Customer Reviews

Enter the Dragon

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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I once read where Bruce Lee said he liked to workout to the soundtrack of "Mission Impossible," and that was the reason why he thought of and hired Lalo Shiffrin to score "Enter The Dragon." I admit I have somewhat a bias for shiffrin's work, but in this case "Enter The Dragon" is an even better score than "Mission Impossible." In fact I'll go even further and say it is on my list as one of the best soundtracks ever written. There is tension and emotion in this score which accurately reflect the content and characters in the movie. Kudos!

What works so strikingly well about Lalo Schifrin's Enter The Dragon soundtrack is how it never falls into cleches.


In 1973 Schifrin was one of the most prolific film scorers in the world. He had done such for Bullitt and Dirty Harry masterpieces of driving jazz funk and orchestral nuance--the type of music that comes to mind when recalling 1970s soundtracks.

Enter The Dragon is no detective movie, but Schifrin is the same genius: the flutes, wha wha's and light and shade cymbals that compose much of this score are similar to those the master had been using in his scores since around 1968. And each time it works. And works effectively

When Schifrin does work the Asian angle with the music--not as often as you may think--he does so tastefully and in ways not obvious. Listen to how he uses extended cymbal resonance, the big but shimmering exquisitely detailed percussion. If music were food, Schifrin would be a top chef--taking known styles and mixing their ingredients in new ways, with different spices.

This FunkJazzAsian dish is amazing, and essential

This Collector's Choice Music CD soundtrack for Lalo Schifrin's music score to Enter the Dragon is superb. Schifrin is a good musician; his score gave a big, sweeping, epic feel to a US/Hong Kong produced kung fu movie made on a limited budget of approximately $700,000. Schifrin is the same guy who wrote the Mission: Impossible theme music, he wrote an underrated score for The Concorde: Airport '79, he scored the Rush Hour action comedies starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, among other works. Schifrin is from Argentina, I think.
Most Hong Kong movies, especially kung fu movies, use a lot of stock music cues from a library of music. You may hear stock music cues from Superman, Live and Let Die, Shaft, Once Upon a Time in the West, Rambo, Star Trek The Motion Picture, etc. in Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest produced movies starring Wang Yu, Bruce Li(a Bruce Lee imitator), Li Ching, Ti Lung, Dragon Lee, Gordon Liu, etc. It's nice to hear a good, original music score in a Hong Kong movie. Even with its flaws, Enter the Dragon is a seminal, martial arts movie classic. Even though it did well commercially throughout most of the world, Chor Yuen's The House of 72 Tenants outgrossed Enter the Dragon in 1973 at the Hong Kong box offices. Years later, Lalo Schifrin wrote an underrated music score for Jackie Chan's first Hollywood film, The Big Brawl/Battle Creek Brawl. I like the Enter the Dragon score, even if it sounds too "Western" and too
"70's ish" by today's standards.

The CD arrived quickly but was not adequately packaged with sufficient padding, as a result the jewel case was cracked. I have extra cases so I did not bother to make contact with the seller, but perhaps I should have so in the future their CDs will be better protected. The cracked case however did not seem to affect the sound quality of the CD which was fine.