Starring: Joe Don
Baker, Elizabeth Ashley, Jim Kelly, Roy Chiao, Burgess Meredith, Tony Lee
Man-Wiu, Si Ming, Ann Sothern, Richard Ng
Director: Robert Clouse
Action Directors: Jim Kelly, Pat
Johnson
I would have liked to have been present for the studio meetings that Fred Weintraub and Robert Clause attended following the release of Enter the Dragon. For one, their film was a big hit in the West (and probably some parts of the East) and studios, always wanting the green, would inevitably want them to try to copy that success. But at the same time, their lead actor never lived to see that film's success and I'm pretty sure that making a sequel starring only John Saxon was quickly discarded. Or was it? I really do not know, but would like to. Did they consider looking for another Asian martial arts actor, or David Carradine, to make a sequel? Was a sequel even considered? Did American studios ever consider making their own Brucesploitation film? It was obvious that there was a market for martial arts movies. What proposals were made to further milk this niche?
As I don't know what ideas were tossed around, I have to content myself with discussing what actually came to fruition. The firstfruits of Enter the Dragon's success, at least in the West, was most likely Black Belt Jones, released in March of 1974. It reunited director Robert Clouse and producer Fred Weintraub with Jim Kelly, now in a starring role, in a martial arts entry in the then-popular Blaxploitation genre. A few months later, Clouse and Weintraub released what seemed to be a spiritual follow-up to Enter the Dragon, but failed so miserably in the final product--and financially as well--that I cannot help but wonder what was going through these mens' heads as they were making it.
Golden Needles opens
with a voiceover informing us that during the Song Dynasty, someone made a
golden statue that detailed which acupuncture points might literally restore
youth and sexual vigor. We then move to Hong Kong, where an acupuncture
specialist is attending to an aged client (Hao Li-Jen, the old man from ETD), who has procured the statue and
the needles therein. The process works, and the feeble old man is now ready to
bed the four hot women surrounding him (a few of them I recognized as
prostitutes from ETD). But
before he can get his fivesome on, the man, women and doctor are immolated by a
bunch of guys armed with flamethrowers, who make off with the statue. The
killers are the flunkies of crime boss Lin To (Roy Chiao, the abbot from the
aforementioned film). Lin To wants the statue to sell to an aging American
crime boss, Waters, played by Burgess Meredith.
Waters's middle man in the operation is a woman named Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley, probably best known for her role in The Carpetbaggars). Felicity, however, has some sizable debts to pay off, and so she tries to finagle a high selling price from Lin To (look fast for Richard Ng in an English-speaking role as Lin To's interpretor in these scenes), get the money from Waters, and then *steal* the statue so she can keep the larger portion of the proceeds. To that end, she employs the services of an American expat named Danny Mason (Joe Don Baker, hot off the success of Walking Tall). The plan is that Danny will steal the statue, his business partner Kwan (Tony Lee Wan-Miu, of The Golden Knight and Heaven Sword and Dragon Sword, part 2) will hide the statue in a clay pot full of oil, and then will send it to Los Angeles. While the initial theft goes without incident, soon there is treachery and backstabbing afoot, and a lot of people are going to die before everything gets settled.
I wonder whose idea it was to take a story idea that would be fit for a second-rate Italian 007 imitation and play it with the utmost of seriousness. And whose idea was it to film this in an "exotic" place while covering the cameras with a thin layer of grime as was the norm in 1970s police dramas? A big part of the problem is that the film looks boring, when it actually isn't being boring. For the most part, the statue and needles are little more than a McGuffin, something to spur our characters into action. Save a brief moment at the beginning, we never get to see the effects of the needles. But maybe it is for the best, as I do not think that anybody was clammering for a prolonged love scene involving either Burgess Meredith or Hao Li-Jen. I'm sure that the PG-rating was to appeal to the youngsters who were not able to watch Enter the Dragon, but then why make a PG action film and forget to put kung fu in it? Perhaps had they gone the "R" route and filled it with sex and violence, it would've been more memorable.
While I can understanding hiring Joe Don Baker for an action film, I cannot understand hiring Joe Don Baker for a martial arts film. I wonder if the filmmakers had approached John Saxon first, as the Danny Mason character is established at not being very good at gambling. That's definitely a Roper quality, and I can easily see Roper staying in Hong Kong after the events of Enter the Dragon since there would only be loan sharks for him to come home to. While Joe Don Baker would be a good for a backwoods redneck action opus or maybe even a police thriller, audiences do not want to see a burly white guy with no martial arts skills tearing a** around Hong Kong. I want elaborate handwork and crazy kicks, not Joe Don Baker throwing people through windows, which is the man's modus operandi. I could only hope that the people who made this had enough forethought to *try* to hire the Caucasian actors who had studied under Bruce Lee before turning to Mr. Baker.
So if Joe Don Baker was miscast, Jim Kelly is just wasted in what amounts to a glorified cameo. Kelly plays an old buddy of Danny Mason from his 'Nam days, much like Williams and Roper in ETD. The second act is set in Los Angeles, and Kelly shows up to lead Joe Don Baker around to find out where the clay pot was sent to. He gets into one fight...ONE MEASLY FIGHT...and then disappears from the film. That means that once the action moves back to Hong Kong, Joe Don Baker is mostly on his own, leading to a climatic foot chase followed by a climatic defenstration, as opposed to a climatic fight, which would have been the smart way to finish this film. You could have given the final fight to Si Ming (Henry Yu's girlfriend in Ninja Heat), who plays a Chinese police officer, and the audiences would have been content at the martial arts on display. But these nincompoops gave us nothing.
There are a few fight scenes scattered throughout the film, although there's nothing special. As I said, Joe Don Baker's fighting style is mainly based around him grabbing someone and throwing him through the nearest window. There is a brief fight at a fitness center involving Si Ming, Jim Kelly and Burgess Meredith's thugs. Jim Kelly's part, probably choreographed by himself, is obscured by too many close-ups and the editor switching over to scenes of people fleeing the building, as opposed to focusing on Kelly kicking butt, which is what we want to see. Si Ming gets a brief fight or two. She probably was not a trained martial artist, so she does some basic basher moves. All of the fights are spoiled by bad camerawork that closes in too much on the actors without letting us see what is happening. That was annoying in Enter the Dragon, but Bruce's athleticism was enough to overcome it. It flat out ruins the action here. And thus ends my write-up about the spiritual follow-up to Enter the Dragon, one of the most iconic martial arts films of all time, that forgot to give us the martial arts. It is no wonder that less than ten people went to watch it when it came out in Hong Kong the following year.
No comments:
Post a Comment