Sat 22 Oct 2016
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: FIVE GOLDEN DRAGONS (1967).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[9] Comments
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?â€) this is a harmless way to kill an hour and a half. For a Harry Alan Towers film that is practically a rave review.
October 22nd, 2016 at 1:17 pm
I did a little looking around on the Internet, and no, it was no accident that the police commissioner in Hong Kong is named Sanders.
According to Wikipedia:
“The film features a minor connection to Edgar Wallace’s short stories by using his Commissioner Sanders as an officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police with Towers using Wallace’s name to attract funds from international film investors.”
October 22nd, 2016 at 1:21 pm
Also from Wikipedia and perhaps of note, actress Maria Rohm was married to Harry Alan Towers at the time, and they stayed married until his death in 2009.
October 22nd, 2016 at 8:45 pm
After the last time that Harry Alan Towers came up on this blog, I acquired two books:
Mr. Towers Of London, HAT’s autobiography;
and Harry Alan Towers: The Transnational Career Of A Cinematic Contrarian, by Dave Mann.
I think you may safely infer which of these books is the most documentarily accurate.
It might be pointed out that much of Towers’s own book is an unabashed love letter to Maria Rohm; their marriage lasted over 40 years.
At the same time, it’s Mann who points out that Rohm became in effect her husband’s producing partner in his later years, when his health began going south on him.
Many times, I read that people describe Harry Alan Towers with words like rogue, rascal, pirate, and the like.
But the impression I almost always get is one of affection for the man – he’s their Most Unforgettable Character.
So which book should you read?
What the hell – read them both!
If you don’t, you’ll probably just blow the time doing something frivolous …
October 23rd, 2016 at 12:21 am
I don’t know how anyone can write seriously about Harry Alan Towers and his film projects. His radio work, yes. His personality, certainly, but Harry, based on sheer volume must be the worst film producer in history. Wherever there was a young, naïve, socially conscious government installed, with tax payer dollars to start a film industry, Harry Alan Towers appeared as if by magic. South Africa, Hong Kong, and God knows in Canada. In Five Golden Bamboozlers, you have one half a star, still functional but in decline, and a bunch of unemployables sitting around a conference table nodding off for a day’s pay and so that Producer, our Harry can say, and/or advertise the remnants of their collective reputations. Strictly for solemn fools and the over all unwise.
Charlton Heston in the early seventies got sucked in to shooting a variation on Call Of The Wild, British-French-German-Italian-Spanish and Norwegian or according to some, Finland, enterprise. He wrote in his published diary, I think I have fallen in with con men and amateurs. He got it right. But they still made the picture.
October 23rd, 2016 at 2:05 am
Barry:
With all due respect …
… lighten up, OK?
It’s not like we’re doing doctoral theses here.
If we can’t have some fun with this stuff, what’s the point?
(Or is that too ‘solemn’ or ‘unwise’ for you?)
October 23rd, 2016 at 8:27 am
My opinion: Towers was a colorful and controversial producer of mostly non-successful movies, but because he was involved in the making of so many of them, and because some of them were better than others, he is as worthy of being discussed here as, say, Martin Scorcese is. Perhaps even more so, as so much has been written about the latter, there remains very little left to say about him. (And in fact, I believe that this may be the first time Scorcese’s name has ever been brought up on this blog.)
But in that regard Barry is correct in pointing out the shortcomings of a man like Towers, skirting financial ruin at times, perhaps, over the course of his career, if not out and out chicanery. But as Mike points out, that hardly disqualifies us from talking about him, flaws and all. To that end, while no, we’re not doing doctoral theses here, I have a hunch that someone will be doing one on Towers someday, if they haven’t already. He’s an essential part of film history.
October 23rd, 2016 at 11:59 pm
Steve, if you mean I have a point, you bet I do, and this is the kind of forum to discuss, dice and dissect this guy, who has given a bad name to a lot of people, some just like me. As for the films themselves, hard to believe they warrant criticism. Some seem worse than others, but all are just awful and cynical exercises.
October 24th, 2016 at 2:09 am
Discuss, yes. Dice and dissect? Let’s leave that the the guys doing the doctoral theses.
October 24th, 2016 at 10:28 pm
I suspect Towers would be a better subject of a film than any he made. As I said he does seem to have stepped out of an Eric Ambler novel.
I confess to enjoying the first three Fu Manchu
films and to a lesser extent COAST OF SKELETONS.