Tonight's movie was "The Mask Of Fu Manchu" (1932), one of Boris Karloff's very early horror films. Man, this is one weird and creepy movie! Boris stars as the mad "Doctor" Fu Manchu (he has three PhDs he likes to brag about), who appears to be Chinese but speaks like Boris Karloff and was educated in England. Go figure. His name is descriptive - he has a Fu Manchu - so that much we can be certain of. But he is a supreme weirdo, and we'll get back to him in a moment.
At the beginning of the movie, an English Chief Inspector is calling upon a professor friend of his. The professor is an archaeologist, and the Inspector wants him to depart immediately for the Gobi Desert in China, in order to seek out the buried tomb of the legendary warrior Genghis Khan. The Inspector has information that an iconic sword and mask, both made of gold, were buried with Khan, and that these icons have great meaning in Chinese mythology. The Inspector has been told that Fu Manchu is seeking to find Kahn's long lost tomb so that he can recover the sword and mask, and thereby claim, to the superstitious populous, that he is the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan.
Holy Smokes, what a premise! This movie was pre-code, and would never get made today, with it's racial stereotyping, but the stereotyping is more or less innocuous. What is really played up, during the interludes in the journey to discover Khan's tomb, is the weird fetishes of Doctor Fu Manchu and his dominatrix-like daughter, played by a young Myrna Loy. They remain at their palace in China, which is created from glorious sets on MGM soundstages (hooray for MGM, my "alma mater"), and Fu Manchu has several different torture devices with which to employ upon his captives. His first victim is the archaeologist, who his flunkies, dressed as Egyptian Mummies, have captured in a museum. The archaeologist is put through The Bell Torture to get him to reveal the location of Khan's Tomb.
Meanwhile, the archaeologist's daughter and her boyfriend are on the hunt for the tomb as well, but then they hear of the kidnapping of her father, and they divert to the palace to rescue him. When they arrive, they are immediately shackled by Fu Manchu, and the strapping boyfriend is given over to Myrna Loy, who looks like a mashup of a geisha and The Statue of Liberty. She takes a liking to the boyfriend and wants to turn him into her slave. Her Dad - Fu Manchu - has just the right serum for the job.
I told you this was a weird movie, and really, it's a horror classic. I think the only reason it is not more well known is because of the racial overtones. Fu Manchu is played as the ultimate evil Asian Mastermind, and by the end of the movie Karloff - who has in his possession a Tesla Death Ray - is preaching to a large crowd of his followers that he will soon exterminate the White Race.
He uses those words, and I told you that this was a weird movie.
But don't take it too seriously, because it plays just like a scary horror film and not a treatise on racial superiority. The fascination with The Orient was a big theme in early Hollywood, especially in mystery movies. China had not yet opened up to the world, and so Hollywood put it's own spin on things, and it's not so bad because it's Boris Karloff, and if you can't love Boris, who can you love?
I write all of this stuff as a disclaimer, because I loved "The Mask Of Fu Manchu". I don't put politics into cultural or artistic situations, I simply let a movie (or whatever) speak for itself on it's own terms.
"The Mask Of Fu Manchu" is one of the most off-the-wall horror films of the early Golden Era that you will see. It is exotic and outrageous, while sticking to the usual 1930s horror plot development.
Two Big Thumbs Up therefore, and I forgot to mention that I acquired this movie as part of a two dvd set called "Hollywood Legends Of Horror", which I bought on Amazon. I have five more movies to watch from this set, none of which I've seen before, so I will dole them out to myself and make each one a special occasion, and review them for you. :)
I wish I had more to write about than movie reviews (though I like doing them), and I could go on Trump Tirades all day long, but I don't want to. I am hoping he will soon be out of office.
Elizabeth, if you still read, I am still here and hanging in there for you, and I would write more for you as I used to, but this doggone stupid Facebook thing continues. The "posts You like" feature has been stuck on the same few posts for weeks now, and I hope it will break soon, and show new posts.
I don't even know if you want to communicate, but if you do I am here, and I hope all is going well and if you have a job that it is okay and that you are still pursuing your goals.
I have no doubt that you are.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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