The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Back at M-G-M, after a loan-out to RKO, Myrna Loy was cast as the daughter of Fu Manchu when, to everyone's surprise, Louis B. Mayer outbid Paramount for the rights to Sax Rohmer's 1932 novel, "The Mask of Fu Manchu". Determined to cash in on the book's success, the studio spent more money on this fourth entry in the series than Paramount had expended on the combined total of the first three. Warner Oland was replaced by Boris Karloff, while Myrna Loy took over from Anna May Wong, and Lewis Stone substituted for O.P. Heggie's Nayland Smith. Unfortunately, neither audiences nor censors responded to the movie's outrageously tongue-in-cheek approach. Failing to recover anything like its huge production cost, this spectacular failure put paid to Fu Manchu until Henry Brandon surfaced as a weak imitation in the 1940 Republic serial, "Drums of Fu Manchu"; and a whole quarter century after that, Christopher Lee successfully revived the sinister doctor in Don Sharp's stylish "The Face of Fu Manchu". "The Mask of Fu Manchu" is available, would you believe, not on an M-G-M DVD, but on a 10/10 Warner DVD.

The Mask of Fu Manchu especially due to Boris Karloff as the title character. The movie is not to be taken too seriously as it should be viewed mainly for fun. Lewis Stone was not bad as Fu's adversary Nayland Smith and Karen Morley is not bad too look at. Saw The Mask of Fu Manchu on DVD and it had a commentary by film historian George Mank. Interesting commentary from Mank which included information about Lewis Stone and Karen Morley, two people I wasn't familiar with between prior to seeing The Mask of Fu Manchu. From this commentary it was tragic to learn how Stone died and interesting that at one time Morley made an unsuccessful run for the American Labor Party for Lieutenant Governor of California.

The comedic and even incredulous moments in the film make it an enjoyable watch. Yet, multiple moments still disturb me due to the repeated employments of orientalist stereotypes. By these stereotypes, I don't only mean ones such as Asians having mono-lids. I am not even commenting on how Fu Manchu himself looks because in the book written by Sax Rohmer, he wasn't described as a very typical Chinese anyways. However, I was disturbed by how the other characters that played alongside Fu looked. For one, in the scenes involving his daughter, she carried a very confused identity. In one moment, she was dressed in a Chinese traditional costume (though it was brought to an extreme with the traditional 'empress-like' head gear). In the next moment, she was dressed in an Indian costume. The multiple costumes that she wore paralleled the film's conflation of the East with anything that is not the West (i.e. not white). From the featuring of Africans, to Indians, to Middle-Easterners and Chinese, all these characters were classified as the 'East', ignoring all the differences. Their agencies are also suppressed because they seemingly blindly adoring Fu. If these confusing multiple races had not been featured, this film would have been a more enjoyable watch.

Full disclosure: I laughed a lot during this movie and found it genuinely hilarious. With that said, I see a lot of comments that dismiss the the very blatant racist tropes to the times and sing the praises of this film as a cinematic classic. The makers of this film tried very hard to make Dr. Fu Manchu a villain and displays all the tropes that would come to be classic in the greatest villains of cinema. World domination? Check. Torture devices? Check. Mad science? Double check. A large part of his evil villain aura also happens to come from his exoticism. By exoticism I mean his Chinese-ness, what the book calls "the embodiment of the Yellow Peril". Early in the film he is even willing to sell his "ugly and insignificant" daughter to pursue his dreams of world domination. The mark of a true villain. Everything about his appearance and his speech is steeped in old-timey racist stereotypes, part humor part xenophobia. As I said before, I enjoyed the movie, and laughed quite a bit. But I know the difference between a good movie and a movie I enjoyed.