The Mask of Fu Manchu

The Mask of Fu Manchu
Blu-ray
Warner Archive
1932
Starring Boris Karloff, Myrna Loy, and Lewis Stone as Nayland Smith
Written by Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf, and John Willard
Photographed by Tony Gaudio
Directed by Charles Brabin

The Mask of Fu Manchu is not so much a movie as an issue of Architectural Digest brought to life, a high-gloss catalogue of luxurious torture chambers designed with the modern sadist in mind: chrome-plated whipping posts, Art Déco alligator pits, and state-of-the-art death-rays. Boris Karloff’s name may be above the title but production designer Cedric Gibbons steals the show.

Karloff plays Dr. Manchu and as is obvious by his regal bearing, he’s a man of impeccable taste, a graduate of Heidelberg University, the Sorbonne and the University of Edinburgh. His daughter Fah Lo See is cut from the same silken cloth, an enigmatic vamp whose sullen expression is only brightened by the sight of broken skin and fresh blood.

Fah Lo is a silent partner in her father’s crime organization and their mission statement gets right to the point; “conquer and breed… kill the white man and take his women.” Directed by Charles Brabin, the screenplay was by Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf, and John Willard, who based their work on the Sax Rohmer story first serialized in Colliers magazine. The moviemakers don’t shy away from Rohmer’s rabble-rousing brand of pulp fiction, in fact they embrace it; Karloff is made to look not-quite human with the pointed ears and fangs of a cat (the ghastly makeup—expertly crafted—was by Cecil Holland). Even Manchu’s intellect and education is presented as part of his sinister character. Skin color, not torture or murder, is the real fear factor here, yet Karloff was surprised by the inevitable backlash to the movie—he thought the story was so comical no one could object.

The story is this: a police commissioner named Nayland Smith is in a rush to find the tomb of Genghis Kahn before Manchu can sink his talons into its treasure, specifically the sword and mask of Genghis, the first Mongolian king. Those enchanted artifacts will allow Manchu to, dare I say it, rule the world.

Manchu has already captured one of Smith’s men, a mustachioed Egyptologist named Lionel Barton who the doctor has trapped under one of his more flamboyant murder machines, the “torture of the bell”, an enormous bronze cylinder whose sound would deafen its victim were they not driven mad first (fans of Sergio Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes remember a similarly ear-splitting contraption). So desperate is Manchu that he offers up his daughter for Barton’s pleasure, but the bell does its work before Fah Lo is pressed into service. 

Barton’s protracted demise—Manchu has the ambassador’s severed hand delivered to Barton’s family as proof—leads Nayland and his crew to Manchu’s domain, a mansion built over a labyrinth of dungeons and secret corridors where his victims meet their fate on the rack or under the blade. This circus of horrors is a tribute to Gibbon’s brilliant constructions and costume designer Adrian’s astonishing fashions (the towering headdresses must have given Karloff and Loy neck aches)—their extravagantly ghoulish creations remind us that this is an MGM picture through and through; the action is depraved but the style is pure Tiffany’s.

Before MGM neutered the Marx Brothers they had their way with horror films too, but with patchy success. Tod Browning eluded the censors with Freaks—produced the same year as Manchu—but Browning’s static, overproduced Mark of the Vampire, a vampire film with no vampire, was the product of a deflated artist. The Mask of Fu Manchu fares considerably better.

Karloff might have been right to parody the loathesome doctor as Kubrick and Southern did with their own supervillains in Dr. Strangelove. But today the parody is not enough, Karloff pointed ears and Loy’s mercurial promiscuity can’t be laughed off thanks to a deadpan script with no irony or the slightest sense of humor. For all his grinning and grimacing, Karloff can’t match the complexities of his greatest monsters, but Loy is inspired in her Dragon Lady act; keeping the straightest of faces while she simmers and sizzles, she creates a new paradigm for the empowered woman (fifty years later Ornella Muti paid tribute to Loy in Flash Gordon as the slinky but deadly Princess Aura).

Tony Gaudio’s cinematography is as dazzling as Adrian’s gowns, and Warner Archive’s new Blu ray does it justice. A few scenes have a degraded quality (the noise and grain can overcome the action) but otherwise it’s a feast for the eyes. The disc is a little skimpy with its extras but there is a feature-length commentary from historian Greg Mank, and two classic cartoons, Freddy the Freshman and The Queen was in the Parlor, both in high def.