A year after Frankenstein came out, Boris Karloff was already a marketable commodity.
Mind you, most of the films he got in this stage in his career involved lots and lots of makeup. In the same year he made this film, he also appeared as a scarred servant in The Old Dark House, and played another of his iconic roles in The Mummy.
There isn’t much to connect his version of Fu Manchu to Frankenstein or any of these other films, other than all that makeup. It took two and a half hours every day to create the Fu Manchu makeup.
Not that it looks all that extensive.
Frankly, The Mask of Fu Manchu is not one of his better films. I suspect that part of the reason is that Universal had loaned him to MGM, but the film is only a little longer than an hour which leads me to suspect that it was intended to be a “B” movie, that is, one that was shown on the bottom half of a double feature.
Another big problem is that Fu Manchu has been reduced to a simple, stereotyped, scenery-chewing villain, and his daughter, Fah Lo Suee (played by none other than Myrna Loy!) to a sadistic nymphomaniac.
Now I know we’re all supposed to think that Fu Manchu is just a horrible ethnic stereotype, but the irony is that the best, early writers of the sort of thrillers that get filed under the heading “Yellow Peril” these days — like Fu Manchu’s creator, Sax Rohmer; H. Rider Haggard; or Talbot Mundy — were all the sort of Englishman who didn’t believe in much of anything and suddenly found themselves totally enamored of Asian culture when they went East.
You really don’t begin to understand the fictional threat Fu Manchu posed to the British Imperial Government unless you recognize that he was a truly superior man — cultured, intelligent, and heir to the huge treasury of wisdom to be found in the Far East (and, ironically, he was originally based on a mysterious real-life crime lord operating out of London’s Limehouse district whom Rohmer had learned about during his days as a reporter).
So, instead of this complex (and curiously, deeply honorable) figure, the movie presents him as yet another stereotyped sinister oriental villain.
I suppose he came out of the deal better than his daughter did, who went from a talented and devious (and yes, honorable, in the same strange sort of way) young woman who took over her father’s organization after his apparent death (one of many) to a sadistic torturer having far too much pre-Code fun with a young man she lusts after.
The other curious change is that the mask is now the entirely fictional mask of Genghis Khan. In the novel it was the mask of the veiled prophet El Mokanna, a strange Persian mystic and chemist who tried to start his own religion in the Eighth Century.
But that is too weird and esoteric for something as dumbed-down as Hollywood, even in the Thirties.
Now it’s far from clear exactly what the Fu Manchu of the novel hopes to achieve by reviving this ancient religious cult leader — creating a big political organization, perhaps — but it’s curious to note that in the novel, he actually succeeds in his plan, and the Veiled Prophet mysteriously appears from a secret door on the face of the Great Pyramid.
Which is far more interesting than the movie’s climax.
Now I would be the first to point out that we shouldn’t judge a film adaptation by comparing it with the book. Film and books are very different, and what will work in one won’t always work in the other.
However, the point I’m trying to make is that something that is complex, tied to a rich history, features a villain who is deeply admirable even if he is trying to kill us, and ends with a very strong ending where the heroes come out ahead but Fu Manchu achieves his main goals, is far more interesting than a routine Asiatic villain trying to destroy the White race. It’s almost a complete parody of the character: exaggerated, simplistic and painted in the most hysterical colors imaginable.
Sigh.
As Hollywood always crams every story into a few narrow little frames, Fu Manchu’s advanced mastery of Western science makes him a mad scientist, complete with a massive Tesla Coil and even a death ray.
Now, somewhere in the Forties (in The Island of Fu Manchu, if memory serves) he acquired the so-called “Erickson tube,” a sonic weapon eventually adapted into flying saucer like aerial vehicles (which conveniently disappeared from the last few books).
But that wasn’t true of the Fu Machu of the Thirties, who was far more interested in lethal creatures like snakes and bugs, or various mysterious chemicals (like the life-extending Elixir Vitae).
He definitely wasn’t your standard model Mad Scientist.
While Myrna Loy is mostly remembered as Nora Charles of The Thin Man series these days, she started her career playing exotic women. I’m not entirely certain why: her features may not entirely fit your bland Hollywood standard, but they aren’t that unusual, let alone exotic. Mind you, MGM doesn’t seem to have worked too hard to make her look Chinese.
Or perhaps they just told her to pretend she was and left it at that.
From what I’ve heard, she and Karloff agreed that the only way their absurd characters could be played was subtly tongue in cheek. I can’t argue with that one, and as far as I’m concerned, any blame rests squarely on the shoulders of whoever wrote this thing.
All three of them. No wonder it’s so bad.
I do know that they wouldn’t have got away with the little-girl-being-given-a-candy-bar expression on her face every time she looks at the hero, if the film came out just a year or two later.
Oh, well. Boris and Myrna are the standouts here, doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, no matter how horrible.
But we all know Karloff would have been unstoppable had they captured the curious texture of the original character with all his vast talents — and moral complexities — instead of turning him into yet another mad scientist.
It’s a real shame.
But then, we’ve seen great actors totally fail at playing our favorite characters before.
And usually because the writers and directors did their best to make sure they did…
rivets on the poster 