Roar of the Dragon

A collection of natives and Westerners barricade themselves in an old Chinese inn against the onslaught of fierce Tartar bandits.

ROAR OF THE DRAGON is a very fine adventure film, with suspense & humor, plenty of excitement, first rate production values and good acting. It is indeed difficult to find anything to dislike about the movie and it stands up nicely to comparison with other similarly themed pictures of the period - SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) & THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933).

Richard Dix creates another sturdy performance as the alcoholic riverboat captain who takes charge in defending the folks sheltering in the inn. Dix gives us a character who's sensible, brave and absolutely no nonsense in dealing with deadly danger. But the film has another champion as well, and this one refreshingly unlikely. Wonderful character actor Edward Everett Horton eschews his normal Nervous Nellie nuances and rewards us with a civil servant who vigorously fights back against the terrorists, heroically aiding Dix despite terrible odds. He even gets to enjoy some tender romance before the film ends, leaving us with a most memorable characterization.

Two lovely ladies grace the film - Gwili Andre as the mysterious gun-toting doll sought by the bandit chief and Arline Judge as the girl from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who finds love in the most unexpected place. Comedienne ZaSu Pitts plays the timid Lady from Omaha, thoroughly regretting her decision to travel around the world. Dudley Digges is the cowardly owner of the stranded riverboat, degraded enough to steal goat's milk from orphans. C. Henry Gordon is delightfully repulsive as the Russian leader of the bandits, whom we first encounter cauterizing the remains of his left ear, bitten off by Dix in a previous encounter.

Movie mavens will spot an uncredited Willie Fung at the end of the picture playing a Chinese sailor.

In Manchuria, bandits besiege a group of westerners. While Richard Dix tries to figure out how to get them out of there, bandit leader C. Henry Gordon wants Gwili Andre.

Ever wanted to see a movie in which Edward Everett Horton mows down a bunch of marauders with a machine gun, and dies heroically? Here's your chance. For a performer best remembered for his many comedies, the only man to ever master the triple take, Horton acquits himself quite well. But then, I've always maintained that anyoneone can suffer on the screen; it takes something extra to do comedy.

The other performer worth commenting on is Miss Andre in her screen premiere. Director Wesley Ruggles keeps her speaking to a minimum, and has her posing a lot in profile, and it's quite a profile. It's no wonder she was a model. But her career as an actress is not impressive: fourteen films through 1941. She died in 1959 at the age of 52.

Other performers in this movie include Arline Judge, Zasu Pitts, and Dudley Digges.

Richard Dix was excellent in this movie. I don't know if it was the direction or the fact that his character was drunk most of the time, but the improvement over the Secret Service a yr. earlier was very pronounced. He had subtlety, complexity and nuance here. In the earlier, he was very stagy. Never heard of Gwili Andre before (or since) but she was extraordinarily beautiful and she could act. She must have been a model. The whole cast was very good.

Almost everything else I planned to say has been said by someone else here-- this is unusually zippy for a movie by the normally mediocre Wesley Ruggles, that big lummox Richard Dix is unusually animated and even amusing at times, the production design and cinematography are very handsome (and female leads Andre and Judge ain't bad to look at either), it's probably the only movie in which Edward Everett Horton handles a machine gun (although he does prove pretty handy with a pistol in 1938's Wild Money), and while the movie seems a bit underwritten (or more likely written in 3 days), it's pretty everything you could want from a 68-minute pre-Code B movie.

The other interesting thing I would note is that it could have inspired bits in two much more famous movies-- the whole opening, in which news of a bandit's rampage is conveyed by telegraph until the moment that the bandit's men chop down the telegraph pole, plays like a dry run for the much more famous and accomplished opening of Stagecoach-- and it's hard to think that's an accident when you know that co-writer, and RKO producer during this time, Merian C. Cooper (of King Kong fame) would soon work with John Ford on The Lost Patrol (as well as on most of his immediate postwar work). The connection with Howard Hawks is less obvious, but when you consider the situation (tough guy Dix surrounded in compound with a bunch of people whose ability to defend themselves is doubtful), and then hear him refer to Arline Judge by a nickname-- the town she was from ("Bridgeport")-- and hear her answer in a deep, insolent Betty Bacall-Angie Dickinson drawl, there's a definite whiff of the much later Rio Bravo, in which John Wayne is holed up with a bunch of questionable help and a girl called Feathers.

I liked it. I thought that it was a pretty decent B-movie for its time. I have one question that maybe someone can answer, though. I thought that I heard "I'll Never Smile Again" playing throughout the soundtrack but, while looking it up, saw that that song wasn't written until 1940. Am I mistaken?