The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu

...and you'll feel like watching this film was time well spent. Perhaps it was the job Warner Oland did here as Fu Manchu that got him the role of Charlie Chan over at Fox, because he is sensational in the part. He transitions from humanitarian to a one-man killing machine on a quest for vengeance against those he holds responsible for the death of his wife and only child. Their deaths occur in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion when a troop of soldiers fire on Fu Manchu's house. The Europeans are after the boxers, and Fu Manchu's family is just collateral damage to them. At the time of the rebellion, Fu Manchu has a young two year old European female ward (Jean Arthur). He uses the power of hypnotism he holds over her to get her to help in his dirty work without her ever remembering anything that happened.

Twenty years later Fu Manchu has killed off all those he finds responsible except one man and his offspring, and this leads him to England. A detective from Scotland Yard figures out what is going on, and the surviving family members including Fu's ward are holed up in an old dark house trying to get the Chinese mastermind to show himself. The complicating factor is that one of Fu Manchu's targets (Neil Hamilton) and Fu Manchu's ward (Jean Arthur) have fallen in love.

This film is pretty static, but then it is one of the first talking films and the placement of the microphone and camera demanded this. Oland and Hamilton are great in their roles, and everybody else is OK except Jean Arthur. She is really playing this one over the top, like she thinks she is still in a silent picture and expecting the villain to tie her to a railroad track at any instance. She doesn't give a glimpse of the great performances that are to come.

Watch this one for Warner Oland, for the atmosphere, and for the general touch of class you find in all of the early Paramount talkies.

Without checking, I'll hazard a guess that very few of the Chinese characters in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu are actually from the East. Certainly none of the main oriental characters are, with Warner Oland leading the way in 'yellowface' to play Sax Rohmer's sadistic villain Fu Manchu. I guess no Chinese actor would be happy to play the role given how anti-Asian the story is, the film playing upon the West's fear of the 'yellow peril'.

The film opens in 1900, during the anti-foreign uprising in China known as the Boxer Rebellion. Reverend Mr. Eltham sends his young daughter Lia to the safety of the house of Fu Manchu (Oland); however, when Western gunfire kills Fu Manchu's wife and child, the once affable Chinaman vows to take revenge, and, years later, uses Lia (Jean Arthur) to get even with those responsible.

An early talkie, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu is technically crude, with the performers clearly struggling to make the transition from silent to sound. Thus we get quite stagey, over-the-top melodramatics from many of the cast, with Oland being seriously hammy as the antagonist. In a way, I feel that this adds to the charm of the piece, although I can see why some might find the performances a problem. My main issue with the film is that it is OVERLY talky, as though director Rowland V. Lee wanted to make the absolute most of this new advancement in movie-making: as is often the case with cartoonish villains, Fu Manchu doesn't just kill his enemies and be done with it -- he tries to bore them to death first with a long speech about his incredible intellect.

Unsurprisingly, Fu Manchu's superior mind proves no match for Inspector Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard, who outsmarts the villain, rescuing Lia and handsome Dr. Jack Petrie (descendant of a General at the Boxer Rebellion) from a gruesome death in the nick of time.

The eponymous Chinese gentlemen is sure that his house will be safe during the famous Boxer revolution that attempted to drive the foreign devils from their country at the start of the 20th century. Reduced to just the British legation, though, the Europeans fight back and his home is accidentally struck resulting in a devastating tragedy. This kindly gent now swears vengeance on those who instigated those killings and over a period of years, he narrows down his dwindling list of targets to just the London-based "Petrie" family. Luckily, Scotland Yard's finest - "Insp. Nayland Smith" (O. P. Heggie) is on the case to try and stop the body count from mounting - but is he a match for the fiendishly clever "Fu Manchu" (Warner Oland)? It's probably about twenty minutes too long this - and most of that could be cut from the rather meandering denouement; but Oland makes for quite an entertainingly vengeful villain and Heggie turns in a decent effort too as the shrewd detective. Otherwise, the lighting needed extra wattage and the dialogue maybe a little less verbiage as the story takes us down loads of secret passages and introduces us to the unforgiving ancestors. I actually had some sympathy with the baddies all along here and quite enjoyed this mystically charged thriller.

Yes this movie is very dated. I've been watching movies for over 65 years, even at 10 years old I was watching the, then, oldies on television. I've experienced the full gamut of movie styles, production techniques, acting dynamics and technology, so I can happily and easily get into a movie from this era. Yes, its very melodramatic, over acted, a bit stilted like a stage play, but the story is intriguing, the acting works for the era, the sets are good, and the movie has a dynamic that works. I understand that not everyone can enjoy these golden oldies for what were, only seeing them through the eyes of the 22nd century. If you can, this is actually quite a classic and very absorbing. I liked it.

An important artifact in Orientalist cinema. Dr Fu is given a sympathetic origin story, which reads easily as a cautionary tale for the colonial collaborator. After the Brits initiated the Opium Wars in order to loot China, they mercilessly put down the \ Boxer Rebellion with unprecedented foreign imperialist support -- the US was also complicit -- and unprecedented savagery (Boxers were strapped to canons which where then fired, for example). Fu is an intellectual who is friendly to the Whites, quite blind to the carnage around him until they kill his family while cannonading Boxer partisans in his courtyard. From here, things move to the heartland of the Empire in London and Fu uses a sort of mustard gas powder to kill off the commanders who initiated the attack. One of Fu's weapons is a white girl he saved and raised. Her hypnotic trance walk and attempted assassination of an upper class Brit is the greatest scene in the film, capturing some true delirium and sensuality a la German Expressionism. Warner Oland gives it his all, charming the camera with his death jokes and cackling with great devilish chivalry as the imperialists die. The climax offers an in-joke on the pulp novels of people like Sax Rohmer, the racist hack who invented the Fu Manchu mythos. Despite these moments, the film is still somewhat set bound. But Rowland V Lee, a fine workman, keeps things zipping along. Apparently, Joseph Mankiewicz added to the script and the racy Pre-Code atmosphere is palpable, if not over the top. There were two sequels, of which the third, 'Daughter of the Dragon' with the great Anna May Wong, is especially lunatic and memorable.