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San Francisco, 1918: A cop warns a citizen to wear a mask.
We thought it would never end. Wildly hailed as a year that
was so shitty its effects were unheard of since the last world war, 2020 and
its attendant virus has decimated all in its path. We will happily all say
goodbye to it, still knowing that future nightmares lay in store (’cause that’s
the way tragedies come, in clusters).
From the start of the spread it was noted that the countries
that were handling the pandemic best were those who activated their
authoritarian side (as with the country where it all began) and locked everyone
down for good, legally demanding they all stay in their houses. But the *real*
boon to people around the world were the “first world” governments that
recognized how people going about their regular work would excite the spread even
more, so they provided financial support to their citizenry. Not the U.S., not
by a longshot.
So, the notion of “herding cats” in terms of getting
Americans to follow rules was spoken about. Then there was the administration
in place, run by a game show host who never wanted to be president, just hold
rallies and campaign against whomever was the pres. He did a stunningly awful
job with the pandemic — but, true to America’s two-parties/one-mind set-up, the
solution for the Dem party was to put up as an “alternative” in the 2020 election their most
right-wing candidate (save billionaire-for-hire Bloomberg), who was the counter
to Trump in term of Tweeting and loudness but is uncommonly like him in terms
of hard-line, helps-no-common-citizen policy (and of course is still — they are our only salvation, sayeth the
pundits [unless they are socialist] — an
Old White Man).
So, the next four years will be a continuation of the
policies held by the last 40 years of presidents from both parties. In the
meantime, the pandemic continues unabated, and there will most surely be other
health crises, for which the government response will again be “Pick yerself up
by your own bootstraps, suckers!”
The year-end rallying of two of 100 senators — one
Republican, one Independent (Bernie as a senator is an Independent; his
alliance with the DNC has been his biggest mistake all along) — to get even a
second, one-time-only $600 stimulus check to average people tells you all you
need to know about America in a single sentence.
Insert among the future disorder occasional outbursts of
civil unrest (because the cops can’t be hemmed in by things such as actual laws — they can do what they want, when they want), which will in turn create
curfews in major cities. That part of 2020 was the most amazingly oppressive — a world in which governments would rather let riots take place (the big-box
companies all have insurance... and police riots are "legal") than listen to peaceful protesters. The solution
for riots (and pandemics): Stay in your house.
The height of pandemic fashion.
And so far the effects of the pandemic have been reflected in
both infection numbers and a death toll, plus a DEEP level of depression among
people all around the world that, again, resembles events in the first half of
the last century for any kind of comparison.The toll of things “missing” included missing people,
missing experiences, missing pleasures, missing addictions, and the key to all,
missing communication and in-person encounters with physical interaction, even if it is only looking the other person in the eyes. (The Zoom call is not a phone call; a phone
call is not a meeting. Text messages and direct-messages in social
media are similar to writing email or print letters, but they are merely “bites”
of communication that preserve the distance while supposedly bridging the gap.)
Thus, we can only say farewell to this year with hope for
the future — and the realization that more health emergencies, psychological
disasters, financial collapses (personal and institutional), and failures of
the U.S. government to help the populace in any important way are set to
come. The only solution: let’s dance!
And since X were being lyrically polite in their heave-ho to
this annus horribilis, let us jump over to the goodbye wishes offered by the
very funny folks in Little Big, a Russian dance/pop/rock/demented music group.
Though he became famous in the Sixties and worked all over
the world, Sean Connery was an old-fashioned Hollywood movie star. He was
certainly Scottish to the core (one of his two tattoos testified to that), but
his charisma, bearing, and style on camera meant that he was always “Sean
Connery,” no matter what role he was playing.
He was also ambitious as hell, and once he had achieved
superstardom as James Bond (in a quintet of films that have certainly been
equaled but not bettered) he burned to leave the role forever and start doing
some real acting. (He had done a lot of theater before starring in films.)
He made a handful of incredibly excellent films in the
Sixties and Seventies, but once the Eighties came around and he was over 50 and
had even won an Oscar, he settled into a run of commercial properties that
didn’t exercise his acting skills at all. (The exceptions can be counted on one
hand.) But when he had extended himself in the Sixties and Seventies, he did
terrific work in unforgettable (although not super-popular — or popular at all)
films.
Before I discuss his collaborations with Sidney Lumet, with
whom he made some excellent films, just a note or two about Connery the movie
star. Firstly, he was one of the first male sex symbols to appear in his
natural bald state onscreen. Think of the older bald stars who wore wigs for
years (John Wayne, Bogart, Sinatra) and the stars who came later than Connery
but still wore absurdly phony wigs (Burt Reynolds being a prime example — and,
of course, William Shatner). Connery was comfortable in his baldness and was so
preternaturally confident onscreen that he still was voted “sexiest man alive”
often, as not only a bald man but a senior bald man.
The other aspect that instantly identified Connery was his Scottish burr. A
regional accent was nothing new to movie stars — think of the
always-British-even-when-he-played-average-American-Joes, Mr. Cary Grant, and
European stars who gave terrific performances with their native accents. For
Connery, the burr was a point of pride, since it marked him as a Scot in the
British film industry (to many Americans his burr was just “another British
accent”).
Before the movies, as an artist's model.
The Scots and the Irish joined with the Cockneys in being
defiantly regional in the class-conscious world of British entertainment. Of
course, Connery’s friend and fellow “King,” Michael Caine, proudly flaunted his
regional accent as well.
Connery’s retention of his burr wasn’t a problem in some of
his best films, but it was completely ridiculous when he played Arabs or other
“foreign” races. Even when playing characters who had never stepped foot in Scotland, Connery always had the burr. The sibilance emphasized in
recent impressions of Sean arrived in his later work — perhaps a tic gained in
old age or a way to deal with dentures or other dental probs.
Much was made online of two quotes from interviews he did
that reflected his “old world” view of the relationships between men and women.
Again, outrage over everything (and the search to find something to be outraged
over) is a prime occupation in these times.
Whenever one is confronted with information about the
“underside” of a much beloved show-biz figure (which incidentally was seemingly
never a problem for anyone Connery dated or married — there has been no
ex-partner who complained about sexist behavior from him), one is best served
to remember John Waters’ quote about Fassbinder (which I’m paraphrasing here).
When talkingabout the great RWF (whose
work he loved), Waters said, “I hear that he was a monster, but I never had to
live with him.” Words to live by.
The most familiar look.
In private, Sean certainly knocked back a few. One of the
few times he was a bit “disorderly” in public was viewed by my father, who was
a major Connery fan. It seems Sean appeared on a local television show hosted
by the writer-raconteur Malachy McCourt along with Richard Harris (who
costarred with Connery in The Molly McGuires in 1970, most
likely the date of the appearance). Connery clearly had a few before the program,
to the extent that he used a UK expression that should not be used on the air
(even on U.S. TV) — the channel the program aired on (Ch. 5 in NYC) showed
McCourt’s show live, in the fashion of David Susskind’s “Open End.” Hellraiser
Harris had to move in for “damage control” and take command of the interview.
From "The Bowler and the Bunnet."
In any case, Connery’s pride produced one item I found while
researching this piece, a U.K. TV rarity that was posted online and pulled down
in the weeks since Sean’s death.
In 1967, Connery directed a documentary, “The Bowler and the
Bunnet,” for Scottish television about an initiative in a Scottish shipbuilding
firm to share the company with the bosses and management. The doc is only 36
minutes long and is very much of its time, with flashy camerawork and editing
and a “social conscience” mixed with the (correct) assumption that the best way
to keep the viewer interested was to have Connery walk through the locations
quite a lot.
The topic is very serious, so Sean himself provides the comic
relief playing “footy” with the younger workers, showing off the parts of the
ships, and hovering above, behind, and nearby when work or a meeting is
transpiring (and one Glasgow cinema used for one of the latter is playing a
double bill of Dr. No and From Russia With
Love).
It’s lighter fare than the politically engaged films
about factory work made by auteurs like Chris Marker, and also has Connery in
“professional” mode (for that year), hiding his baldness under a cap (the
titular “bunnet”). And yes, he’s already got a mustache — his one-two punch,
along with his very prominent eyebrows, to move attention away from his dome
and back to his face.
Setting aside Marnie (1964), which is
either a later masterwork by Hitchcock (as argued in Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films) or a slapped-together compromise (as
argued in Donald Spoto’s books), the first significant dramatic starring role
that Connery had was given to him by a director whom I’ve written about before, the great Sidney Lumet. Lumet was often referred to as a “great New York
director,” and that constrictive label can be completely dispelled by three of
the films he made with Connery.
The first one, The Hill (1965), had a
terrific starring part for Sean, as a very proud British soldier who lands in a
WWII British prison camp run by two sadists. Thus, the macho side of Connery is
present, but his character isn’t anything like Bond — he’s a devoted military
man who is in the camp because he struck an officer. Thus, he is both more of a
straight-arrow than Bond and more of an inherently “political” character.
"Shorn" indeed.
Connery wanted very much to not look like Bond in his other
films, and so he has the mustache in the film that he wore in private life, as
well as a cropped haircut that worked well with his balding pate. He wanted to
be regarded as a working actor and not a “personality,” and so he is an
antihero in the picture but is also a martinet who lives by a code of ethics
that constantly brings him into conflict with his superiors.
The plot finds a cellmate of Connery dying from rough
treatment at the hands of one of the sadistic officers. Connery’s character
stands firm in wanting to report the incident as a murder to the camp’s
commander. The theatrical origins of the film are apparent throughout —
although the scenes shot on the titular hill (a form of torture for the camp
inmates) are memorably grim, the plot and theme are best conveyed through tense
and often insulting dialogue. Connery discussed (starting at 26:59 in the clip
below) with Irish critic Mark Cousins how the film’s best scene wasn’t in the play,
and was written to flesh out the theme of the piece.
Lumet was certainly a director whose best work showed a
growth over the years, but he began to infuse his work with modernist visual
techniques in the mid-Sixties, most prominently in the finale of Fail-Safe and the memory montages in The
Pawnbroker (both 1964). Here we encounter images and editing that
showed Lumet’s awareness of European cinema and the manner in which the new
auteurs were conveying emotions visually.
Lumet was also a superb director of actors, and even his
meagerest films usually had terrific casting for the supporting roles. In The Hill, he employs a number of top-notch British actors
and one great American — Ossie Davis, playing a West Indian soldier imprisoned
for stealing liquor. Davis’ character is the only person who stands with
Connery against the camp officers, and he has several standout sequences,
including one where he reports the murder of their cellmate to the camp commander
wearing only his underwear and jumping around like a gorilla (but reinforcing
quite seriously that an inmate was tortured to death).
The Hill was lauded by critics (and won
Best Screenplay at Cannes) and it did establish once and for all that Connery
could do more than lift an eyebrow while aiming a Walther PPK. It also did show
that Lumet could direct any kind of material with style and intensity. (Click
the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The next film Lumet made starring Connery is a *very* New
York piece, The Anderson Tapes (1971). A caper film shot in
some great NYC locations, it has an intriguing premise that never quite amounts
to anything, other than letting the film look and sound very flashy.
Connery and Lumet shoot The Anderson Tapes.
That premise, simply put, is that a band of thieves planning
to rob the inhabitants of an affluent Fifth Avenue apartment building are under
constant surveillance for various reasons (none of which concern them
directly). The idea itself is a brilliant one, which surely could’ve spawned a
terrific crime picture that also said something about the surveillance state
(and this back in ’71!). Unfortunately, though, the surveillance aspect just
becomes an intermittent gimmick that provides amusement and answers the eternal
question raised in caper movies (namely, how will our antiheroes get caught?).
Connery is ex-con Anderson, who leads the criminal crew;
among his cohorts is an impossibly young Christopher Walken (in his
major-studio feature debut). The supporting cast contains familiar faces from
the movies and TV, including Dyan Cannon, Martin Balsam, Ralph Meeker, Alan
King, Val Avery, Dick Anthony Williams, Garrett Morris, Stan Gottlieb, Anthony
Holland, Richard B. Shull, Conrad Bain, and Margaret Hamilton!
Aging Connery, young Walken.
The comic scenes, of which there are many, are well-played
but distract from the storyline proper. And Quincy Jones’ musical score is
electronic enough to reinforce the surveillance theme, but can’t make it mean
anything in the long run. Lumet’s Achilles’ heel was his not being a scripter — Anderson was one of several of his pictures that could’ve
been great but needed rewrites, if not by the director then basically anyone
else. That said, the film was a box-office hit. (Click the “Watch on
Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
United Artists was so intent on getting Connery back into
the Bond franchise in the early Seventies that they would agree to anything.
The result was his starring in Diamonds Are Forever, and a
two-picture deal that produced only one film, The Offence (1973), which was a box office flop but contains arguably Connery’s best-ever
dramatic performance on film.
Lumet directs Connery and Bannen.
Connery produced the film and chose Lumet to direct. The
material being adapted was another play, which showed its roots even more
clearly than The Hill, being primarily a sequence of bravura
two-character scenes. The plot revolves around plainclothes police sergeant
Johnson (Sean Connery), who is having a mental breakdown and becomes
emotionally caught up in the apprehension of a child murderer, Baxter (Ian
Bannen). During his interrogation of Baxter, whom he is certain is the killer,
he beats him to death. Johnson has a terse discussion with his wife (Vivien
Merchant) before he submits to his own interrogation by a police superintendent
(Trevor Howard).
The third act of the film is the full interrogation with
Baxter, leading up to Johnson beating him. (Previous glimpses of the
interrogation were brief.) Baxter’s taunting of Johnson makes Johnson
understand that he has similar instincts. (Lumet intercuts images of Connery
being gentle and doting to the last, intended victim, as if he too was a
pedophile.)
While Anderson missed the boat entirely, The Offence is both a great drama and it makes two great points: about police work blunting the emotions of the officers, and that the best method of
detective work is an identification with the criminal that the policeman can’t pull away
from. (A similar theme was presented in Richard Tuggle’s 1984 Eastwood vehicle Tightrope.)
These themes are reflected in two unforgettable scenes. The
first is Johnson recounting the horrors he’s seen as a policeman to his wife,
whose looks he openly insults — the film is a grim, dark portrait that
meticulously chronicles the mindset of a cop “on the edge.” At this point, the
police procedural aspect of the film goes away and we’re in a superb (if unforgivingly
dark) character study.
The second scene that can’t be forgotten is the full
interrogation. The scene begins with Johnson in a rare upbeat moment, joking
with the suspect. Shortly in, though, Baxter begins to taunt him so effectively
that we realize that Johnson will turn violent to shut him up.
It’s a beautifully played sequence that leads one to believe
Baxter wants to be punished by the “hard man” Johnson and is taunting him to
receive his comeuppance. (Baxter’s smiles at Johnson contain a great degree of
masochism.) “Nothing I have done,” says the child-rapist murderer to Johnson, “can
be one half as bad as the thoughts in your head.” When Johnson condemns him
verbally, he responds, “It’s there in everyone, you know that. There’s nothing
I can say you haven’t imagined….”
Lumet was famous for giving actors their “Oscar
performance,” and The Offence certainly contains Connery’s
best dramatic moments onscreen. Contrarian and cranky-man that he was, Sean
dismissed the film in the Mark Cousins interview. Cousins hazards when they
reach the early Seventies in the Connery chronology, “The
Offence, of course, was a great picture.” To which Connery replies,
“Yeah, yeah, all my family went to see it.” By this point (1997), Connery was
strictly interested in making movies that did good box-office and no longer
challenged himself.
For his part, Lumet carefully weaves in modernist
techniques, the most important being our view of the world inside Johnson’s
head — with an interrogation lamp blurring out various moments where he loses
his temper. The Offence was released the same year as Serpico, and thus is an excellent (if totally non-NYC)
precursor to Lumet’s well-known New York cop pictures (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A). (Click the
“Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The fourth time Connery worked with Lumet he had a
supporting part in a star-studded ensemble in one of the greatest of all movie
whodunits, Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Again, we
are far from NYC in this film (with Martin Balsam, Anthony Perkins, and Lauren
Bacall providing the only American presences in the film — and Balsam does a
terrific Italian accent).
Murder is indeed one of the best-ever
adaptations of Agatha Christie, with one of her perfect solutions to a murder
mystery. The cast is sublime, with Albert Finney doing a beautifully
cartoonlike (yet still dead serious, when he needs to be) interpretation of
Hercule Poirot, and every guest star but two being a very likely suspect.
Connery plays an older, much more rigid version of the type of character he
played in The Hill — a military man devoted to the concept
of honor who actually helps Poirot assemble the solution to the mystery with
his comments about the efficacy of the jury system. (“12 good men and true.
It’s a sound system.”)
The balance that Lumet and scripter Paul Dehn found between
a tongue-in-cheek approach to the material and a strict adherence to the codes
of the genre is nothing short of miraculous. It is both a perfect Hollywood
movie of the Seventies (in its wry approach to adapting a classic mystery
novel) and a perfect Thirties movie (offering both a tight script and a bevy of
unassailable performances).
The film only gets better with age and, of course, didn’t
need to be remade but was, several times — in 2001 with Alfred Molina starring
as Poirot, in 2010 with David Suchet as the Belgian super-sleuth, in 2017 as an
audio play with Tom Conti exercising his “little grey cells,” and again in 2017
with Kenneth Branagh both directing and starring as Poirot in another one of
his misguided moves as a filmmaker. And that’s not counting a Japanese remake….
(Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The last Connery-Lumet collaboration, Family Business (1989) is a perfect example of Eighties “bloat” in major studio moviemaking.
Two big stars — Connery and Dustin Hoffman — are spotlighted, the plot is an
excuse for a series of rather tepid comedic and dramatic scenes, and every
aspect (right down to Cy Coleman’s bombastic, Broadway-sounding score for a
non-musical crime picture/family drama) is the product of a “big” approach that
fails.
Connery and Lumet, later on.
From the first, the film makes no sense, as Connery plays
the father of Hoffman, who in turn plays a Scottish-Sicilian-American former
mobster (!) who doesn’t want his son (the always non-magnetic and un-absorbing
Matthew Broderick) to get involved in the world of crime. The missed
opportunities in The Anderson Tapes are nothing compared to
the mistakes made here — the most obvious being the father-son pairing of the
leads. (Connery’s character lives in a completely Irish-American milieu, but it
is emphasized that he emigrated from Scotland several decades ago.)
Unlikely relatives.
The film is poorly paced, with the first section devoted
entirely to humor and the second attempting to make us feel for several
patently unrealistic and unrelatable characters. It was a dud at the box office
and was dismissed by critics. Its one memorable moment finds Connery yelling at
his unlikely son, “Up yours, guinea midget!”
(Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
A final bonus: The 1990 BAFTA tribute to Connery. You can see him win many awards on YouTube, but this is one of the best ceremonies, as it avoids the Hollywood touch (as at the AFI tribute, where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) is seen to be his pre-eminent role outside of Bond) and instead gives us a group of people he had worked with and who admired him, including Herbert Lom, Gina Lollobrigida, Honor Blackman, Richard Attenborough, Billy Connolly, Ursula Andress, Roger Moore, fellow King and good friend Michael Caine, and even Sidney Lumet.
Now onto the feature films and other media depictions of the
Insidious One. Comic books will be left out (although you can read the Wally Wood-drawn “Mask of Fu Manchu” comic here), as well as live productions, and obscure
variations and pastiches on the characters. The key to these films, simply put,
is the amount of “Fu content” they contain.
As with Golden Age Hollywood movies featuring great
comedians and — the most obvious — gangster and monster movies, these items
rise and fall based on how much time that Fu is center stage. The longer he is
offscreen, the more insufferable the film or show is.
The first films made from the Fu Manchu novels were two
series of silent cliffhangers made in England. These films (as with the later
U.S. radio series) were note-for-note adaptations of the books, which initially
were compilations of stories Rohmer wrote for magazines. It should be noted
that the Fu Manchu films basically reprise incidents and situations found in
the first six or so novels; the U.S. radio series was one of the few instances
where three more of the novels were adapted. While the Republic serial was
named for one of the later novels, it reached back to situations found in
earlier books.
The second serial, The Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1924), is not readily found on the Internet, but The Mystery of Dr.
Fu-Manchu (1923) is present in its entirety. Directed by A.E. Coleby,
the serial moves much slower than the gold standard of silent serials, which
are surely those directed by Louis Feuillade and German items like The
Spiders by Fritz Lang.
Mystery established the pattern that one
will encounter in all the subsequent Fu films, where one desperately wants to
fast-forward through the scenes that don’t feature Fu or his colleagues in
crime. Nayland Smith, Petrie, and the other good guys do chase after Fu, but
they also spend an inordinate amount of time talking in rooms. These scenes are
lethal, whether they’re in a 1920s serial or a 1960s adventure pic.
This series also starts the pattern that would continue
through all the Fu movies and appearances in other media, in which a white
actor plays the Insidious Doctor. Here it’s an Irishman named H. Agar Lyons,
who curiously isn’t made up as an Asian. He is a thin, menacing-looking fellow
with a hawk nose who occasionally is seen lounging around in a silk “Oriental”
outfit but is most often seen in a suit with a cape, a hat, and spats. (He most
definitely was the only spat-wearing Fu.)
Coleby also gave up on trying to make his Arabic and
Eurasian female characters look Asian — they are simply white actresses dressed
in flamboyant outfits with frizzy hair. (Did one assume a frizzy-haired woman
looked “foreign” in 1920s England?)
The one redeeming aspect in Mystery is
the recreation of the tortures described in the books, from whipping to “the
Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom” (in which the victim is put in a wire cage with
partitions, through which rats come and gnaw on different body parts). The most
memorable scene for this viewer was a dream sequence in which Petrie dreams of
being Fu’s slave. He and three other scientists mix strange potions in chains
under the watchful eyes of Fu, while another slave-scientist is being flogged
by a henchman.
Like the later TV series, Mystery has no
cliffhangers — it is composed of 15 short, self-contained films that have
conclusive finales. This robs the serial of a lot of its power and makes it
best seen in doses of 2–3 episodes at a time and no more. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
Fu was next played by Warner Oland, the Swede who excelled in
“yellow face” roles (including his signature character, Charlie Chan), in a trio
of pre-code features. The first two of the films, The Mysterious Dr.
Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930), are flat-out dull, as the scripters crafted a prim and proper script,
consisting of too much talking in rooms (making the pictures seems like poorly
crafted stage plays); one of the incessant talkers is the later TV“Commissioner Gordon,” Neil Hamilton. The
torture aspect of Fu’s activities is downplayed, since it wouldn't involve talking.
And far, far worse was the fact that the scripters decided
Fu needed a reason to be a world-conqueror. In this and the
subsequent two films starring Oland, Fu carries out his dastardly plots because
his wife and son had been killed in the Boxer Rebellion!
The only truly watchable entry in the Paramount pre-code
trilogy is Daughter of the Dragon (1931). The film is quite
unique, in that Fu Manchu dies onscreen (only to return for select moments as a
specter) and then the leading criminal is his daughter, Ling Moy, played by
Anna May Wong. She is a hesitant crime lord, who is very much in love with one
of the tedious British characters. The script is as leaden as in the two
preceding films, but the notion of a woman supervillain is enough to relieve
some of the tedium. (And it was made three years before the Dragon Lady debuted
in “Terry and the Pirates.”)
Wong later regretting taking the role, saying in 1933, “Why
is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain —
murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could
we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?”
The most interesting scenes find Ling Moy talking to a
Chinese police detective, played by Sessue Hayakawa. Wong adopts a more formal
way of speaking here, so her American accent sounds vaguely like the British
accents heard in the other scenes. This clashes with Hayakawa’s thick Japanese
accent, giving a particularly weird tone to the usual leaden dialogue found in
these films.
While this piece was being assembled (read: yrs truly was in
the midst of a Fu binge) it was announced that a box set of the five Fu films
starring Christopher Lee was being released around Halloween. Those films are
reviewed below — but suffice it to say that one would have to be a massive fan
of Christopher Lee to see four of those films more than once. Not so with the
next two entries, which are without question the best of all the FM features.
The first of those two is inarguably the best and most
outlandish of the Fu movies, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932),
starring a post-Frankenstein (1931) Boris Karloff. Mask was made by the very classy MGM with an A-budget and
eye-catching images by director Charles Brabin and cinematographer Tony Gaudio
(The Adventures of Robin Hood).
The film captures the thrilling, pulpy, and deviant aspects
of Rohmer’s work. And yes, it puts forth both the inherent racism in the Yellow
Peril scenario and the fact that any viewer worth his/her salt will enjoy Fu’s
violence and destruction and find the British colonialist intolerably smug and
worthy of their eventual destruction. Cue the line restored to the film in
recent decades: “Kill the white man and take his woman!”
Karloff’s reputation has meant that the film was categorized
as horror — and it shares with the great Universal monster movies of the early
’30s a mad scientist motif, as here Fu has the same kind of sizzling,
spark-flinging machinery as Dr. Frankenstein. (And created by the same man,
Kenneth Strickfadden.)
A cut scene of a "snake man."
The basic parameters of the storyline qualify it as pulp
action-adventure, but there is also the standard parlor-mystery level and a
pre-noir look at an underworld. And as for Asian “exotica,” the director who
set the standard was von Sternberg, and Mask is the closest
approximation to a thriller directed by him.
Karloff was, hands down, the best actor to play Fu, and thus
his performance here is exceptional. His FM isn't any old supervillain, he is
the most malevolent and fearsome villain to ever be set loose on colonialist
dullards. He emphasizes the sadistic nature of the character and exhibits glee
when torturingthe Brits. It’s hard to
pick a favorite of these scenes, but one in which British Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence
Grant) is placed beneath a bell in order to be rendered both deaf and insane is
a sure favorite.
The 1994 book Hollywood Cauldron by Gregory
William Mank contains a chapter about Mask with intriguing
quotes from Karloff, none of which are sourced. Mank apparently did a very sizeable
amount of research for this tome, but several of the quotes in the book are
unsourced; as he thinks Freaks and Mask are both rather wretched, laughable films, he’s therefore to be put in the “Caveat
lector” category. Nevertheless, his unsourced quotes from Boris include the
fact that there was no finished script when shooting began on the film.
Karloff also complained about the “bad makeup” and the fact
that he would be given full script pages the day of shooting that contained
long speeches written in “impeccable English,” then told that other speeches in
pidgin English had been substituted: “They had five writers on it, and this was
happening all through the film. Some scenes were written in beautiful Oxford
English, others were written in — God
knows what!”
The other standout performance is Myrna Loy as Fu’s daughter
Fah Lo See. As in every depiction of the characters, she suffers lovesickness
over one of the British heroes, but the most surprising scene —which makes the film a true pre-code work
(and leagues livelier than the Warner Oland trilogy) — is the moment where she
exhibits a kinky intensity as hero Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett) is
being whipped in front of her.
Enter the Hollywood Cauldron book again.
Here, Loy is quoted from her memoir Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming (1987) as saying that she disliked the script and told producer Hunt Stromberg
that the character was “a sadistic sex maniac.” She declared that her complaints
resulted in the “character’s worst excesses being toned down.”She also stated that “Boris and I brought some
feeling and humor to those comic book characters. Boris was a fine actor, a
professional who never condescended to his often unworthy material.”
Mask was the only time the proper balance
was struck between the utterly crazy and staid aspects of Rohmer’s writing in a
movie. This is reflected in the torture scenes, which are paced wonderfully and
shot like incidents in a cliffhanging serial.
One wishes there had been other Karloff Fu films (he made
five Mr. Wong films, after all!), but the U.S. State Department stepped in and asked
MGM not to revive the character, as American-Chinese relations would be
damaged. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The next incarnation of the Insidious One was the U.S. radio
show The Shadows of Fu Manchu(1939). The show featured recreations of scenes from the first nine novels and was quite an odd item, since each episode
is only 15 minutes long, and the opening and closing were to be announced live
on whatever station aired the show. So, the copies that we have are “clean”
versions that have long intro and outro bumpers of music.
The best-known performer was later Lucille Ball cohort Gale
Gordon as Dr. Petrie. He and the other cast members recited bushels of dialogue
that came straight from the novels, with expository dialogue added in. At least
— unlike the silent serial and later, horrible TV series — the Shadow radio series (which clearly wanted to be mixed up title-wise with the actual
Shadow program) had every episode end with a cliffhanger. [Note:
Two earlier Fu radio shows — one American, one British — are lost to the ages.]
The year after the radio show, the serial Drums of
Fu Manchu (1940) was released. Drums is right
below Mask as one of the most entertaining Fu movies — it’s
a great example of the top-notch serials made at Republic, and although
scripted in the classic serial mode (in which every single action seems pointed
toward that week’s cliffhanger), it’s one of the few consistently exciting recreations of Rohmer’s “race against time” writing.
Henry Brandon was no Karloff, but his portrayal of Fu is diabolical and threatening-yet-clever; thus he is the most interesting character in the serial. Although Rohmer made a
point about noting that Fu’s fluent English was “both sibilant and guttural,” Brandon
adopts the “sneering villain” voice that was often used on radio shows and was later
immortalized by Richard O’Brien in his nasal performance as Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Physically, Riff may look
like a mad scientist’s assistant, but he speaks like a consummate
supervillain.)
Brandon is quoted from a 1986 interview with author Gregory
William Mank in Hollywood Cauldron about the film: “… I’d go
to a theater nearby here in Hollywood, where they showed it, and sit among the
kids (they never recognized me) — and I loved their reactions. Within two or
three episodes, they were on my side! It was because I was brighter
than the others, and the kids went for intelligence, whether it was bad or
good.”
“But the PTAs — they didn’t like it at all, because the kids
would wet their beds after seeing it. And the Chinese government raised plenty of hell! And that’s childish, because I consider Fu
Manchu a fairy tale character — it’s not to be taken seriously for God’s sake!”
[Mank, p. 83]
Those viewers rooting against Nayland Smith will be happy to
see him nearly turned into a lobotomized dacoit by Fu. “Dacoit” being the
most-used phrase in Fu movies and novels — it refers to Indian and Burmese
criminals, but in this usage simply means Fu’s henchmen. And the titular drums are
a terrific gimmick — at the end of every chapter, the drumbeats come on the
soundtrack, signaling doom for the heroes.
As happened with Mask, sequels to the serial
were planned, but the U.S. government requested that no further Fu adventures be
filmed, as the Chinese were our ally at this time in the fight against Japan.
The 1956 TV show The Adventures of Dr. Fu
Manchu (1956) was made by Republic’s TV arm (Hollywood Television
Service), but it’s the complete opposite of Drums — a dull,
thrill-less “action” series. The show is dreary and — insult of insults — it’s
the most easily found of the Fu movies, since it fell into the public domain.
(An earlier TV pilot starring John Carradine as Fu (!) has survived but is under
lock and key.)
Most inexcusable is Glen Gordon’s weirdly lazy turn as Fu.
Speaking… slowly… to… approximate… an “honorable Chinese” accent, Gordon’s
portrayal is the most racist (if such a thing is possible) of all portrayals of
FM. His mustache looks pasted on, his intensity is nil, and the accent is just
beyond shameful.
Two episodes rise above the rest — one where Fu allies with
a gangster (the great character actor Ted de Corsia) and another that is a
clear foreshadowing of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, in which Fu
kidnaps a plastic surgeon to get an unnamed “dead” dictator a new identity. And
then from an HQ on a remote island, Hitler (yes, it’s him) tries to take over
the world, for good this time. But he’s defeated within the 26-minute running
time (the closing credits for the whole series find Fu losing a metaphorical chess game with
Nayland Smith), and a bizarre and amusing alliance is just tossed away in an
episode of an otherwise forgettable TV series.
The star of the five 1960s Fu Manchu films produced by Harry
Alan Towers, the great Christopher Lee, once said that only the first of his Fu
features was worth making — he was quite right. Because if you thought the
Lee/Dracula films got weaker and weaker as time went on, those pictures seem
like cinematic landmarks compared to the second through fifth Lee/Fu movies.
The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) provides the
best vision of Fu’s manic desire to conquer the world; it is the first time we
see many dead bodies on display. In one scene, Fu poisons an entire town and
the British lawmen see the results — streets with bodies strewn about. So this
time out Fu really does seem like a violent threat, not just a transient madman
who kills a few select victims.
Lee is indeed at his best here, since he took all his roles
(no matter how thin or awful they could be) very seriously and he plays Fu with
true conviction. The other cast member who impresses is Tsai Chin, who plays
Fu’s daughter Lin Tang. She occupies a significant position in these films,
because she was the first and only Asian woman to play that role and the only
Asian besides Anna May Wong to play a starring role in a Fu film. She was also
one of only two regulars in the Lee/Fu movies. (The other was Howard
Marion-Crawford as Dr. Petrie.)
One of the odder developments, though, was that even as it
became commonplace to see more sex and violence in British exploitation, there
was still a limit in the Fu films. This is clear where when Lin Tang wants to
whip a man (taking direct action, as opposed to Myrna Loy’s character, who just
liked to watch) and is prevented by her spoilsport father.
Face is without question a very good Fu
feature. All that followed was dross, and embarrassingly bad dross at that. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) show the
James Bond influence. It’s a “slave chick” movie (paging Doctor Tongue and
Hugo, from “SCTV”) and has some enjoyably lurid moments, but even with a large
group of Fu’s female slaves on prominent display, it’s still a pale imitation
of Face. Although the wonderful Burt Kwouk does show up as a
henchman. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967) should
work for a few reasons, including the fact that it was partially shot in Hong
Kong and has a fairly decent (if familiar) plot twist, in which a Fu henchman
is given plastic surgery to look like Nayland Smith (which none of his friends
notices, naturally enough, although his skin is gray and his eyes are dead).
By this, the third Lee/Fu outing, there was no disguising
that nearly everyone involved was going through the motions.This would reach epic proportions in the last
two Lee/Fu disasters. (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
Shot in Spain and Brazil, The Blood of Fu Manchu
(1968) is a cut-and-paste creation by that most beloved yet least
talented of cult favorite filmmakers, Jess Franco. Franco accomplished in film
after film the trick of making utterly unsexy exploitation. (How do you fuck up
a women’s prison picture? Watch Jess’s entries for the answer.) Here he made a
film about Brazilian bandits that he seemingly was going to make anyway and
just stuck Fu Manchu into it when he got the gig.
The plot revolves around the aforementioned bandits and a
“kiss of death” that Fu’s slave women are ordered to give select victims. The
film contains variations on scenes from Face and Brides, and, again, is a remarkably unsexy and un-thrilling
specimen.
By this point, Lee was clearly doing his scenes in a very
short span of time. (Perhaps a few days, if not a few hours.) Franco’s pacing
will seem mercilessly slow to any viewer not in Franco’s cult (where an
occasional psychedelic color scheme is greeted as a “style” of filmmaking). (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) was the
last serious Fu movie, and it is perhaps the worst ever, plain and simple. This
time out Franco created a film about Turkish intrigue that barely has Fu Manchu
in it at all. And when Lee (whose shooting schedule seems to have been a scant
few hours, if not a few minutes) is onscreen, he looks as bored as the viewer.
Moving at a glacial pace, Castle is a
classic cut-and-paste Franco effort. (And, natch, “effort” is the perfect noun
to go with Franco’s name.) Much fun has been poked at the fact that Franco
needed footage of a ship sinking, so he simply used scenes from A
Night to Remember (1958), but that is somewhat amusing. There are
other scenes in Castle that are sheer torture – not in the
violent FM sense, but as an example of a filmmaker who had no real idea of what
would come next, nor did he care.
This is the film that did what Asian-Americans had wanted to
do for decades — it killed off Fu Manchu. (A later 1986 film by Jess Franco called Esclavas del Crimen is an unauthorized adventure of the daughter
of Fu Manchu, but when dealing with Jess Franco, enough is more than enough.) (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
A tangential oddity that (sorta) takes place in the ’70s but
was made in 1990: Spanish horror star Paul Naschy starred as Fu in “La hija de
Fu Manchú ’72,” a short film coproduced by Spanish television. The short was
seemingly intended as both a spoof and a tribute to the Fu Manchu mythos, with
Naschy appearing as Fu himself, wearing a patently phony mustache.
Nayland Smith and Fu’s daughter are center stage here as
well, and a woman who is abducted by Fu’s daughter and whipped onscreen by a
henchman. The visuals are tongue-in-cheek and evoke comic book panels and what
appear to be much-beloved memories of Mask and the Lee/Fu
movies (as well as Bruce Lee movies). The title sequence is a no-budget send-up
of James Bond title sequences.
The very last Fu Manchu feature, The Fiendish Plot
of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), was also Peter Sellers’ last film, and it
seemed like an atrocity when it was released after Sellers’ death (and his
superbly quiet turn in Being There). Viewed through a 2020
lens, it’s just a misconceived and badly paced comedy.
Looking very feeble and unhealthy, Sellers plays both Fu and
Nayland Smith. He is surrounded by a very talented cast, including Sid Caesar
(who gets nothing to do), Helen Mirren (in her sexpot guise), and the
aforementioned Burt Kwouk (who does a cameo with Sellers asking if he’s seen
him somewhere before).
There are quite a few Seventies and Eighties comedies that
had the terrible pacing of Fiendish Plot (that type of
misconceived, patently bad vehicle picture became the specialty of SNL alums).
But one can see where Sellers tried his hand at adding to the proceedings, with
odd surreal gags that his Goon partner and friend, the genius madman Spike
Milligan, could have scripted to a fine turn (including a very Goon-like flying
house).
As it stands, the picture was an odd and sad end to Sellers’
career and an equally odd finale to the Fu saga on film. (Further novels were
written after Rohmer’s death in 1959, but never sold as well as his initial
books in the series had.) (Click the “Watch on Odnoklassniki” link in the thumbnail.)
A suggestion in closing, for those who are new to the
character: watch Mask of Fu Manchu first and if you enjoy
it, see Drums or Face. After that, you’re
on your own, and probably best off reading the books.
And since I’d rather be washed ashore on a desert island
with only Jess Franco movies to watch than close out this piece with Nicolas
Cage playing Fu in a fake trailer that was part of the “Grindhouse” project, I
will leave you with an odder and most definitely funnier vision of Fu, which
spawned Sellers’ revelation in Fiendish Plot that Fu’s first
name was Fred: the opening of the Goon Show episode that introduced
the character “Fred Fu Manchu,” the best bamboo saxophonist in the world.
This is an unusual version of the episode that was part of
the Telegoons TV show (1963-64), where old episodes were
performed with puppets on television. The three principals returned to redo the
episodes without a studio audience.
(or, Can a White Man Dig the Fus?) He is the world’s most
evil man. A scientist-doctor-scholar who uses his brilliance to criminal ends.
He plots to overthrow governments and take over the world, but still finds the
time to whip his subordinates when they screw up, and slowly and elaborately
tortures the good guys when they dim-wittedly fall into his clutches.
He was a literary (well, hardback original)/mass-market
paperback staple (much copied in the pulps and comics) and the subject of
several feature films, and a landmark villain in 20th-century
fiction. He is Dr. Fu Manchu.
The evil doctor is also a racial stereotype who was one of
the stranger, more elaborate colonialist nightmares. An Anglo vision of a
non-existent “Yellow Peril” that is very much out of step with the current
century. And yes, his adventures — the better ones (and many of the movies
are quite dreadful) — are still engrossing because he was conceived of as a
master villain and, as every fan of genre fiction, genre movies, and comic
books knows, a complex villain is always more interesting than a virtuous hero.
In this piece I will explore the different big-screen
incarnations of Dr. Fu as well as his appearances in other media. This binge
wasn’t occasioned by anything specific, except for the need to move beyond Bond
villains and Marvel bad guys, and return to the real McCoy, the supervillain
who provided the template that was later dutifully copied by Ian Fleming and
the Bond screenwriters, and Stan Lee and his bullpen of scribes (and
artist-cocreators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko).
The most-used photo of Fu's creator.
As for the writing of Fu's creator, "Sax Rohmer" (born Arthur Henry Ward), Sir Christopher Frayling, speaking in a BBC documentary, put it best: "In a way, [Rohmer] is an heir to the Victorian tradition of the penny dreadful — that all his books, or virtually all his books, started as serials. They have a very dramatic opening, they have a rather exotic middle section, and finish with a bang... so it's a real page-turner. They have that kind of serial quality that fitted them very well for the radio and the movie serials.
"It's a blood and thunder aspect. He's not very good at characterization, and tends to make up for that with lots of incident and color and strange ways of speaking. He overwrites like mad. They're not detective stories — there's no puzzle element, because I don't think Sax Rohmer was subtle enough for that, but he really lays on the formula.
"And the formula is usually: eminent person is kidnapped in the first chapter, usually an archeologist... 'the man who knew too much." Dr. Petrie and Smith go on the hunt, it leads them to an opium den, they bump into Fu-Manchu or one of his agents. There's an elaborate machine of torture, which is seldom used but is described in a great deal of detail...
"...Like the penny dreadful concept of 'with one bound he was free' — there's no explanation, Fu comes back [from the dead with each new adventure]. So, they're fairly formulaic. But it's exoticism, the color, and this wonderful quality of prosaic, everyday London settings with this mad, exotic Oriental stuff going on just behind the scenes. I think that's the key quality to Sax Rohmer.
"I wouldn't make any claims for it as literature. But it's almost dreamlike. It's certainly magnified and has a kind of music hall, pantomime quality, particularly the early books."
The third novel (aka" The Hand of Fu-Manchu," 1917).
The most important thing about Rohmer is the position he holds as a very definite “bridge”
between Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming. The Fu Manchu novels are pure pulp
with a vaguely upper-class air, but more importantly they contain odd, detailed
crimes, colorful sidekicks, alluring femme fatales, and cliffhangers galore.
The connection Rohmer’s universe had to that of Sherlock
Holmes’ creator is ridiculously apparent, especially when one reads the novels.
The first few books in the series in the series of 13 novels (written over a
half-century, from 1913 to 1959) are narrated by Dr. Petrie, who recounts his
adventures with Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a very smart police detective who is
able to deduce things from very little evidence and is perpetually ready to run
to a certain location to foil the plans of the evil Dr. Fu-Manchu (who lost the
hyphen in his name by the third novel, The Hand of Fu Manchu).
Holmes and Watson they aren’t — Nayland Smith isn’t *that* brilliant, and
Petrie is so madly in love (and lust) with Fu’s Arabic slave girl Kâramanèh
that he can barely keep his mind clear to aid his friend.
And the criminal mastermind Fu, although having been clearly
constructed from elements cobbled from Asian villains that came before him (an excellent essay on that can be found here) is clearly a new-model Moriarty,
constructed with a Yellow Peril agenda. Rohmer’s most significant realization,
though, was clearly that there were millions of readers who would follow a
supervillain from book to book as easily as a super-detective.
Rohmer’s influence on Ian Fleming’s work is even more clear
cut. And for those who’d like to hear it from the horse’s mouth, here is a
quote from an interview that Fleming conducted with the inimitable (and clearly very drunk) Raymond Chandler, in which Fleming says he grew up reading
the FM novels. This follows a question from Chandler about why he included torture
scenes in all of his books:
“Really? I suppose I was brought up on Dr Fu Manchu and
thrillers of that kind and somehow always, even in Bull-dog Drummond and so on,
the hero at the end gets in the grips of the villain and he suffers, either
he’s drugged or something happens to him . ..”
Fleming’s most explicit tribute to Rohmer is, of course, Doctor No, the Bond novel in which the secret service agent
fights an Asian supercrook. But Fu is present in all of Fleming’s supervillains
— he is in Le Chiffre, Goldfinger, Largo, Blofeld, Hugo Drax (played by Michael Lonsdale), and Scaramanga (incarnated by Christopher Lee, who later played
Fu Manchu).
Bond’s creator clearly enjoyed Rohmer but felt that
(post-Spillane) the sex and violence quotient had to be amped up. And so Bond
is a dirty fighter constantly sleeping with different women, and perennially
pursuing another eccentric supervillain (who quite often will abduct and
torture him in some unusual way).
As with Fleming, Rohmer’s books have always been shelved in
the Mystery section of bookstores and libraries, but their work has a lot more
in common with action fiction from the pulps than the staid and quite
intelligently plotted works of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or even (the creator
of an equally popular Asian stereotype, Charlie Chan) Earl Derr Biggers.
The reason to revisit the world of Fu Manchu is not to
wallow in the racism of the books, but to behold the supervillain that started
off the craze that continues to this day. Nayland Smith describes
him this way in a quote from the first book, The Mystery of Dr.
Fu-Manchu (1913; retitled The Insidious Dr.
Fu-Manchu in the U.S.), that is used in most every article ever
written about the character:
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline,
high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a
close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him
with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant
intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the
resources, if you will, of a wealthy government — which, however, already has
denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a
mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
The first edition of the first novel, 1913. (U.K.)
Despite the racist stereotyping, Rohmer’s books remain
eminently readable because of the pulpy quality of his work and
for the sheer audacity of the melodrama:
“Of all the pictures which remain in my memory, some of them
dark enough, I can find none more horrible than that which now confronted me in
the dim candle-light. Burke lay crosswise on the bed, his head thrown back and
sagging; one rigid hand he held in the air, and with the other grasped the
hairy forearm which I had severed with the ax; for, in a death-grip, the dead
fingers were still fastened, vise-like, at his throat.
“His face was nearly black, and his eyes projected from
their sockets horribly. Mastering my repugnance, I seized the hideous piece of
bleeding anatomy and strove to release it. It defied all my efforts; in death
it was as implacable as in life. I took a knife from my pocket, and, tendon by
tendon, cut away that uncanny grip from Burke's throat . . .
“But my labor was in vain. Burke was dead!” (The
Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, aka “The Devil Doctor,” by Sax Rohmer, 1916)
The second novel, U.S. first edition. (1916)
The way the racism is manifested specifically in the books
is in the frequent hyperbolic mentions of the “yellow”-ness of the Asian
characters’ skin and their sheer animal violence. Nayland Smith and Petrie are
model British gentlemen, and so they often go straight for the throat by
describing the “yellow” peoples as inhuman. (Although it should also be noted
that Arabic races are very much a part of Fu’s squadron of evil sidekicks.)
The other side of this racism in both the books and movies
is the overwrought obsession with Eurasian and Arabic women that the Anglo lead
characters have. They are not simply attracted to these women — they are wholly
and completely obsessed with them. In this regard Rohmer reflected the old
world view that mixed-race exotic women were the biggest turn-on — and so Dr.
Petrie never stops talking about Karamaneh, Fu Manchu’s slave girl, whom Petrie
eventually marries.
One thing should be noted about Rohmer’s Brits — they are
racist toward other groups as well. In Hand, two Jewish art
appraisers come to look at a rare brass box Nayland Smith has obtained, and
Petrie notes, “Lewison, whose flaxen hair and light blue eyes almost served to
mask his Semitic origin, shrugged his shoulders in a fashion incongruous in one
of his complexion, though characteristic in one of his name.” Also in the book
another character is casually described as a “dago.” Thus, while Rohmer’s work
and the better Fu films still function very well as purely thrilling
entertainment, they do contain implicitly racist stereotypes (as does, it must
be mentioned, much mainstream entertainment from the earlier part of the 20th
century).
The third novel, Sixties and Seventies U.S. paperbacks.
And there is another, inverse factor in play here that most
likely wasn’t intended by Rohmer (or was it?) — namely, that it’s fun to watch
the Chinese supervillain toying with and torturing the hell out of the
colonialist heroes. For, as much as the “codes” of action-adventure stories
dictate that the audience is supposed to be sympathetic with the virtuous, it’s
common that most viewers enjoy seeing the villain make mincemeat out of the
hero.
The FM books and movies play with this notion — although Fu
is “killed” at the end of some of the adventures, we know he will be back in
the next installment, and Nayland Smith and his colleagues will be just as
powerless to defeat him then. But in the meantime, we’ve seen the Good Doctor concoct some mighty impressive hoops for them to leap through….
The fifth novel, Sixties U.S paperback.
Reflecting the conflicted feelings a colonial has for his “lesser charges” (whom he suspects are actually smarter than he), it is
emphasized in the books and the more faithful movie adaptations that Fu is an
extremely moral and honorable villain, as odd as that sounds. Although he
clearly wants to rule the world, when he makes a pledge to someone, he keeps
it, even if it will interfere with his world domination.
At various points he allows Petrie to escape because he
would prefer to capture him and have him as a confederate (or a
slave-employee); at other points he strikes a quid-pro-quo bargain with Nayland
Smith or Petrie (again, usually freeing them), and keeps his word admirably.
Thus Fu Manchu registers as a thoroughly British, oddly colonialist creation —
a villain who wants to conquer the world but who will never break his word and
thus is a highly ethical sadist and criminal mastermind.
It is also stressed by Nayland Smith that Fu possesses the
single most developed mind that he has ever encountered. This is another reason
why it is particularly fun to see the British leads one-upped by a member of a
race they consider beneath them. Fu himself acknowledges his evil genius quite
often and looks forward to his inevitable triumph over the Brits — but he
doesn’t want to win too easy a victory. (This was transformed by Fleming into
the oft-commented-upon torturing of Bond, rather than strictly killing him to
begin with.)
