Cool is All You Need.

I don't remember the first time I watched “Enter the Dragon”. I don't remember the first time I saw Bruce Lee or Jim Kelly either. These things exist in my mind as if they always existed, as if I had no choice over the amount of real estate they occupy on my head. I do however remember the feeling of first seeing each one, and in this particular case, in this particular month I want to celebrate that feeling about Jim Kelly, and more to the point Jim in Enter the Dragon, without reserve one of my favorite performances of all time. It is a role so dripped in the luminosity of blackness, and a certain type of black cool that would find its later iterations in a Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, and Will Smith, (“I make this look good”) I don't think one can help but luxuriate on its ever present impact and legacy. What I find so impressive about that qualifier for me, is that I find Kelly’s actual acting technique ( if we can call to that) to be merely serviceable if not altogether underwhelming. I have a little giggle to myself as I say that, because it bolsters and corroborates his character “Williams” own words in the films text. When “Mr. Han” appraises his fighting style as “Unorthodox”, Williams dry retort is “but effective”. Touche, because in and out of text it serves as maybe the most potent example I can recall of the amendatory, sanctifying power of being the coolest m*****f***er on the planet.

Kelly cut an incredibly good looking figure. His body type was very similar to Bruce Lee’s, nearly lanky, but athletic. Detailedly chiseled, with a perfectly rotund afro as a cap that vice gripped a gaunt face. Thick eyebrows over soft eyes, cheekbones cut with a protractor, held in their parenthetical space an effervescent smile. Kelly was to say the least easy on the eyes, but interestingly enough due in part to what he lacked as an actor, and in this case what he possessed as an actor - those looks became an afterthought. Kelly's brilliance in this film isn't just relegated to one or two canonical scenes. The quality of his presence, the silk-laden assurity of his own cool is present from the opening credits. As they flash we get various vignettes of Kelly in various actions or non action. Kelly just standing as a low angle shot captures his essence upon arrival in Hong Kong. Kelly breezily crossing the street, or sitting in a boat, are all opening shots across the bow as to what will become unavoidably apparent in short time. His flat, laconic line readings of lines like “Ghettos are the same all over the world..they stink”- end up giving the text an elegant sense of blue collar sagacity. The sounds that came from his mouth as he exhaled while fighting were not the iconic birdsongs of Bruce Lee, but something more gutteral and abrasive -“Oooh Oyyy!”. His attitude was meant to place him in that long history of cinematic black athletes who are meant to be too cocky for their own good, from Apollo Creed to Willie Beamon, but by way of Kelly’s own charms it ended up being what allowed Kelly to set himself apart in a film devoted to its megawatt star.

Time after time when the film seeks to relegate Kelly to a blowhard triviality, he makes himself instead an arresting presence. About a quarter of the way through the movie Williams and the others are sent a bevy of the islands sex workers (probably more like slaves as it is later revealed) as a gift from Han, the islands benefactor and the holder of the tournament Williams has entered. Williams instead of just choosing one ends up choosing three, and then replies that if he left anyone out that they should understand because “it's been a long day”. In the context of the film this is meant to be a pre-emptive foreshadow as to exactly the trait that gets Williams into trouble..his arrogance. Outside the context of the film it is a affirmation of the long-standing trope of the black man as especially virile, a fetishization of his supposed special sexual proclivity as a devourer, and a bit of a mongrel. Kelly's natural equanimity and agacerie, don't subvert, but they do undermine the intentions of the text - he's just having too much fun with it to take the label seriously, it glides off him like so much water off a raincoat. By any tangible metric John Saxon's Roper is meant to be the second to Bruce Lee's first; the rakish rogue with just enough sense to know his place. His is an interesting and still rather cool role in this inverse of hierarchal status on film and even still he would end up an afterthought to Jim Kelly’s entrancing Williams. The massive appeal of a black man who used his training to train others in his community in self-defense against all threats foreign and domestic, (something akin to Black Panthers) his willingness to fight and beat the brakes off of police, and Kelly's own majestic sense of self evident cool proved too much for poor Saxon and his agent (especially in the black community) who reportedly had their fates in the film switched due to Saxon's own rising star. Even with his expeditious demise, Williams - and Kelly by association cemented his legacy in that very death.

After all, it may have been Williams who was sentenced to death, but it was us the audience who received his last meal, in those last moments before Williams is unceremoniously killed off screen Kelly would leave us with a flurry of endlessly quotable all-time line readings and an underrated fight scene. I'd like to imagine that contemporarily theater-goers were a bit caught off guard by Williams untimely death, which was not announced in the ways in which many films tend to do. Williams was randomly called to Hans office and we generally understand what he’s going to be called up there for, but that it will result in his death is something I gather we know now, rather than that was immediately expected. Either way, upon arrival and discovery of what it is he's been called up for Williams is in no mood to be cooperative. It could be said subtextually that in his particular office and position Han resembled too closely to Williams the police, and considering that long-standing relationship and the black communities concrete position on snitching, Williams found Han to be an immediately offensive character. All that before we get to the fact that the setup to the actual question is Han casting aspersions on Williams fighting ability. This barrage of personal insults leads us in order to Kelly's barrage of celebrated ripostes. “Suddenly I'd like to leave your Island”. “Bull***t Mr Han Man! (the a vowel dragged into it's own pool of audacity to taste of it) and of course “Man, you come right out of a comic book!”. Each word of that sentence is given a beat, a rhythm, that propelled it into our collective memory accompanied by Kelly’s uber fashionable and languid mode of verbal transportation. Before any of those lines are delivered Kelly delivers the biggest punch, the unforgettable last laugh. Not the best line just the one that cements his legend; When Han proposes to offer a subliminal shot masked as concern -”We are all ready to win, just as we are born knowing only life. It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for.” - Williams can barely hold his excitement to reply quite rapidly -“I don't even waste my time with it”. The words are delivered almost in song, eyebrows tossed in the air like so much laundry just before he pauses to add -“When it comes, (his body sort of sashays reinforcing his swagger) I won't even notice”. Han himself, allows his head to glide back into his chair replete with curiosity, not just in the “why” of it, but in the “Where” - as in “where did we find this one?”. Kelly not finished by a longshot gives the most unexpected and borderline hilarious answer; his confidence is not based in his study, or his read of the situation, or in some wisdom about winning not being everything, but in his own belief in his good looks and his ability to look good doing anything! Here again we have a situation where the text is calling us into judgement of Williams. There aforementioned historical context here, a long-standing idea emanating from white society (who typically could not beat us in sport) that black athletes and to some extent athletes or fighters of color were far more concerned with showing off, than being skilled. Once again Kelly undermines the intent to eternal effect. Williams does die, and more importantly and legendarily his premonition was correct; he was too busy looking good, for any of us to be concerned with it. So good in fact he ascended beyond all logic into the annuls of cinematic iconography.