Saturday, July 20, 2013

40th Anniversary of Bruce Lee & Enter the Dragon

You could say America's love affair with the martial arts began in July of 1973.

That was the year Bruce Lee's standard-setting martial arts film Enter the Dragon premiered to rave reviews and fascinated American audiences. Bryan Enk of Yahoo Movies offers an engaging look back at the film with history, insight, and commentary from Bruce Lee's wife Linda Lee Cadwell. I was only three years old when Bruce Lee entered the American movie lexicon as a true movie star, so like many Bruce Lee fans, I came to the story later through a variety of Bruce Lee bio-pics and reading Lee's groundbreaking martial arts book - about a style of kung fu he created and refined - The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. It takes a pretty significant and deep mind-body connection to create a martial art - a skill set that generally developed over centuries.

For martial arts fans, it's certainly worth looking back at the legacy of arguably martial arts' greatest icon. Certainly, reading Lee's book is a great place to start. And, of course, Hollywood did produce what it considers to be the definitive biography - Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story. However, there are may other great sources of information, and for the true fan, it's worth checking out a wide variety of films about the star. The story of Bruce Lee  is full of myth and legend. I can even remember believing as a kid that Bruce Lee would return on the tenth or twentieth anniversary of his death because he had not died, but retreated from society to deal with supernatural issues we could only marvel at.

While I'm certain now that Bruce is no longer with us - and not coming back - it's always worth looking back on one of the greatest cultural icons of the twentieth century.


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