Bruce Lee was determined to conquer Hollywood, and he had the perfect cinematic vehicle to do so. It was called Operación Dragón, contained some of the most spectacular action scenes ever filmed, tied in with the spirit and popular hits of its time on several levels, and was supported by Warner Bros. And the film was a huge success: it managed to raise $400 million (more than $2,000 million at current inflation) for a budget that didn’t even reach $1 million. But Lee didn’t live to see it: On July 20, 1973, the most famous fighter in cinema history and the icon par excellence of neighborhood theaters died prematurely at the age of 32 as a result of a stroke. Excitement about the star’s commercial landing in the United States, where the film had long been widely promoted – including through free karate classes to encourage public interest in the martial arts – grew on the day of his premiere of a phenomenon. on August 19, less than a month after the protagonist’s death and just 50 years ago.
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Born in California in 1940, the actor has been working for some time to bring his vision of martial arts cinema to the North American industry. He had his first breakthrough in the series The Green Hornet (1966), in which he played Kato, the hero’s pioneering driver who possesses great sword fighting skills. But he strove for more. In the midst of the hippie era, Bruce Lee’s philosophy, known as Jeet Kune Do (‘the way of the intercepting fist’ in Spanish, its rhetoric exemplified in the famous speech ‘Be water, my friend’), had seduced many Hollywood figures who considered him a guru, including Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Roman Polanski with his hapless wife Sharon Tate, or LA Lakers player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. However, beyond discovering psychedelics and drugs with them, Lee could not find funding for his complex projects that combined kung fu combat and spirituality. In Hong Kong, the artist was able to develop his film concept with full control over the choreography and the way it was performed, even rehearsing directing one of his feature films, The Furor of the Dragon (1972). .
Bruce Lee’s character counts on the man with the scar (actor Robert Wall), the villain’s main henchman and responsible for his sister’s death. Sunset Boulevard (Corbis via Getty Images)
The essayist and film historian Adrián Sánchez collects all of this in Operación Dragón. The 50th Anniversary Book (Notorious Editions), a hardcover volume released this summer, lavish in photographs and packed with uniqueness of an iconic, hugely influential film that changed martial arts cinema forever. “Bruce Lee comes to radically renew what has been done. Up until the early 1970s, wuxia, period films featuring gunfights, were dominant. It provokes a new era in which melee combat becomes the main thing,” he tells Icon Sánchez. In the book, the author analyzes the wealth of different elements that shaped the identity of a B-series breath proposal imitating the James Bond films, with funk music by the Argentinean Lalo Schifrin and the assimilation of elements of the so-called blaxploitation, the film movement of the African-American Community that just adopted Hong Kong kung fu as a form of expression.
Lee, who had incorporated Chinese nationalism in titles like Oriental Fury (1972) to silence all his skeptics in Southeast Asia, believed that the strategy to confront white hegemony in Hollywood was through the Alliance, which in her own way formed the backbone of the film by Robert Clouse. “In the origin there was already the premise of uniting different races and that the whites [John Saxon] Don’t be the hero, be the squire. It was a time when studios realized the huge audience represented by black audiences. “The Red Nights of Harlem” dates from 1971 and is already a film that moves not on the fringes but in a higher majority sphere,” explains the author. “That’s what Operation Dragon is aiming for, hence the appearance of Jim Kelly, who has a lot of the coolest scenes. He wasn’t even an actor, he was an athlete, and that made him a bit of a star in martial arts blaxploitation.
Destroy the image of the enemy
The plot of Operación Dragón shared the theme of infiltrated spies with 007. Bruce Lee plays a young Shaolin recruited by British intelligence to take part in the fighting tournament that a drug lord organizes on his private island to hire the best thugs. The boss in question, Han (played by Chinese martial artist Shih Kien), who has a prosthetic hand, is also a traitor to the temple the protagonist belongs to, and as if that wasn’t enough, his main henchman ended his life. his sister. Structured by the different fights of the competition, a model that would later inspire classics of the subgenre like Bloody Contact (1988) or Kickboxer (1989), the film culminated in an impressive confrontation between hero and villain in a mirror maze with Han instead of his incomplete member he put on a blade prosthesis.
Entertainment Dragon’s villain, Han (actor Shih Kien), uses a prosthetic bladed hand in his fight with Bruce Lee. Sunset Boulevard (Corbis via Getty Images)
“It’s the perfect synthesis of philosophical ideas, cinematic materialization and pure visual spectacle,” says Adrián Sánchez. “There is an abolition of reality, an absolute hyperstylization where Bruce Lee’s movements are multiplied. He kicks, and the kick multiplies meter by meter, as if the punch and the leap were being performed in different places, as if moving energies.” Although for the historian, the best thing Bruce Lee ever filmed was the 40 minutes of his unfinished playing with death, the completion of “his idea of a philosophical martial arts cinema”, he succeeded in Operación Dragón in translating into images the central teaching with which the film began: the denial of the ego and the destruction of the enemy through the destruction of the image, since the enemy “has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true feelings”.
The sequence, the result of an amazing visual trick that involved hiding the camera in another mirror cube, was shot under Lee’s control, who had full responsibility for the action scenes. The thoroughness and performance clarity the actor demanded in the visual grammar of the fights had led to conflicts with some of his superiors in Hong Kong, such as Wu Chia-Hsiang, the sacked co-director of Karate to the Death in Bangkok (1971) . In fact, once he was able to direct his own fights, he became a compulsive self-entitlement in his quest for excellence and the correct embodiment of hand-to-hand combat: he even prevented the European and United States release of El Furor del Dragon, a classic today, thanks to the transcendental confrontation between Lee and Chuck Norris in the Coliseum in Rome for not being satisfied enough.
Adrián Sánchez believes that this enormous claim to self was instrumental in the tragic and abrupt end of Lee, now addicted to a cocktail of drugs (between prescription and illegal) that had already warned him during filming of Operación Dragón: “His personal discipline was standing at odds with the lifestyle of a 1970s superstar. That collision didn’t seem to be very sustained over time.” Although it is only possible to speculate as to what would have become of the fighter in Hollywood had he survived the film and had the opportunity to expand his body of work, Sánchez has reservations about the eventual success of his later career. “Surely he would have had the TV series he had been chasing for so long, maybe a sequel to Operación Dragón… But you have to remember that even after the film’s absolutely extraordinary success… “Big studios still haven’t made martial arts films.” , the author explains. “It’s hard to believe that Operación Dragón would have become such a huge cultural phenomenon without his death. When he dies, he transcends legend and enters the iconographic space of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, the people who are above the stars.”
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