MOD Movies: Halloween with Fu Manchu and friends
There is nothing tasteful about a Fu Manchu movie. The stories of a ruthless, sadistic, depraved Mandarin crimelord, originally created in a series of lurid pulp thrillers by Sax Rohmer in the 1910s, traffic in a jingoistic fear of Asian assault on western culture (especially the empire-building Britania). Fu Manchu is a criminal genius with three doctorates, a passion for assassination by exotic poison, and an obsessive quest for world domination. And he has been, since the beginning, played by Caucasian actors in silk robes, long-mustaches, and what can only be called yellowface make-up.
Dr. Fu Manchu returned with a vengeance in the 1960 in a series of lurid British thrillers from Harry Alan Towers, a British writer/producer cashing in on the Hammer success with his own low-budget thrillers and horror films, and starring Christopher Lee as the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.
In the 1965 The Face of Fu Manchu (Warner Archive), the first of five Fu Manchu features from Towers and Lee and the character’s first big official screen appearance since 1940, he kidnaps a brilliant scientist, forces him to turn over his latest, potentially destructive invention by means of torture (usually of a beautiful young daughter), and then holds the world ransom. That basic structure recurs in the sequels, just as it drove many a James Bond film and a couple of Pink Panther sequels and Austin Powers movies.
Not that anyone watched these films for their plots. The film opens on Fu Manchu’s own execution, a scene right out of Hammer Films’ The Revenge of Frankenstein. Clearly this is not the end of Fu Manchu, who returns for his revenge with a literal underground kingdom beneath the streets of London, a fanatically devoted cutthroat army in black pajamas and red sashes (part Viet Cong, part Playboy After Dark), and a small private zoo of poisonous spiders and deadly snakes.
The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady (Sony Pictures Choice Collection) was Warren William’s third film playing retired gentleman jewel thief turned freelance detective and knight errant Michael Lanyard, aka The Lone Wolf, but it’s the first of the nine Warren William Lone Wolf films to appear on home video. Hopefully it’s not the last.
Ring-A-Ding Rhythm (Sony Pictures Choice Collection) is a 1962 British music performance film originally titled “It’s a Trad, Dad” (you can see why they retitled for the U.S.). The first feature by American-born but British-based Richard Lester (who went on to redefine the rock movie with “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help”) is basically a succession of performances connected by the thinnest of plots: a couple of teenagers defy a ban on jazz by recruiting bands for a big concert. And by jazz, I mean the traditional Dixieland style that had a big youth following in Britain in the early sixties: modern sixties youth listening to music that was new during prohibition. Can you believe those starchy adults and parents are still horrified? Dropped in with the dozens of trad jazz acts (including Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen and the funky Temperance Seven) are a handful of pop and rock performances by the likes of Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, Gary U.S. Bonds, Gene Vincent, and Britain’s Helen Shapiro, who also plays one of the leads.
The Explosive Generation (MGM Limited Edition Collection) may look like another low-budget teensploitation picture from the drive-in age, and sure, it is a cheap picture churned out with a minimum of fuss and style. But the explosive content of this high school picture is sex education, which is added to the curriculum at the request of an honors class of senior class students and sets off a firestorm among the parents, leaving our idealistic, progressive young teacher caught between his principles and his principal. Said teacher, I should add, is played by William Shatner. It’s his second film and his first leading role, before his soon-to-be trademark intensity took over. There’s plenty of speechifying and contrived injections of hep dialogue (“Crazy, man!”) and Buzz Kulick’s direction is never more than functional (and often not even that), but give the film credit for treating teenagers as intelligent, thoughtful young adults who are inspired to pull together to stand up for their education and their free speech rights. Their inspired non-violent protest is a weirdly mesmerizing tribute to youth solidarity, a precursor to the counterculture cinema of the late 1960s in clean-cut fifties garb. And that Shatner guy isn’t too bad either.
Timbuktu (MGM Limited Edition Collection) – Jacques Tourneur may be one of the most underrated directors of his time, from horror classics “Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie” and “Curse of the Demon” to his noir masterpieces “Out of the Past” and “Nightfall” to some of the greatest films of the American frontier, “Stars in My Crown” and “Canyon Passage.” So it’s with some disappointment I watch his talent fall off in his late career. A few months ago it was “The Fearmakers,” and now comes Timbuktu, a pure B-movie potboiler French Foreign Legion film from the late 1950s that plays like a cavalry matinee picture. This one, moved up to World War II but still engaged with an Arab uprising in French colonial Africa, stars Victor Mature as an American gunrunner without political allegiance but with a code of sorts. Yvonne De Carlo plays the neglected wife of a duty-first French Colonel (George Dolenz) who apparently has no qualms about sending his wife to make love to the mercenary Mature, a man only too happy to play along as he plays double agent between the warring factions. A game of bluffs and feints and psychological warfare ensues, but Tourneur never makes anything more of it than a juvenile form of big screen pulp, from John Dehner as the least convincing Arab Emir in the movies down to Mature as the griming mercenary with a conscience. Silly stuff, but De Carlo is quite the honey.
Hornet’s Nest (MGM Limited Edition Collection), a grim 1970 World War II mission thriller with Rock Hudson and a cast of Italian kids playing soldier, is essentially a bloody Italian war drama by way of an American exploitation picture. Phil Karlson, one of the great director of bare-knuckle film noir, is behind the camera at least part of the time. The Italian prints apparently list Franco Cirino as director (he’s credited at First Assistant Director here) and the production is dominated by Italian names (including a score by Ennio Morricone). Karlson’s direction became more blunt in his later years but even so, the cynicism and brutality is more Italian exploitation sensibility than American drive-in branding, with the kids going all “Lord of the Flies” on both the German invaders occupying their village and any civilian (or even ally) who stands in the way of their vengeance. Hudson brings a groovy seventies mustache and haircut to forties Italy (maybe one those kids was inspired by his style to become Vidal Sassoon) while trying to play military father to these teenage guerrillas. Regardless of Karlson’s commitment in front of the camera, it feels like it was edited on the Italian industry assembly line.
Hickey and Boggs (MGM Limited Edition Collection) from 1972 reunites former “I Spy” partners Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as down-out-heels private detectives in Los Angeles. Directed by Culp from a script by Walter Hill, it’s very much a scrappy early draft of the buddy action films that Hill would later direct, but in the key of seventies grit and cynicism. One is separated, the other divorced and unable to get over it, but both of them hang on to the last gasp of Raymond Chandler-esque dignity and professionalism even as they get taken by their clients and harassed by the cops at every turn. Culp is a director in the Don Siegel mode, just as focused on process and professionalism and refreshingly straightforward in both dialogue and action. He understands these characters, he likes them, and while he may not agree with them, he definitely respects their doggedness (though not the self-pity). Success may not satisfying, given all they lose along the way, but they earn it out of sheer perseverance and loyalty. The last men standing get the spoils. It is nice to finally see this film on DVD and in its correct aspect ratio.
Conflict (Warner Archive), a 1945 murder mystery with a psychological twist, melodrama flourishes and a shadowy film noir style, once again features Bogart on the other side of the law, this time as a man who murders his wife after their fight wedding anniversary in what appears to be the perfect crime… until she suddenly returns to haunt him. Alexis Smith plays his sister-in-law (and the motivation for his murder — he wants to upgrade to a younger model) and Sydney Greenstreet (a familiar Bogart nemesis indeed) is a psychiatrist who gets involved when Bogie’s wife mysteriously “disappears.” It’s a generic title for a routine suspense thriller, but Bogie is far more fascinating when he tips to the dark side in his post-”Maltese Falcon” films than when he routinely played the villain in the thirties. He’s more unstable and unpredictable, suggesting a psychosis that makes him far scarier than the thugs of his gangster years. And while director Curtis Bernhardt doesn’t bother trying to give the story (concocted by Robert Siodmak and Alfred Neumann) a plausible foundation, he does conduct the mood quite nicely. Interestingly enough, Bogart turned to knocking off his wives and yearning for Alexis Smith again a couple of years later in “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” (1947), also from the Warner Archive (
Edge of Eternity (Columbia Pictures Classics), a murder mystery set in an isolated desert mining town in Arizona where the mines closed year ago, stars Cornel Wilde as a straight-shooting sheriff trying to untangle the mystery around the murder of an unidentified stranger and the cover-up of his identity. Director Don Siegel gives the otherwise routine thriller a nice tension and a great sense of place. Shot on location near the Grand Canyon, the widescreen photography gives the open landscape a vastness and an isolation, and the “bucket” of the industrial loader that cranks across the canyon and the use of small private planes and a police helicopter over the craggy hills only adds to the feeling of remoteness. But in my own perverse way, I found it worth the time just to see the end credits offer their thanks to the many organizations that helped out, notably The United States Guano Corporation.
The 1965 “You Must Be Joking” (Columbia Pictures Classics) is a scavenger hunt comedy by way of a military farce made by a director under the influence of “A Hard Day’s Night.” The script suggests “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” redesigned for a youth audience, with a small company of authority figures stripped of their authority and pit against each other in a race through London to collect five random object by hook or by crook. It’s a test designed by an off-kilter army psychiatrist (Terry Thomas, of course) to test the ingenuity and creativity of aspiring leaders for the new modern army. Along with all the British caricatures (Denholm Elliot as a cool aristocrat who swills cocktails while his servants chase down the objects, Lionel Jeffries as the drill sergeant of a career soldier, Lee Montague as the apoplectic army engineer) is Michael Callan as the American army’s contribution to the contest, who gets help from his swinging British girlfriend and a sexy French pop star. Old school British humor and contemporary cultural satire rub shoulders throughout and Winner never seems to know which audience to favor. A dryly witty scene set in a record company autograph mill where a staff of little old ladies sign fan pics of teen idols is followed by a tone-deaf parody of the Beatles movies featuring a phony band chasing our American con man across London in a bit closer to “Carry On” than Richard Lester, even with his freeze frames and snappy transitions. Mostly it works, a mix of mod culture in respectable society with a stiff upper lip deadpan to the slapstick.
