Circle of Iron
BLUE UNDERGROUND
CIRCLE OF IRON (aka The Silent Flute-a less compelling title that makes much more sense) is what you'd call a fantasy/kung-fu film with inescapable Zen Buddhist underpinnings.
Jeff Cooper (The Born Losers) stars as an upstart young fighter sent on a mission to kick the shit out of a mysterious and powerful figure named Zetan, and take control of an equally mysterious and powerful Book of Enlightenment. Along the way he meets several teachers and several challengers-all in the form of David Carradine. The Zen platitudes fly faster than the kicks, and it's been called one of the most pretentious kung-fu films ever made-a point I'm not going to argue.
More interesting than the film itself is the back-story. Originally written by a then-unknown Bruce Lee and his student, James Coburn, it was a project that couldn't get off the ground. Then Lee went to Hong Kong and became an international superstar. Three years later when he was told that the studios finally wanted to make The Silent Flute, however, he was no longer interested. Then he died, so in 1978 they made it with Carradine instead.
It's not a great film, but should be an interesting curio for Bruce Lee fans (or Eli Wallach, Roddy McDowell and Christopher Lee completists).
JIM KNIPFEL
FERTILE MEMORY
DIRECTED BY MICHEL KHLEIFI
KINO VIDEO
SAUL AUSTERLITZ