Sax Rohmer‘s villainous Asian master-criminal Fu Manchu had first debuted in a series of short stories first published in 1912 and gathered together in book form as The Mystery of Fu Manchu the following year. Rohmer would publish twelve more volumes, some short story collections, some original novels before his death, The Wrath of Fu Manchu, a posthumous collection of three stories was published in 1973 and Cay Van Ash and William Patrick Maynard published several follow-up novels many years later.
The character had made the transition to the big screen in 1923 when Harry Agar Lyons took the role in the British serials The Mysterious Fu Manchu (1923) and The Further Mysteries of Dr Fu-Manchu (1924). In Hollywood, future Charlie Chan Warner Oland played him four times in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930), Paramount on Parade (1930) (in a cameo appearance), and Daughter of the Dragon (1931) before Boris Karloff took a crack at it in The Mask of Fu Manchu.
Sir Denis Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) of the British Secret Service – referred to throughout out as Nigh-land Smith – tries to alert Egyptologist Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant) to the threat posed by Fu Manchu who is out to secure a fabled mask and sword from the tomb of Genghis Khan. Fu Manchu plans to pronounce himself the reincarnation of Khan and lead the united peoples of Asia in a war against the west. Barton is kidnapped and taken to Fu Manchu who tries to bribe him with the promise of sexual favours from his daughter Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) but when that fails, he submits Barton to “the torture of the bell.” Barton’s daughter Sheila (Karen Morley), her fiancé Terrence “Terry” Granville (Charles Starrett), and two other members of Barton’s expedition team, Dr Von Berg (Jean Hersholt), and McLeod (David Torrence) join Nayland Smith in an attempt to rescue him, but McLeod is killed and Granville captured a tortured by Fah Lo See. Granville is injected with a serum that makes him subservient to Fu Manchu and the race is on to free him from his spell and prevent Fu Manchu from getting the sword and mask. Much torture, manly fisticuffs and some business with Fu Manchu’s death ray ensue.
There’s no doubting that The Mask of Fu Manchu is a beautifully appointed film. Cedric Gibbons‘ art direction, Adrian‘s lavish costumes and Tony Gaudio‘s atmospheric photography conspire to give the film an “A” movie sheen that rewarded producers MGM with a sizable box office hit. The film rode the wave of popularity set in motion the first of Universal’s classic horror films, cannily borrowing not only one of their biggest genre stars in Karloff but also Kenneth Strickfaden who brought his bag of whizzing, sparking and flaming electrical tricks with him (he’s very noticeably doubling for Karloff in some scenes involving his props). But good looks can be deceptive and there are more than a few problems with The Mask of Fu Manchu.
We might as well address the elephant in the room straight away. Yes, The Mask of Fu Manchu is a remarkably racist film. Fu Manchu is dismissed as a “yellow monster”, the villain’s line urging his acolytes to “conquer and breed – kill the white man and take his women” caused much offence and Nayland Smith’s vision of a world in the grip of the Chinese borders on the hysterical. Fu Manchu had long been always beset by charges of overt racism. In the books, the white characters cite the controversial writer Bayard Taylor as an authority on the Chines based on his extremist views of the people as depraved and morally indefensible, views based on no substance whatsoever.
The Chinese government was, by all accounts, less than impressed by The Mask of Fu Manchu‘s representation of its people and with good cause. It’s a problem that’s dogged screen adaptation of Rohmer‘s work since the beginning and which goes a very long way to explaining why Fu Manchu isn’t as oft-filmed a character as Sherlock Holmes, Dracula or Frankenstein, particularly in more recent years. In 1932, the Chinese embassy formally complained to the American government about the film and when it was re-released in 1972 it faced picketing at several US cinemas. When the film debuted on home video in 1992, several of the more contentious scenes had been trimmed or removed entirely, cuts apparently made in 1972 to lessen the offence.
One can’t help but wonder if the violence in The Mask of Fu Manchu – particularly the sexual violence – was so marked because director Charles Vidor, writers Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf and John Willard (author of the play The Cat and the Canary) and producers MGM felt that it justified some of the other characters’ hatred for Fu Manchu and his followers. Indeed the vitriol is so outrageous at times that almost plays like some sort of strange, misguided parody.
That may or may not be the case, but in truth the racism is just one of the problems that beset The Mask of Fu Manchu. The script is a mess, giving all the impression of having been put together on the fly (which is indeed largely what happened) and Vidor‘s attempts to spice things up a bit with torture and fistfights fail to address the film’s structural issues. Not that Vidor, trying to make his first feature film, was there for the whole production – he was replaced by Charles Brabin who takes the on-screen credit and more than often the production issues are obvious. But the real problem lies in the script – the film feels too often like a compressed serial, falling back to readily on fist fights and daring escapes to keep the lumpen plot moving along. There’s a certain pulpy madness to it all but it’s never quite as satisfying as it should be – a lot of the lower budget serials of the time are more exciting than this.
Sheila’s tearful declaration of love for Granville releases him from the “spell” that Fu Manchu has placed him under is very silly indeed, there’s not a great deal to depth to the villains (they’re just sadistic monsters getting their cheap thrills against lavish backdrops) and even at a brisk 68 minutes in its original, uncut form, it runs the risk of outstaying its welcome before it comes to a surprisingly abrupt end with a silly bit of additional xenophobia to put the Chinese “back in their place” as an epilogue.
The best reason for seeing the film today is a couple of the performances. Most of the cast are just there, perfectly adequate without being particularly outstanding. But there’s a lot of fun to be had with the exuberant turn by Myrna Loy, whose sexually charged Fah Lo See responds with eye-popping enthusiasm to the torture of a shirtless Granville, an inappropriately orgasmic response accompanied by enthusiastic cries of “faster! Faster!” “That scene was really the last straw,” she wrote in her 1987 autobiography Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, co-written with James Kotsilibas-Davis. “I’d been reading Freud, and apparently the writers hadn’t. ‘I can’t do this,’ I told our producer, Hunt Stromberg. ‘I’ve done a lot of terrible things in films, but this girl’s a sadistic nymphomaniac’.”
Despite her qualms, she’s very good in the role but the film really belongs to Karloff, positively grotesque behind Cecil Holland‘s make-up and seemingly having a high old time with the part. Fu Manchu may not have been as indelibly memorable as Frankenstein but he’s far more monstrous (we first see him with his face distorted in a mirror), entirely devoid of any of the sympathy that Karloff and director James Whale had managed to generate for the monster in Universal’s Frankenstein (1931). He makes no attempt to adopt a cod-Chinese accent which would have only made matters even worse than they were but spits out his often absurd dialogue (“You cursed son of a white dog – I’ll flail you for this!”) with real relish.
The film was a hit, but MGM decided not to press forward with a follow up. Fu Manchu returned in a Republic serial, The Drums of Fu Manchu in 1940 with Henry Brandon in the title role and the Spanish spoof El otro Fu-Man-Chú six years later but then vanished from our screens for a quarter of century until Christopher Lee took over the role for a quintet of films produced by Harry Alan Towers – The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969). When Peter Sellers spoofed the part in 1980s witless The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu it marked the end of the cinematic road for the character. One would imagine that, despite his claims that “the world has not heard the last of me” in the Lee films, we won’t be seeing him on screen again soon.
Crew
Directed by: Charles Brabin, Charles Vidor [uncredited]; Copyright MCMXXXII in U.S.A. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents a Cosmopolitan Production. Controlled by Loew’s Incorporated; Screen Play by: Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf and John Willard; From the Story by: Sax Rohmer; Photographed by: Tony Gaudio; Film Editor: Ben Lewis; Music: William Axt [uncredited]; Gowns by: Adrian; Make Up: Cecil Holland [uncredited]; Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Cast
Boris Karloff (Dr Fu Manchu); Lewis Stone (Nayland Smith); Karen Morley (Sheila); Charles Starrett (Terrence Granville); Myrna Loy (Fah Lo See); Jean Hersholt (Von Berg); Lawrence Grant (Sir Lionel Barton); David Torrence (McLeod); Willie Fung [ship’s steward – uncredited]; Ferdinand Gottschalk, C. Montague Shaw [British Museum officials – uncredited]; E. Allyn Warren [Fu Manchu messenger – uncredited]
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