The Mask of Fu Manchu (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 4) shortly after 9 I dug out the “Legends of Horror” DVD collection on Warner Home Video, consisting of six films – only two of which (Doctor “X” from 1932, the first science-fiction film shot in color, and its sort-of sequel, The Return of Doctor “X” from 1939, memorable in both good and bad ways for being Humphrey Bogart’s only horror role) were actually made by Warner Bros. The other four – Charles Brabin’s The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936) and Karl Freund’s Mad Love, a.k.a. The Hands of Orlac (1935) – were all produced by MGM. MGM was hardly the go-to studio for horror – though in the 1920’s Browning and his late star Lon Chaney, Sr. had made some great ones together – but they saw how much money other companies, especially Universal, were making off Gothic terror and MGM production chief Irving Thalberg decided he wanted some of that money for himself and his company. So in 1932 Thalberg borrowed Boris Karloff from Universal and cast him in The Mask of Fu Manchu, based on one of the original Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, a British author whose real name was Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward. He was born in Birmingham, England on February 15, 1883, though both his parents were Irish, and he died at age 76 on June 1, 1959 of so-called “Asiatic flu” – ironic given that he’d made his fortune telling tales of unspeakably evil and wicked Asian geniuses plotting the utter destruction of the white race. He wrote a total of 13 Fu Manchu novels as well as five from later in his career featuring a female version, Sumuru.

Fu Manchu made his screen debut in an early (1929) Paramount talkie called The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, in which Warner Oland played him (which makes the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Opera a “doubles” movie since it features two actors who played Fu Manchu, Oland and Karloff). Oland’s later fame as Charlie Chan, a positive Chinese character, eclipsed his earlier stint as Fu Manchu. In 1932 MGM put The Mask of Fu Manchu into production and assigned one of their quirkier directors, Charles Brabin, to the project. Brabin had made his debut as a shorts director in 1911 and his last film, A Wicked Woman, was made in 1934 even though he lived until 1957. He was briefly married to Theda Bara and his most famous film was probably the silent version of Ben-Hur (1926) even though he was fired from it in mid-shoot and Fred Niblo replaced him. According to imdb.com, Charles Vidor – future film noir director of classics like Gilda (1946), who’d already shot an important noir precursor in Sensation Hunters (1933) – also did some uncredited work on The Mask of Fu Manchu. The Mask of Fu Manchu doesn’t hold up very well today, partly because – though he boasts of having three Ph.D.’s, explaining to the British agent Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), “I am a doctor of philosophy from Edinburgh, I am a doctor of law from Christ College, I am a doctor of medicine from Harvard” – Fu Manchu is just 100 percent evil, with no redeeming qualities and no backstory to explain just how, after living so long in the Western world, he had turned so violently against it and now wanted genocide against all white people. This gave Boris Karloff almost nothing to work with as an actor – all he could do is drawl out his elaborate explanations about how he was going to make his white captives suffer with a sort of fiendish grin.

Back at Universal under Karl Freund’s direction he’d made The Mummy, which also cast him as a super-powerful villain but gave him a heartbreaking backstory that allowed him to express love and other tender emotions denied him here by Rohmer and screenwriters Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf and John Willard. One advantage MGM had over Universal is the sheer size of their sets budget; Fu Manchu’s lair is enviably elaborate – the large bell under which he ties up Lionel Barton is especially impressive – and so is his costume (actually, according to imdb.com, a Chinese women’s bridal gown!). But the film’s unremitting racism (complained about by the Nationalist government that more or less ruled China then) makes it just tiresome these days. After watching a lot of movies lately featuring Anna May Wong, I was not only far less tolerant of the film’s racism than I might have been otherwise but I found myself wishing they would have got Wong to play Fu Manchu’s daughter, Fah Lo See. Instead they gave that role to Myrna Loy, who’d been born Myrna Williams but, because she had a slight slant in her eyes (nothing like that of a genuine Asian but close enough for 1920’s Hollywood), her first agent decided to rename her “Loy” because it sounded Chinese. In her early days she played a lot of sinister, evil Oriental vamps, including the murderess in the RKO thriller Thirteen Women (1932) out to kill her 12 white former classmates in an exclusive school. MGM signed her in 1932 but gave her this role as her first MGM film. Loy complained directly to studio president Louis B. Mayer and actually got him to admit, “I was wrong about you. From now on you’re only going to be a lady.” Mayer loaned her out to RKO for Topaze (1933), a marvelously stylish film starring John Barrymore as a French pharmacist exploited by greedy capitalists (when Charles and I watched that years ago I joked that Barrymore’s biggest acting challenge was convincing the audience that his character had never had an alcoholic beverage before in his life) and then brought her back to MGM for two 1934 films, Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man, that established her as a star in sophisticated non-villainous parts.

The plot of The Mask of Fu Manchu deals with the recent discovery of the tomb of Genghis Khan on the edge of the Gobi Desert. The British government sends agents Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone – weird casting indeed since I’d read the book The Mask of Fu Manchu and I’d imagined Smith as a good deal younger, sort of Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu’s Moriarty), Terrence Granfield (Charles Starrett), German agent Von Berg (Jean Hersholt) and Barton’s daughter Sheila (Karen Morley in one of her typically annoying, overwrought performances – one wonders how King Vidor was able to calm her down in Our Daily Bread when all her other films, or at least the ones I’ve seen her in, stink), who insists on going along because she’s the only one who knows where the tomb is even though she gets the usual sexist B.S. from the guys: “That’s no place for a woman!” The Brits are determined to beat Fu Manchu’s men to Genghis Khan’s tomb because if he finds it first and grabs Genghis Khan’s golden mask and scimitar, he’ll be able to pose as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and lead an army that will massacre all the white people, first in China and then throughout the world. There are some clever scenes, like one in the British Museum in which three of Fu Manchu’s thugs dressed as mummies mug Sir Lionel Barton and kidnap him, and another in which Fu Manchu uses some of Kenneth Strickfaden’s electrical equipment (which had “created” him in Frankenstein) to test a mask and sword purporting to be Genghis Khan’s and expose them as fakes (created by Nayland Smith to fool him). In the end Fu Manchu gets his hands on the real mask and sword, but one of the white guys figures out how to use one of Strickfaden’s gadgets to zap it out of his hands, blowing his cover, and on a ship taking the principals back to Britain Smith throws the sword of Genghis Khan into the sea to prevent either Fu Manchu or someone like him from stealing the sword and using it to start a genocidal war against all the white people in the world again. Also, for some unexplained reason, Fu Manchu’s army of bodyguards consists exclusively of Black men in loincloths – one of whom he kills to have blood drawn out of him to make a serum that will annihilate Terrence’s will and turn him into Fu Manchu’s slave – and though they’re sexy enough one keeps waiting for an explanation of why an Asian villain would have Black men providing his muscle (in both senses of the word).