Circle of Iron,
also known as The Silent Flute, has
over the years gathered some cultish acclaim, chiefly since it was a
labor-of-love project that was to be Bruce Lee’s English-language breakthrough.
While Lee was still a struggling actor and martial arts dayplayer, he and
friends James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant (the Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night) developed a
mystical epic about the quest for enlightenment and peace; it blended thick
religious symbolism, surreality, complex location shoots and, of course,
head-cracking action. It was also abstruse and un-filmable.

In the intervening years, Lee went on to international
acclaim in Enter the Dragon, and when
his friends raised the necessary capital to lens their passion play, a haughty
Lee informed them that they could no longer afford him. (So much for that
all-for-one, one-for-all dream…) Five years after Lee’s mysterious death,
however, the vision would finally be realized, though this time with David
Carradine as its star.

The movie — about a young man named Cord (Jeff Cooper, above right, possessing
one of the largest, most unusually shaped craniums I’ve ever seen) searching
for clarity via a “book of enlightenment” and occasional conversations with a
wise old blind man named Ah Sahm — is still a wildly mixed bag of
Eastern-tinged esoterica, action and weird humor. Eli Wallach (above left), for instance,
pops up as a man in a large pot in the desert who is trying to dissolve his own
testicles in hot oil. Still, Carradine’s multiple performances (he co-stars as
Ah Sahm, Monkey Man and Death) and some simply gorgeous location shooting makes
for riveting retro-showcase theater for appreciative zen-martial arts fans, if
not mainstream audiences.

The superb supplemental extras on this special edition DVD
also elevate the release from Blue Underground, their second treatment of the
title. They include an audio commentary track with director Richard Moore, the
film’s theatrical trailer, an alternate title sequence, a mini-documentary
tracing the project’s strange history to the screen, the first draft of the script
on DVD-ROM and a fantastic new interview with Carradine in which he reminisces
about the film and its special place in his heart — he rates it “probably his
favorite,” especially for the ideas it espouses. Hmmm… okay. C (Movie) A- (Disc)