Christopher Lee had a dry run for his Fu Manchu films, made under the auspices of Harry Alan Towers, a few years later in Anthony Bushell’s The Terror of the Tongs. Like Terence Fisher’s The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), it took Hammer’s brand of horror out East and bolted it on to a historical drama full of sadistic violence and mayhem, a tale full of white actors with fake epicanthic folds as members of the Red Dragon Tong doing unspeakable things to anyone who crosses them.
In 1910 Hong Kong, the secretive Tong, led by Chung King (Christopher Lee, getting top billing in a Hammer film for the first time) is wreaking havoc around the harbour area, and hot on their heels is the crusading Captain Jackson Sale (Geoffrey Toone) of the Royal Navy. Mr Ming (Burt Kwouk) attempts to flee the clutches of the gang but accidentally causes the death of Sale’s daughter Helena (Barbara Brown) when he leaves a list of its members hidden in a book intended as present for her. Vowing revenge, Sale finds allies in a nameless beggar (Marne Maitland) and a serving girl, Lee (Yvonne Monlaur) Sale discovers that a traitor has been tipping off the Tong about his work…
Anyone under the misapprehension that this might be a bit of a two-fisted Boys Own adventure were disavowed of that notion by the pre-credit sequence in which a man is brutally macheted to death. But it never manages to find a way to keep up that initial energy. Former actor Bushell (he’d played Colonel Breen in the BBC original of Quatermass and the Pit (1958-1959) and Captain Rostron in Roy Ward Baker’s Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958)) was a pedestrian director and he can’t find a way to bring to The Terror of the Tongs the same sort of energetic verve that Fisher brought to The Stranglers of Bombay.
He’s hampered by an incident-packed but daft script from Jimmy Sangster, a rather dull hero that even Geoffrey Toone can’t invest with any get up and go and not enough money to realise his ambitions – at the climax a tragic death is meant to elicit sympathy, but it doesn’t and the mass brawl that follows between the Tong and their enemies is too undermanned to work. Earlier, a blabbermouth Tong enforcer lives long enough to explain the back story in a clumsy wodge of exposition and though Sangster peppers the script with plenty of incident elsewhere, it’s stodgily directed.
As well as a disappointing Toone, there’s Lee, positively relishing his explanation of the hideous practice of bone scraping under make-up he later described as the most uncomfortable of his career, Roger Delgado and Marne Maitland back from The Stranglers of Bombay and, as we’re in Hong Kong, or at least a studio set version of it (beautifully designed, as ever, by Bernard Robinson), there’s the inevitable but always very welcome Burt Kwouk on hand as just about the only actor of Chinese descent in Britain at the time who was actually given much to do above the level of extra work. Kwouk would be on hand again the next time Hammer visited Hong Kong (narratively if not actually), in Visa to Canton/Passport to China (1960) – as would the S.S. Helena and harbour set seen here – but stayed at home in the UK for Hammer’s co-productions with Shaw Brothers, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) and Shatter (1974).
The Terror of the Tongs is an undemanding and unremarkable enough time filler but it’s neither as grim nor as memorable as The Stranglers of Bombay, and the first three Fu Manchu films with Lee in the title role are a lot more fun. It does through provide the strangest footnote in Hammer history. When the film opened in Glasgow local gang, The Calton Team, turned up for a screening only to find that members of their hated rivals The Spur were also in attendance. At first all was calm but as the film unspooled, tensions began to mount and as the end credits rolled, Calton leader “Terror” McCabe stood up and let out a roar of “tongs ya bass” before leading his crew into a brawl with the outnumbered Spur. The battle cry was a repost to e Spurs who were known for painting “Spurs ya bass” on walls around their territory in Barrowfield and later the Calton Team changed their name to the Calton Tong and their new war cry became ubiquitous in their violent conflicts.
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