in. In the original cut, there was a scene where Mei Ling (Betty Chung) was talking about the unexplained disappearance of Williams. It would’ve been cool if, like The Untold Story, his body was instead being used to feed the old men in the cells.
As for deleted footage in general, Bruce’s death made the footage more valuable. Look at Tower of Death a.k.a. Game of Death II. If it wasn’t for that movie, we would’ve assumed that the deleted scenes were jettisoned like Bruce’s deleted scenes from his previous movies. You really have to question (second guess) what happened to Henry Wong’s ETD documentary footage. The second flaw is that, by film’s end, Bruce doesn’t have much dialogue. In fact, most of his dialogue was taken out for pacing reasons. I suspect that those scenes would’ve been left in if the spy was played by James Coburn (who was trained by Bruce). The third flaw is that Bruce’s character doesn’t practice what he preaches when he takes his eyes off Oharra as he bows. The fourth flaw is that he fights Oharra with anger, which goes against what he taught Lao.
The fifth flaw is that Han’s daughters (who are his bodyguards) don’t fight in the finale. If ETD had been a H.K. movie, Mei Ling alongside Lee and Roper would’ve fought them after chasing Han away from the outdoor arena. If Bruce had died during the making of the film, they would’ve filmed such a scene but under the condition that there are reshoots which would allow for Williams to only be held captive like Roper instead of being killed off. The sixth flaw is that Roper doesn’t get killed by Bolo, yet Williams gets killed by Han. The seventh flaw is that there were deleted scenes between Roper and Tania that could easily have replaced unnecessary scenes featuring Bruce, especially considering the commercial intentions of the U.S. producers.
Artistically, Tania’s deleted scenes would’ve made her final scene more touching. The scene where Oharra informs Lee about the uniform requirement is pointless when it’s pointed out in the next tournament scene. As for reminding the audiences of Lee’s vendetta against Oharra, we already have a flashback in Lee’s fight with him. Considering that most of Bruce’s philosophy scenes were done away with, they should’ve got rid of Lao’s tutorial since it has less relevance to the plot than Lee’s conversation with the Abbott which not only references Han, but is echoed in the finale. They removed Lee’s second dialogue scene with Mei Ling about Williams, but they left in the Parsons scene on the boat. The counter-intuitive editing is second to only Jackie Chan’s The Medallion in the martial arts genre.
The eighth and final flaw is that Bolo is a useless character in that he can’t be a bodyguard when you have Oharra acting as Han’s bodyguard for when he is outside his own island. Even though he has a muscular physique, Bolo is a gratuitous character who may as well have been there for sexual appeal. He’s supposed to be the executioner, but the main villain’s daughters would’ve been more effective in homicidally punishing his guards because of their number. The moral of the story would’ve been greater in that if you can’t defeat the daughters then how can you possibly put down the father. A similar statement was stated by Leung Kar-Yan’s character in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Legend of a Fighter. Like The Big Boss, the main character in Yuen’s film truly lets loose after his jade pendant is broken.
If Bob Wall hadn’t forced Bruce to cast him in The Way of the Dragon then Bolo Yeung (or Yeung Sze as he was known at the time) could’ve been Oharra. One of the questions that has been asked concerns Bolo being fought by Roper instead of Lee. In its current state, had Lee fought Bolo then Roper would have to fight Han because of Warner Brothers wanting to appease the prominently Caucasian audiences. Roper had to fight one of the two guys. A decision was made to not have him fight Han (a choice that made John Saxon realize that he wasn’t the star as fibbed by producer Fred Weintraub) because the quality of the martial arts action would’ve dipped considerably.
Muse on this for a momentous moment: a young musclebound man takes on a toned 32-year-old before a middle-aged everyman takes on an old guy. This harks back to a cardinal rule in martial arts cinema - the best fight has to be the final one. Look at The Matrix, Neo’s fights with Agent Smith are not up to the quality that was set forth when Morpheus had challenged Neo. As for ETD, the best one-on-one fight is the first one (a short challenge match featuring Sammo Hung). It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that one can say that Kam Kong would’ve been more imposing as a villain than Shih Kien (a.k.a. Shek Kin). I first saw Kam in Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, which sees Jackie Chan lampoon Bruce’s nunchaku gimmick. For a guy who was reluctant to be mimicking Bruce, Jackie certainly had no qualms about later parodying the nunchaku by using a corded mallet in Drunken Master.
Given that Bruce was more than happy for Enter the Dragon to no longer be the English title of The Way of the Dragon, perhaps The Game of Death would have been a better title for Enter the Dragon given the tournament theme. That way, the pagoda movie would have the other title since Bruce Lee was literally entering a pagoda where one of the floors is called the temple of the dragon (i.e. the fourth floor has a guardian whose wall features a carving of a dragon). Fred Weintraub would have been relieved since he thought that Enter the Dragon sounded like it could be a fantasy movie for kids. It’s an indicator of how things could (or maybe should) have been that the July 2013 issue of American Cinematographer has an article titled Tournament of Death.
Chuck Norris was originally offered Bob Wall’s role in Enter the Dragon. He didn’t want it because he already played a villain, despite the fact that he went on to play a villain in a H.K. movie called Slaughter in San Francisco (1974). Either Chuck was lied to about being the star, offered more money than what he was offered for Enter the Dragon or he was threatened to be in it by Lo Wei (the director who was a gangster). Regardless, Lo needed to gain lost face when Nora Miao dropped out of A Man Called Tiger to be in The Way of the Dragon. Now you can understand why his anger made her cry during the making of New Fist of Fury. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for Lo to make sure that Bruce could no longer cast Li Kun in The Way of the Dragon. Losing one great asset but gaining two good assets means that severance pay in H.K. is more to do with quality than quantity (otherwise Bruce would have just lost one asset).
