Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee series)

The Face of Fu Manchu 

This surprisingly classy production was the first and best in a series of Fu Manchu films made by exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers and starring Christopher Lee. The Face of Fu Manchu is an interesting attempt to straddle both the Anglo-Horror cycle created by Hammer Films, from which Harry Alan Towers employs Hammer’s star player Christopher Lee, and the then rage for James Bond films. [Which is somewhat ironic considering that Ian Fleming fairly much borrowed the Fu Manchu character when he created the title character in Dr No (1962)]. It is an approach that does not entirely jell – the Anglo-Horror element is sometimes deliberately bent out of shape to include the staple car chases and fisticuffs of the Bond films. It also results in the inclusion of often jarringly anachronistic gadgetry like 
directional mikes and radio headsets amid the clearly Edwardian period setting. 

But on other angles The Face of Fu Manchu cannot be faulted. It was the finest film from Don Sharp, usually a director who rarely rose above the hack end of the Anglo-Horror cycle. (See below for Don Sharp’s other films). Sharp’s nicely clipped direction keeps the film swiftly moving. The opening beheading of Christopher Lee is a particularly strong lead-in. And there is at least one vividly memorable sequence – the haunting moment where the hypnotized scientist Harry Brogan, previously a character played for a certain buffoonery, complains he is tired whereupon Christopher Lee hands him a dagger. The array of 
ermines, silks and robes in pinks, purples and canary yellows are eye-catchingly gorgeous, all the more so in being placed up against the formidably grim location work at Dublin’s disused Kilmarkham jail. 

Christopher Lee gives a solid performance as Fu Manchu, although it is noticeably really only Lee in an epicanthic makeup job and drooping mustache and is otherwise the same familiar Lee dark presence and clipped delivery. He gets a most wonderful foil in the casting of Nigel Green as Sir Dennis, who plays with a wonderfully steely, dignified determination and a sense of moral reproach that accompanies him like a halo. The part was recast in the next two films with Douglas Wilmer who had a stolidity, entirely lacking in the presence that Green brings here. (Moria) 

Brides of Fu Manchu 

The second of Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films. Towers brings back many of the elements that made the first film, The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), a success – director Don Sharp and stars Christopher Lee, Howard Marion Crawford and Tsai Chin. Although this entry is bereft of Nigel Green, Face’s wonderfully authoritative Nayland Smith, with Douglas Wilmer proving a stodgy replacement. The plot is also very similar to the first film – Fu Manchu again out to bring down the British Empire by kidnapping scientists and using hypnosis to force them to create a death weapon. 

But the way Brides moves, hurtling its large cast of characters from subplot to subplot without let-up, makes for a highly entertaining blend of pulp super-science, period melodrama and Yellow Peril that is almost as good as the first film. The opening with a girl hung over a pit of snakes, prevented from falling only by her bound hair, which Fu Manchu then forces one of the hypnotized daughters to cut in front of her dumbstruck father and then threatening to make the daughter remember lest he cooperate is fabulous. The title however is a sensationalistic cheat – there being nothing in the film whatsoever to indicate that Fu Manchu is married, let alone multiply so. 

Vengeance of Fu Manchu 

This was the third of Harry Alan Towers’ Fu Manchu films. It is generally considered that the series went downhill after the first entry The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and particularly during director Jesus Franco’s last two entries. Two of the strengths throughout the series were Christopher Lee’s icily inscrutable performance, which was always finely balanced out by Tsai Chin as his dedicated-to-the-death daughter, and the fine period production values, which are marked here by a return to Ireland’s Kilmarnock jail which added immeasurably to the look of the first film. All of these are up to scratch once again here, but in most 
other regards the film is a routine effort. 

The plot lacks a real credibility – Fu Manchu’s rather far-fetched world domination plot this time around involves creating surgical doubles of all the top police officials around the world, placing the doubles in trances and sending them to kill. As a plot it is all over the place – there seem long subplots that don’t really go anywhere such as the one involving Moss’s girlfriend’s stint as a Shanghai nightclub singer, and a surfeit of characters. The film also makes the mistake of trying to turn the hanging of the Nayland Smith double into suspense – while Dr Petrie doesn’t know it is a double we do and it feels rather false when director 
Summers tries to make us involved in the race against time to save ‘Nayland Smith’ because it doesn’t really matter to us whether the double is hung or not. The surgical techniques involved in the facial reconstruction are far too advanced for the film’s time period, least of all for a lone missionary operating amidst the Chinese peasantry. Wilmer does the iron-willed moral imperative thing with typical stolidity as Nayland Smith. The film was German financed and casts Germans as Americans with bizarrely unconvincing results. 

Blood of Fu Manchu 

The fourth of the five Towers-Lee Fu flicks, The Blood Of Fu Manchu, is quite simply a bloody mess. The wafer-thin plot revolves around — what else? — Fu's latest scheme for global conquest. From his fortress hideout, a "lost" city somewhere in the South American jungle, he plots to unleash a deadly poison on the world unless all nations swear fealty to his rule. The first step in the plan is to assassinate his ten greatest enemies — with Nayland-Smith (this time played by Richard Greene) at the top of the hit list. This is to be achieved via the "Kiss of Death", a lethal lip-lock administered by a bevy of hypnotized babes. The women, inoculated with the poison through snakebites, are to seek out their individual targets and kiss them. Within seconds the victim goes blind, followed by a slow, agonizing death. (Just what exactly keeps the assassins from succumbing to the poison isn't really explained.) As planned, Nayland-Smith is incapacitated when a beautiful woman shows up unannounced at his London home, unexpectedly rushing into his arms and kissing him. The mystery woman is killed while fleeing the scene, hit by a car in the street. Though 
Nayland-Smith is struck blind, he's helped by his Watson-like companion, Dr. Petrie (Howard Marion-Crawford), to take ship for South America. The ace detective is convinced that Fu Manchu has his base there; the deadly kiss reminds him of an old Inca legend. He also has one of his top agents stationed in the region, a German adventurer named Carl Jansen, who can assist them once they arrive. 

The story then switches to Jansen (Götz George), trekking through the jungle in search of Fu's hideout. Escaping an ambush laid by Fu's private army, Jansen is arrested by the provincial governor and forced to play chess with him. (???) A missionary nurse (The Bloody Judge's Maria Rohm, wife of producer Towers) is then thrown into the mix, as is a fat, boorish bandit chief (Ricardo Palacios) who finds himself on the wrong side of both Fu Manchu and the good guys. Bridging these various plot threads are scenes of Fu and his reptilian daughter, Lin Tang (Tsai Chin of You Only Live Twice), barking orders to their henchmen or threatening captives in the dungeon. Since the flick's nominal hero, Nayland-Smith, is put out of the action early on, I suppose there was little alternative but to focus on these other characters. The result is a rather schizophrenic movie which bounces around to no real purpose — very little is actually going on. This scattershot effect is only exacerbated by the sudden, jarring inclusion of a lengthy scene from another Franco-Towers flick, The Girl From Rio (also from 1968), starring Goldfinger's Shirley Eaton. Apparently added to the film for padding purposes, this footage is woefully out of place; it adds nothing to the story and destroys all attempts at period detail. (The Fu films are set in the '20s, while the Girl From Rio clip shows 1960s fashions, cars, and architecture.) Conclusive proof — as if that were really needed — that the filmmakers just didn't give a damn. 

So yeah, the flick's pretty bad. Nevertheless I found it mildly diverting. Fortunately the cheese is laid on pretty thick. It also doesn't hurt that Franco ups the sleaze factor — at least in this uncut version — by including some naked chicks in chains, a move that has never proven detrimental to any movie as far as I'm concerned. The action sequences are laughably dumb... I was sweating bullets (NOT!) during the tense struggle between Jansen and one of Fu's killers atop a log spanning a gorge all of 5 feet deep. One fight scene (if you can call it that — it's really just two guys rolling around in the bushes, over and over) seems to last an eternity and is out of focus almost the entire time. (Not exactly an uncommon occurrence in a Franco film.) As the bandit leader Sancho Lopez, Palacios pretty much steals the movie; he's a Latin version of John Belushi in Chris Farley's body. We even get a dance number from him! And Christopher Lee's rigid, straight-faced stoicism amid the ludicrous dialog and situations is an abject lesson in Goal Visualization. This is exactly how people are able to muck out port-a-potties for a living. Think of the paycheck. 

Castle of Fu Manchu 

JESUS! 

No, not an oath invoking the deity or even my reaction to this terrible movie. It's a cry of admonition aimed at the director, Jesus "Jess" Franco, who destroyed Fu Manchu as thoroughly as the crime lord's mortal enemy, Nayland-Smith, ever hoped to. The Castle Of Fu Manchu, with horror icon Christopher Lee again reprising the title role, was a total stink-bomb everywhere it played, and for good reason. Its predecessor, The Blood Of Fu Manchu (1968), wasn't very good either, but at least that film was odd enough and cheesy enough to be mildly entertaining. Castle just smells. It's cheap, shoddy and dull, wasteful of a decent cast as well as the viewer's time. 

Fu Manchu's plan this time is to freeze the earth's oceans unless the major powers accept his dictatorial rule. (You'd think that after failing so often this so-called criminal genius would finally get a clue and set slightly more modest goals.) To demonstrate his power Fu creates an iceberg in the path of a passenger liner sailing in the Caribbean. The ship strikes the unexpected obstacle and sinks with great loss of life. Per his usual M.O., Fu broadcasts a radio message to the world claiming responsibility for the incident and threatening bigger disasters to come unless his demands are met. This time, however, the crime lord's 
ambitions have outpaced his ability to follow through — his freezing process isn't quite perfected yet. In the course of sinking the liner the machinery in his secret base overheats and blows up, wrecking everything. Fu is forced to relocate while he works out the kinks in his scheme. 

Phase One of Plan B involves procuring a new headquarters. In a plot thread that wastes a lot of screen time to little effect, Fu's daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin) enlists the aid of an Istanbul gangster, Omar Pasha (Jose Manuel Martin), to mount a raid on a castle overlooking the Black Sea, which is occupied by a provincial governor. Omar Pasha's henchmen — including his prized cross-dressing female assassin, Lisa (Lady Frankenstein's Rosalba Neri) — take care of the dirty work, eliminating the castle guards. (The sadistic Lin Tang gets the honor of beheading the befuddled governor.) Fu Manchu then promptly double-crosses Omar's gang, his own flunkies wiping them out with the exception of Lisa, who intrigues him. ("She fights like a man.") Fu and company move into their new digs and set up shop; Lisa is ensconced below in the Dungeon of Multicolored Lighting Gels. 

On to Phase Two. Fu needs help perfecting his freezing technique. It seems some kind of chemical compound derived from opium (!) is used to make the special crystals essential for the insta-freeze process. Prof. Heracles (Gustavo Re), the altruistic scientist whose theories made the ice weapon possible, has been kidnapped to get the proper formula. Problem is, Heracles is rapidly dying from a defective heart. Thus Fu has the professor's physician, German heart specialist Dr. Kessler (Günther Stoll), abducted along with Kessler's attractive nurse, Ingrid (Maria Perschy). Kessler is ordered to perform a heart transplant on Heracles, keeping him alive long enough to get the needed information. If he refuses, Ingrid will be tortured to death. While all this is going on, Fu's nemesis Nayland-Smith (again played by Richard Greene) has tracked the supervillain to Istanbul, where a local police captain (director Franco himself, in a fez) points him in the direction of Omar Pasha. Omar wants revenge against Fu for being betrayed and to free Lisa from the Chinaman's clutches. The gangster and the Scotland Yard commissioner team up to take Fu down. 

Reviled as one of the all-time worst movies ever screened on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Castle Of Fu Manchu was the death knell of the Fu series — thank God the sixth contracted film never materialized. It wasn't released in the States until 1972, three years after it played in Europe, and then only at the bottom of the cheesiest drive-in double bills. Sloppily assembled and tediously dull, the film is a prime example of too little money for what was hoped to be accomplished. (I'd bet the lion's share of the budget went for 
Christopher Lee's hotel bills.) All the major special effects sequences consist of footage lifted from other movies... Scenes from a previous Lee-Fu film, The Brides Of Fu Manchu, pads the opening; lengthy color-tinted clips from the black and white A Night To Remember (1958) represent the sinking of the ocean liner. (Yep, that's the H.M.S. Titanic slipping beneath the waves of the Caribbean. A dam-breaking/flood sequence is also culled from elsewhere but I don't know from which film.) When Fu's castle is destroyed at the finale they cram in ludicrous snippets of volcanoes erupting, even a bridge being blown up, that don't match the principal footage in the slightest. It positively 'Ed-Woodian' in its ham-handed ineptitude.     

Strangely enough, after injecting a dose of sleaze into his previous Fu Manchu entry — if you're gonna throw women in a dungeon, might as well get 'em naked, I say — Franco pulls back with this one. No topless chicks in chains here, a real shame considering Italian cult fave Rosalba Neri is on hand.( As brief as her scenes are, Neri's butch gangster gal is one of the few bright spots in the movie.) There's no gore, either.  In its uncut state Castle is a mild PG at best. Franco must've been bored to death making it. He seems content to simply point the camera at the actors while they do their thing, then go ape-shit with the zoom lens. (Close-up shot of Lee's face. Dialog. Zoom out from Lee's face. Dialog. Zoom back in. Repeat.) One 
pointless sequence, which seems to go on forever, consists of nothing but panning shots back and forth across Fu's antiquated lab equipment. 

This is arguably the worst film Christopher Lee ever appeared in, and he's been in more than his fair share of turkeys. The execrable dialog he's forced to recite here probably set his teeth on edge. Obviously, there must've been a nice golf course near the location. As the flick's hero, Nayland-Smith, the over-the-hill Richard Greene, who'd once been the dashing Robin Hood of '50s TV, makes Roger Moore look like Jet Li. 

So what saves Castle Of Fu Manchu, if only barely, from 1-point Stinker status? Well, there's the exotic Ms. Neri (even if she doesn't take her clothes off, goddammit) and some amusingly clumsy action scenes. My favorite involves some of the castle guards, who, despite a gun battle raging close nearby, continue to obliviously pace their sentry rounds as if nothing is happening. (Which, unfortunately, is the case with 90% of this movie.)