Mask of the Dragon

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").

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!

I warn you, folks, you deal here with a Sam Newfield's movie, a chain produced and directed material, as thousands of others. Sam Newfield the director was a great specialist, providing five or seven - sometimes more - films per year. You have understood that he had not time to be careful with each of those features. He just filled the blanks, as a chain worker in a car factory. So, please, don't be too harsh to him. This is a total forgettable movie, unlike Sam Newwfield's THREE DESPERATE MEN, his best film for me. Maybe he had more time to be involved. This is a mystery, detective yarn, with some "exotic" charm, to give the feeling to audiences to travel. Chinatown provided so many plots for the movie industry.