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I work in Film. I live in Martial Arts. I thrive in Imagination.

WHY I LIKE THIS VIDEO: Kurosawa was a master filmmaker, relying on image to convey his emotions. How he captures emotions with this imagery is conceptually brilliant. I could watch this video a hundred times and always learn more.

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Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon (1973)

November 02, 20231 min read

I had the opportunity to meet Bob Wall when he came to our dojo for a benefit for Frank Trejo. Bob Wall plays "O'Hara" in "Enter the Dragon". He had great stories to tell. Down below a podcast interviewing Bob Wall.

Say “kung fu movies,” and what’s the first image that comes to mind? A shirtless Bruce Lee, his chest scarred and his hands in a fighting position. Having done time in TV as the Green Hornet’s sidekick, the Chinese-American star went east in the early 1970s to star in a series of movies for the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest. The results — The Big Boss (1971) and Fists of Fury (1972) — made him a household name all across Asia. Hollywood wanted to lure the continent’s biggest star back, so a story about an undercover agent infiltrating a nefarious villain’s fighting tournament was ginned up for him. The rest is history. Enter the Dragon would cement Lee’s legacy as something close to a real-life superhero, and to see the man plow through dozens of men in a flurry of fists, feet, staffs and nunchucks is to understand how he was singlehandedly able to turn martial arts into a global phenomenon. The final battle, in which Lee fights his metal-clawed nemesis in a hall of mirrors, is an all-time banger.

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Michael Mandaville

Michael is a writer, filmmaker and dedicated World War II historian who studies martial arts, action films and is learning more about VFX every single darn day. Oh and a Scholar Warrior

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