The Face Of Fu Manchu (1965) Remember the year here.......1965.......Leading roles for Asians ended up played by British actors with their eyes pulled into a slant.........(and usually,as does Christopher Lee in this film, Brits didn't attempt that grating, fake sing-song Chinese accent that Hollywood movies favored. They preferred to play their Asian characters as if they all graduated from Oxford.......)
Viewing this movie from a distance, that is, accepting it as an ancient artifact from a long gone age, you can embrace its silliness and throw an eye-rolling smirk at its casual racism.
Guilty pleasures don't come any guiltier than this........
You can almost think of it as a 1920's Bond film. Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu isn't much different from Joseph Wiseman's Dr. No. (The big exception: without access to rockets and radiation, Fu Manchu's world domination plot becomes more organic in nature......turning a rare Tibetan plant into a population-killing lethal gas....)
And also on board are international babes destined, in a few short years, to appear as femme fatales in "You Only Live Twice".......Tsai Chin as Fu Manchu's evil daughter and Karin Dor as a damsel in distress, forever popping her big brown eyes at the rampant villainy around her.
Director Don Sharp, to his eternal credit, takes this nonsense seriously.(no "Batman TV-type camp on display).......which somehow makes it all the more funny. Nigel Green and Howard Marion Crawford make a perfect pair of imitation Holmes 'N Watson foils for Fu Manchu..........muttering stuff about "the Yellow Peril" and wrongly profiling innocent Asian tourists, much in the same way white U.S. cops harass blacks for being black.....
The Green-Crawford dynamic duo is ably assisted by West German leading man Joachim Fuchsberger.....who looks like a chunkier George Clooney and engages Fu Manchu's army of Dacoit stranglers in endless, old fashioned fisticuffs.......(mostly accomplished by a stuntman who's not anywhere even close in appearance to Fuchsberger)
Great cheesy sequences abound........Lee uses his poison gas to wipe out an entire British coastal village.....(a scene that closely resembles a sequence in that same year's American thriller, "The Satan Bug").......the wonderful lionheart of Great Britain, James Robertson Justice, gets the film's best line, yelling "You can't leave the museum littered with dead Chinese!".........and considering the rock-bottom budget, the film does an amazing job of recreating 1920's England. (Though no one seems to populate it except the occasional constable and Lee's ever busy stranglers...)
A vital BQ consumer warning, though.........if you plan to indulge in a Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movie, we recommend
this one only.........of the four sequels, the next one "Brides of Fu Manchu" dredges up some amount of cheesy fun, but the subsequent films devolve into crummy, unwatchable junk, directed by Jess Franco, the Ed Wood Jr. of Europe.......fair warning.
A movie like this requires a special place in your heart.....(the equivalent of the attic where you store old corny junk you don't want to let go of, but you know you should.) Ridiculous and politically incorrect in the extreme, we'll stick "The Face Of Fu Manchu" up on the dusty shelves of our Guilty Pleasure attic, with 3 so-bad-it's-good stars (***)........
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