MGM, which issued this comic book of a movie, made it easy for viewers to figure out that its movies were exotic. The men always wore white suits and pith helmets. When it was REALLY exotic, they wore pistols and boots too.
Lewis Stone is Sir Nayland Smith who leads an expedition into deepest Mongolia to unearth the hidden burial place of Genghis Khan and steal his sword and his mask. There is a certain urgency attached to the task. The notorious arch-fiend Dr. Fu Manchu wants to beat them to it and raise all Asia against the West, and he has spies everywhere. They're even hidden in the British Museum disguised as mummies. I'm afraid I had to call him "doctor" because he insisted on it in the movie. He has -- let me think -- a PhD from Edinburgh, a JD from Pace, and an MD from Harvard. In none of these places did they teach him to trim his fingernails.
The story is too complicated to spell out here, and besides I nodded out for a few minutes somewhere around the point at which the white folks are captured and the hysterical blond babe is spread out on the altar in a flowing dress of virginal white and Dr. Fu is poised above her, prepared to baptize the sword of Genghis Khan in her blood, just before he and the horde of Yellow Perils is wiped out by the death ray gun that the muscular hero has stolen and is now wielding from a hole in the ceiling and then -- then -- yes, that's where I nodded out. One of the duller moments.
I don't know. Some people find this sort of vulgar trash thrilling, but I found it boring. Granted, it was never intended to be more than a comic book of a movie but I quit reading comic books when I was a kid. (We called them "funnybooks".) We used to buy them and then trade with each other. I remember Wayne Bigg tried to cheat me once by inserting one comic book into the pages of another. The swine. I wonder what became of Wayne Bigg. Probably in jail.
It's not a BAD movie, not bad enough to be amusing in itself. It's exactly what it set out to be. If you can vibrate with joy at the sight of Boris Karloff in outrageous Mandarin make up, his features lighted from below, sneering racist agitprop, then this is your kind of movie.
Maybe we owe it to ourselves anyway to see this compounded Saturday afternoon serial. The name of Fu Manchu has become part of our vernacular lexicon. I mean Dr. Fu Manchu of course.
Lewis Stone is Sir Nayland Smith who leads an expedition into deepest Mongolia to unearth the hidden burial place of Genghis Khan and steal his sword and his mask. There is a certain urgency attached to the task. The notorious arch-fiend Dr. Fu Manchu wants to beat them to it and raise all Asia against the West, and he has spies everywhere. They're even hidden in the British Museum disguised as mummies. I'm afraid I had to call him "doctor" because he insisted on it in the movie. He has -- let me think -- a PhD from Edinburgh, a JD from Pace, and an MD from Harvard. In none of these places did they teach him to trim his fingernails.
The story is too complicated to spell out here, and besides I nodded out for a few minutes somewhere around the point at which the white folks are captured and the hysterical blond babe is spread out on the altar in a flowing dress of virginal white and Dr. Fu is poised above her, prepared to baptize the sword of Genghis Khan in her blood, just before he and the horde of Yellow Perils is wiped out by the death ray gun that the muscular hero has stolen and is now wielding from a hole in the ceiling and then -- then -- yes, that's where I nodded out. One of the duller moments.
I don't know. Some people find this sort of vulgar trash thrilling, but I found it boring. Granted, it was never intended to be more than a comic book of a movie but I quit reading comic books when I was a kid. (We called them "funnybooks".) We used to buy them and then trade with each other. I remember Wayne Bigg tried to cheat me once by inserting one comic book into the pages of another. The swine. I wonder what became of Wayne Bigg. Probably in jail.
It's not a BAD movie, not bad enough to be amusing in itself. It's exactly what it set out to be. If you can vibrate with joy at the sight of Boris Karloff in outrageous Mandarin make up, his features lighted from below, sneering racist agitprop, then this is your kind of movie.
Maybe we owe it to ourselves anyway to see this compounded Saturday afternoon serial. The name of Fu Manchu has become part of our vernacular lexicon. I mean Dr. Fu Manchu of course.