REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

   

FIVE GOLDEN DRAGONS. Blansfilm, UK-Germany, 1967. Robert Cummings, Margaret Lee, Rupert Davies, Klaus Kinski, Maria Rohm, Roy Ciao Guest Cast: Dan Duryea, Brian Donlevy, Christopher Lee, George Raft, Maria Pershy. Screenplay Peter Welbeck (producer Harry Alan Towers), based on a story by Edgar Wallace. Director: Jeremy Summers.

   If producer and screenwriter (usually as Peter Welbeck) Harry Alan Towers hadn’t existed, Eric Ambler would have had to create him. Like a typical Ambler hero, Towers was a semi-disreputable, sometimes successful, and usually on the run from his creditors, figure in international cinema, whose output runs from the simply awful (Jesus Franco’s Castle of Fu Manchu) to the damn good (Face of Fu Manchu) and the great middle of not too bad (this, Coast of Skeletons). Always on the fringe of British and international film making, sometimes successfully and more often than not disastrously, Towers’ own story is probably more interesting than that in many of his shot off the cuff, high concept mediocre delivery, films.

   Here he is working with a big budget in pulp country somewhere between his two favorites Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace where he was always most comfortable. The setting is Hong Kong, where the international criminal syndicate known as the Five Golden Dragons are meeting — at least four of them are (Dan Duryea, Brian Donlevy, Christopher Lee, and George Raft), as yet the mysterious fifth Dragon from Hong Kong has called the meeting and has yet to show. Anyone familiar with their Edgar Wallace should recognize that set up from a mile off.

   The plot is set in motion when a mysterious man arrives in Hong Kong and is promptly tossed from the 12th floor of a plush apartment building on the Peak (Hong Kong’s prime real estate). Before he dies he leaves an envelope to be delivered to an American named Bob Mitchell staying in Hong Kong, a fact that attracts Commissioner Sanders (no accident that name I’ll wager) of the Hong Kong police (Rupert Davies in Maigret mode) and his top man Inspector Chiao (Roy Ciao) and a chain smoking effeminate killer named Gert (Klaus Kinski).

   Mitchell proves to be an aging, somewhat comic, but charmingly naif playboy (Robert Cummings) who claims he met the dead man in Manila and has no idea what the note that reads Five Golden Dragons means. That might be true, but it spooks the two beautiful women he picked up at the hotel pool, Margaret and her sister Ingrid (Maria Pershy and Maria Rohm).

   When more bodies show up in relation to Mitchell, including Margaret in his locked bedroom under a robe bearing a golden dragon, Mitchell (who variously claims to sell insurance, be a linguist, and a visitor from small town Kansas) ducks the police and goes to ground to look into things himself, led to a nightclub run by the tough Peterson (Sieghardt Rupp) and chanteuse Magda (Margaret Lee) where he stumbles onto the cave like lair of the Golden Dragons.

   Anything beyond that would be a spoiler, though there isn’t much to spoil. Five Golden Dragons is handsomely shot, there are some decent chases, at times it actually is fairly bright, and at other times it tries too hard. I enjoyed it, but if you were looking for much more than a bright colorful diversion you would be disappointed.

   Mitchell under gun point to Peterson: “I thought I’d drop in an ask you to introduce me to your boss, you know, Goldfinger number five?”

   The big four guest stars are mostly wasted, Donlevy, Raft, and Lee have virtually no dialogue, and once Maria Pershy’s Margaret is dead the feather brained Ingrid (Maria Rohm) is poor substitute though Lee provides some much needed sex appeal. The big reveal about Mitchell is no surprise by the time it comes, and the ending, telegraphed from the start, more than a bit of a let down though that, at least, might have come from an Edgar Wallace thriller, in fact it resembles The Crimson Circle more than a little in that aspect.

   On the other hand, if you want a nice tour of Hong Kong circa 1967, with attractive company, a bit of action, a touch of mystery and intrigue, and a few decent quips (“Gert, oh you mean Gertrude, is your fourth man?”) this is a harmless way to kill an hour and a half. For a Harry Alan Towers film that is practically a rave review.