Mask of the Dragon

Director Sam Newfield and his producer brother ground out movie cheapies like sausages, all made with the smelly meat scraps you don't want to know about. The point was to squeeze production costs until the squealing almost stops and keep the factory busy with low-cost actors, writers and production crews. If costs could be kept low enough, then almost any ticket sold, no matter how few, would yield a penny or two of profit. The movies were booked strictly as cheap filler. They are classic examples of how it is always possible to produce things of lower quality than you'd think possible.

The Mask of the Dragon has to do with a jade dragon from Korea, an investigation into a murder, the discovery of a smuggling ring and the deadly secret behind the dragon. The bizarre, abysmal quality of the movie is vividly evident by the occasional background music...generic thrills played on, wait for it, an organ. Newfield adds a couple of cowboy songs for good measure.

Mask Of The Dragon has young Richard Emory killed almost immediately after coming home to America after Korean war service. Before that he had agreed to help a Korean dealer in Oriental artifacts get a Chinese jade statue into the USA.

Watching this it occurred to me that ever since 9/11 we are all warned and asked at airports not to accept packages from strangers. You would think someone in the army and a private detective would know better.

So like in The Maltese Falcon your partner is supposed to do something about it when you're killed and this film does have some similarities to The Maltese Falcon updated for the Cold War. Of course the plot and the characters aren't halfway as interesting.

I think you've figured out there is smuggling afoot here, but when you see the film I think you'll agree that the smuggling might have made more sense going out of the USA instead of coming in.

Richard Travis as the Sam Spade of the piece and Sheila Ryan as a CSI investigator and Lyle Talbot of the LAPD try to solve the homicide of Emory and later of Dee Tatum a singer stabbed through a curtain on the Johnny Grant Show. Sid Melton plays one of the bad guys and he was Lippert Pictures house comedian. In this film his comedy is very forced.

Dashiell Hammett if he saw this film would have been mortified at what was done to his masterpiece.

This film has only one thing to recommend it. The frankly hilarious portrayal of devious Korean "Prof. Kim Ho" by an outrageously badly cast Jack Reitzen. The rest of this procedural adventure centres around an American soldier "Oliver" (Richard Emory) who promises to repatriate a jade dragon with the aforementioned Professor at his Los Angeles shop. Thing is, though, he doesn't last long enough when he gets home and it now falls to his pal "Ramsey" (Richard Travis) and his gal "Ginny" (Sheila Ryan) - who now possess this valuable curio - to get to the bottom of the murder before they, too, find themselves goners. The title evokes "Fu Manchu" or "Charlie Chan" style adventures, but sadly Sam Newfield and his cast of no-hopers delivers us more in the line of a badly scripted and poorly directed C-feature that is peppered with a couple of seriously rotten set-piece musical numbers and some contrived comedy banter (from Sid Melton) that might kill an hour at a drive-in. I really wouldn't bother!

MASK OF THE DRAGON was bundled with a George Raft film (MAN FROM CAIRO) on a DVD entitled "Forgotten Noir". Well, this really isn't an example of Noir, though it is a film best forgotten!!

This review is for the non-heavily edited version, though at 53 minutes this is still a very short B-film. Later, this film was cut way down so it would fit in a half hour time slot on television. Believe it or not, editing the film that severely wasn't that difficult, as there was a lot of padding to this rather thin story. Several songs by a cowboy trio and a comedy routine by Sid Melton were definitely oddly included in this film.

By the way, including Sid Melton is odd since he's such a little guy and seems ill-placed as a member of a vicious gang. Plus, he alternates between being a heavy and comic relief. You may remember his as "Alf Monroe" from GREEN ACRES--a long way from a crime drama!

As for the plot, a service man is returning home from the Korean War. A Korean merchant asks him to take a package with him and the dumbbell agrees--even though you would assume this is part of a smuggling operation. Not surprisingly, the guy is killed and the package disappears. So it's up to our dull hero to come to the rescue and figure out who was responsible and why.

This film has B-movie written all over it--with a super-low budget and a lineup of B-actors (such as Lyle Talbot--the unofficial King of the Bs). Melton basically plays his role like he's a vaudevillian doing stand-up. Compared to other Bs, this one is sub-par--because of clumsy writing, broadness of the acting and horrid music (it was all done on an organ--talk about "Über-cheesy").

This second feature from ''Quickie King'' Robert Lippert is fairly amusing, in it's (very)unambitious way. When ''Hero''Richard Travis' Army Sergeant pal is murdered shortly after he returns from the Orient, He and his lab technician girlfriend (Sheila Ryan) find themselves in the middle of the investigation. This leads them to a group of smugglers, working out of a Chinatown curio shop in downtown Los Angeles. Not to mention an almost completely beside the point interlude at a local TV station. Here, what there is of the story grinds to a halt while a Singing Cowboy act is shoehorned in to perform two unnecessary (and unwelcome) musical numbers, and character actor Sid Melton tries out what looks like a weak comedy act on an adjoining stage. He's accompanied by one of the worst no-name ''Actresses'' ever seen on film. (And, naturally, this one was never seen again.)

Luckily, the story (eventually) resumes. Director Sam Neufeld obviously had no idea how to handle the TV station segment, so it plays like an ''Amatuer Hour'' contest. The rest is strictly point the camera and shoot. And the stock footage used sticks out like a sore thumb. Although the supporting cast boasts a few vaguely familiar faces, the most prominent is prolific character actor Melton, who made 18 films for Lippert. He's playing a small-time crook in league with the smugglers, who, for no discernible reason, dresses up (unconvincingly) as an Oriental from time to time, and stands in front of the curio shop shop spouting Pidgin English. Most of the Oriental characters are played by occidental actors (par for the course in those days) with accents so thick it's hard to understand them-all except for Melton, who speaks with an unmistakable Brooklyn inflection.One of the few authentic Orientals is a burly wrestler billed as ''The Great Mr. Moto'' (whoever that is) whose main function is to playfully push partner in crime Melton around. ''Mask Of The Dragon'' like Lippert's other epics, was made simply to draw a fast buck and fill the bottom half of a double bill. Even at that, this one is about rock-bottom in terms of production values.(It wasn't called a ''Spartan Production'' for nothing.) The commentator on the very good-looking DVD (from VCI ENTERTAINMENT) does go on (and on) about the quality of the ''sets'', though they look like actual shops, offices, apartments, etc.It's hardly likely they were built for this film alone. The rest is mostly scene after scene of talk, with occasional bouts of comic violence.If that doesn't grab you, almost all of the background score is played on an Organ (!).This unique addition, for better or worse, reminds one of the old soap opera's from the Golden Days Of Radio, where each (hopefully) shocking incident was punctuated with a blast of the old Wurlitzer. Here, it makes an already pretty silly movie that much funnier. Though it clocks in at under an hour, it still feels padded, thanks to the singing cowboys and listless jokes that hit the ground like rocks. This was obviously an attempt to stretch the running time to the length of a feature, but it failed miserably. In fact, a few years later, the film was cut to 25 minutes and shown that way on TV. And, probably, all the useless bits filmed on the fictional TV show were eliminated, along with the songs. Still, Travis and Ryan are a fairly engaging pair of Heroes (Spunky Ms. Ryan would have made a lovely Lois Lane) and Melton, believe it or not, is occasionally amusing in an idiotic sort of way. He went on to greater fame as ''Alf Monroe'' on the comedy series ''Green Acres''.Strangely enough, he's not the only one here with a ''Green Acres'' connection. Leading Lady Ryan eventually married Pat Buttram,who played''Mr. Haney'' on the same show. Once again, the gaudy, colorful posters created for this film , promise much more than it ever delivers. Still, though ''Mask Of The Dragon'' is no classic, Lippert and Neufeld have done worse.See ''Fingerprints Don't Lie'' (filmed-back to back with this one featuring most of the same cast) for proof of that.