MAKE A MILLION. Monogram, 1935. Charles Starrett (Professor Reginald Q. Jones), Pauline Brooks, George E. Stone, James Burke, Guy Usher, Norman Houston. Director: Lewis D. Collins.
As far as I have been able to discern from Charles Starrett’s credits on IMDb, this was the next to the last film he had the romantic lead in before he became a full-time cowboy star. A movie entitled Along Came Love, made in 1936, was perhaps the last. It was probably a good thing that he could ride a horse, because on the basis of this one, his career in movies would have disappeared under his feet, with no one today knowing he ever existed.
While made as a comedy, Make a Million also attempts to address the economic issues that were plaguing the nation in 1935. Not very deeply, mind you, but just enough to draw audiences in and maybe have them laughing a little about the problems they were having paying their bills and keeping their families fed.
As Professor Reginald Q. Jones, Starrett plays one of those naive and out of touch left wing radical professors who think the little men in the country are paying all too much toward the wealth of the upper class, and when he fails one of his students, the daughter of a banker, for disagreeing with his theories of economics, he is summarily fired.
But with one proviso: If he can use his theories to earn a million dollars within a fixed amount of time, he will be reinstated. Which, without wanted to reveal too much detail in how he goes about it, with the assistance of a band of hoboes, he does. Along the way, the daughter of the banker gets to see how shady a businessmen her father is — and am I telling you too much? — decides to switch sides, but almost too late.
Nobody today, I grant you, would watch this movie other than a relic of the past. It is fun, though, to see Charles Starrett in a suit and tie and at six foot two, towering over everyone else in the movie, especially during a meeting between a band of avaricious bankers and the band of the brotherhood as they are busily discussing financial matters of the day. “What do you think of copper [as an investment]?” “Coppers? I can do without them.”
WILLIAM L. HEATH – Temptation in a Southern Town. Hillman #114, paperback, 1959. Reprinted in the UK as Blood on the River by John Long, hardcover, 1961.
W. L. Heath wrote several books about life and crime set in small-town rural south, the best known of which (because it was filmed) is Violent Saturday, but all of his work is worth reading for the sharply observed characters, well-knit plots and subtle atmosphere.
Temptation in a Southern Town follows two characters to their inevitable meeting: aging Sheriff Deparis, who learns late in the book that he has stomach cancer (a sentence of painful death in 1959) and Billy South, a strong, hard-working black man who got in with a crowd of rum-runners a ways back and messed up his life.
Heath does a compelling job of charting a collision course without making it look contrived. He picks out little bits of detail, highlights the bit players (a short interview with a mill foreman makes the character real for us, even though he’s never seen in the book again) and throws in the little details that make a story come alive without slowing the pace.
There’s an incredibly tense few chapters that occur when a run goes wrong, and another nice bit when Billy’s associates turn on him, but the quiet scenes in little shops, watching children at play or just hanging around an empty jail are no less entertaining.
And best of all, when the story gets to where we knew it was going all along, Heath goes for drama instead of melodrama. When the ending comes, it never seems stage-managed, but arises easily from the characters themselves.
I’ll add that Heath treats the racial prejudice of his time much as Jane Austen treated the plight of women in hers: He acknowledges its presence and patent evil, bases some of the plot on it, but makes the book more about individuals than issues.
If you’ve never read anything by William L. Heath, you should give yourself a treat.
G vs E (aka Good vs Evil). USA. July 18, 1999 to October 31, 1999. Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) March 10, 2000 to May 12, 2000. Rockfish Films / USA Studios / Universal. Cast: Clayton Rohner as Chandler Smythe, Richard Brooks as Henry McNeil, Marshall Bell as Ford Plasko, Googy Gress as Decker Benbow, Tony Denman as Ben Smythe, and Deacon Jones as himself. Executive Producers: Jonas Pate, Josh Pate and Paul Biddle. Created by Pate Brothers (Jonas and Josh).
This Cable original series from the USA Network had a fun premise that offered up enough laughs to make it entertaining. Yet there were too many flaws that eventually doomed it with the Heavenly Listeners on its Day of Judgment.
G vs E (as it was called in the first season on USA) featured the adventures of two dead men working for the Corps, God’s bounty hunters. Chandler Smythe and Henry McNeil are two murder victims trying to earn their way into Heaven after living a life not worthy of either Heaven or Hell.
ORANGE VOLVO. (July 18,1999) Written and Directed by Jonas Pate and Josh Pate. Guest Cast: Troy Evans and Dominic Keating Recurring Cast: Susie Park, Blake Heron and Ashley Rogers. *** Reporter and widower Chandler Smythe is killed during a mugging gone bad. Next Chandler finds himself still in Los Angeles and being told he is dead by two men called Ford and Decker. They offer him a second chance at redemption if he joins the Corps, God’s bounty hunters.
Stationed in the Hollywood division of the Corps, Chandler and new partner Henry hunt down people who have made a deal with the Devil. They try to get the person to renounce the deal but should they fail the Devil takes their client’s soul and turns them into a Morlock (demon). Morlocks and the Corps fight a constant deadly battle, a war of good versus evil.
The leader of the Corps is tough mean Deacon Jones. Played by the real Deacon Jones a Hall of Fame NFL player that terrorized quarterbacks during his career in the 60s-70s. He brings his no nonsense approach and the ability to inspire fear to his leadership of the Corps.
Here Deacon gives some advice and also explains the three rules of the Corps:
The Corps rules are simple:
No sex. Morlocks look like normal humans except when they die or seen in a mirror. Morlocks use sex to trap Corps agents to kill and turn them into a Morlocks.
Agents can not contact friends and family. Their loved ones will not recognize them and the Morlocks would use them against the Corps agent.
Corps agents have no special powers or magic. They can be killed and if they die they face immediate judgment for where they will spend their afterlife.
While Deacon Jones was a better football player than actor his character is one of the best parts of the entire series. However the rules are a major flaw of the series and while offering conflict for the drama, the rules are responsible for most of the buzz kill when the story gets fun.
A bigger mistake is the series focus on rookie Chandler Smythe, the worst part of the series. Chandler is a self-absorbed whining loser who refuses to give up being involved with his son. The son is a teenage boy on the edge of going bad. This running plot point is a constant source for Chandler to do something stupid and put everyone in danger. Neither actor Clayton Rohner (Chandler) or Tony Denman (son Ben) are able to make their unlikable characters any less unlikable.
Richard Brooks’ portrayal of dead 70s cop Henry McNeil is another highlight of G vs E. The series does a fine job parodying 70s TV cops shows from the visual style to the buddy cop relationship between experienced and groovy Corps agent Henry and bumbling idiot rookie Chandler.
The last two regulars are Ford and Decker, Chandler and Henry’s superiors. Both Marshall Bell and Googy Gress have fun with their roles as bumbling inept superiors and are fun to watch.
My favorite episode of the series is “Buried,†the third episode of season one. This is a fun episode as the focus is on the buddy relationship of Chandler and Henry as Gods bounty hunters trying to save souls. But even this episode could not avoid spoiling some of the fun with maudlin scenes between Chandler and son.
BURIED. (August 1, 1999) Written and Directed by Josh Pate. Guest Cast: Reno Wilson, Michael Paul Chan and Emmanuel Lewis. Recurring Cast: Susie Parks. *** Chandler tries to save a young boxer from Hell but ends up buried alive. He calls Henry (by cell phone) and Henry begins a quixotic adventure across Los Angeles to find and save Chandler.
NBCU cable networks USA and Syfy have often shared original programs. USA ordered 22 episodes of G vs E. It aired Sunday at 8 pm and lasted eleven episodes. USA has always aimed at the general audience so G vs E was much better suited for the SciFi (now SYFY) channel and its different smaller audience. The series changed its name to the easier to understand Good vs Evil and moved to the Sci-Fi channel on Friday night for its final eleven episodes.
The series did a good job exploring the inner workings of the Corps. In an episode from the second season, “Portrait of Evil” wraps itself in parody of 70’s TV buddy cop shows and the film Rear Window as it shows the process of possible promotion (aka Judgment Day) for members of The Corps.
PORTRAIT OF EVIL. (May 5, 2000) Written by Marshall Page. Directed by David Mackay. Guest Cast: Thomas F. Duffy and Jack Donner. Recurring Cast: Jack Esformes. *** Henry retrieves some important documents the Corps was after, kills two Morlocks and saves Chandler’s life. Hero Henry is offered possible promotion to Heaven while Chandler wallows in self-pity.
While not totally forgotten today, man, if they had just been satisfied doing Starsky and Hutch fight demons, Good vs Evil could have been a cult classic on the level of X-Files and Twin Peaks. Instead it is just another series of many during the wild cable/syndicated days of the 80s through early 2000s that a few viewers remember with fond memories.
CRAIG RICE – The Corpse Steps Out. John J. Malone, Jake Justus & Helene (Brand) Justus #2. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1940. Reprints include: Pocket #476, paperback, 1947. IPL, softcover, 1989. Rue Morgue Press, softcover, 2012.
If I were to put together a list of detective mysteries that take place in or around radio stations, this would have to be included, and somewhere on top of the list. When radio star Nelle Brown gets into trouble with a blackmailer (and an ex-lover) and some letters he possesses, it is up to Jake Justus, her overworked press agent, to keep her image as squeaky clean as her adoring public thinks she is.
Problem is, and it’s a big one, when Nelle goes to the blackmailer’s apartment to confront him, she finds him dead, and the letters nowhere to be found. More than that, when Jake goes to investigate, the body itself is nowhere to be found.
There are two more murders before the book is done, and at least two of them, when eventually found, have been moved hither and yon, all for a good purpose, you understand. Aiding Jake in this madcap sequence of activities are Helen Brand, vivacious socialite — and rather wealthy, as I understand it — and Jake’s attorney, John J. Malone, who is often described as crooked, but while he may skirt the edges of legalities, I would not call him crooked, not on the basis of his actions in this book.
It also may be that Jake and Helen will have managed to have gotten married by the time the next book in the series came around, but try as they may, they don’t seem to get to the altar in this one. Too many bodies disappearing and popping up again!
This is a fun book to read all the way through, save perhaps the ending, when all of the strange events that have been happenings have to be sorted out and explained, including the naming of the killer. I also caution you that there is a lot of drinking that goes on in this book. Gin, mostly, but when the supply of gin runs out, rye will do, with beer as a chaser. Or is it the other way around?
THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR Rx. Universal PIctures, 1942. Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Anne Gwynne, Mantan Moreland (not credited), Samuel S. Hinds, Mona Barrie, Paul Kavanaugh, Shemp Howard, Edward MacDonald, John Gallaudet. Screenplay by Clarence Upson Young. Director: William Nigh.
A strong element of horror and Gothicism runs through this fast moving ’tec tale from Universal about amateur sleuth Jerry Church (Patric Knowles) trying to nail a crusading serial killer who signs himself Dr. Rx.
The fifth victim of Dr. Rx, yet another criminal who escaped the law but not justice, has just died and the police headed by Captain Heard (Edward MacDonald) and his man Sweeny (Shemp Howard) are in in tither. Jerry Church is just back from South America with plans to retire to his family’s business in Boston (thus Knowles’ British accent) and sell bonds, which makes things even worse.
Friendly rivals, Heard was counting on Church to track down this madman. Jerry’s retirement is postponed, when John Crispin (Paul Kavanaugh), brother of defense attorney Dudley Crispin (Samuel S. Hinds), who represented three of the murdered men, convinces Church to at least hear his brother out at his Long Island estate. Crispin fears for his and his wife’s (Mona Barrie) lives, and that very night Jerry finds a note from Dr. Rx warning him off posted on the steering wheel of his car.
Persuaded to take the case, Jerry focuses on Tony Zaroni, Crispin’s latest client, a hood on trial for murder, and when he is acquitted by the jury, Zaroni doesn’t even get out of the courtroom before he collapses, pronounced dead by the mysterious Dr. Fish (Lionel Atwill in bottle thick glasses) who has been watching the trial closely. Zaroni like the other victims died of strangulation, but how was he strangled in an open courtroom surrounded by witnesses?
Yes, it’s a miracle crime, and I thought of John Dickson Carr too, but there is no fair-play here despite misdirection, red herrings, and more than a few twists worthy of the master.
Complicating Church’s investigation are his forgetful valet Horatio (Mantan Moreland doing the most with the usual demeaning stereotype), and a mysterious figure who seems to know his every move and broadcast them to the press.
The latter proves to be his girl friend, mystery writer Kit Logan (Anne Gwynne) who has had his apartment bugged while he was in South America. When Jerry catches her in the apartment below his he is rightfully angry, but also realizes heloves her so they elope.
Now, to the horror, miracle crime, and serial killer, and detective story elements we add a touch of the Thin Man theme so popular in films of the mid thirties through the forties.
After meeting the mother of a policeman who was on the Dr. Rx case and driven mad, his health and mind destroyed by the mysterious killer, Kit wants Jerry to quit, but Zaroni’s ex partner, Ernie Paul (John Gallaudet) threatens Kit if Jerry doesn’t stay on the case to clear him. After taking Jerry for a ride in the country where, in a scene that had to be lifted from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Jerry has a nice Marlowesque exchange with Paul’s moll:
“My name’s Church, Jerry Church,†Knowles introduces himself to the blonde moll similar to Chandler’s Silver Hair, Eddie Marr’s wife. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.â€
“That’s the way to have any man.â€
Not Chandler by any means, but not bad.
Before the final fade to black Jerry and Horatio will be kidnapped by Dr. Rx after a rainy chase through the country and he will find himself chained to an operating table being menaced by an angry ape while Horatio looks on hopelessly, and the mad Dr. Rx babbles.
This never happened to Nick Charles or Pam North, though Pam came a lot closer to it than Nick.
All leading to a clever trap to capture Dr. Rx at his deadly game.
I suppose this will seem much better if like me, you first saw it on the weekend late show when you were fourteen, and caught it whenever it played since.
Despite some missteps, the stereotype bits with Moreland (who is always better than the material), and one of those Detection Club no-nos (a unnamed South American poison) this is entertaining, with Knowles and Gwynne an attractive pair, Atwill menacing, and Jerry Church a sleuth I wouldn’t have minded encountering more than once.
The horror elements give it the minor boost it needs, and a skilled cast and snappy screenplay do the rest. It can currently be seen on YouTube in an outstanding print and it is well worth catching with the few caveats I’ve made.
LAWRENCE BLOCK – A Long Line of Dead Men. Matt Scudder #12. William Morrow, hardcover, 1994. Avon, paperback, 1996.
Well, it had to happen: the first Scudder title that wasn’t five words. Does this have Significance? Is it a Portent of Momentous Change? Beats hell out of me.
It’s a fairly strange men’s club, this “Club of 31.” All the 31 members do is meet once a year to mark and celebrate the passage of time, and when the roster is reduced to to one, the survivor recruits 30 more young men and the cycle begins again.
The strangest thing, though, of how many of the current group have died the last 33 years — 14 of them. There’s no apparent connection to be made, but one of the survivors thinks the numbers are strange, and asks Scudder to either confirm his suspicion or set his mind at ease. The deaths have ranged from suicide to murder, and Scudder begins to seek a pattern.
To me this was the weakest of Block’s books in a long, long time, at least since he hit his stride with Ginmill. He’s such a fine writer that I’m not sure he knows how to write a bad book any more, but I had problems with both the plot and pacing on this one.
The plot weakness I can’t discuss other than to say I found the villain as eventually revealed to be enormously unlikely. The pacing simply struck me as overly slow — not something that usually bothers me — and more than a little jerky and episodic.
Quite a few people have complained about the number of references to drinking and AA in past books, and here for the first time it bothered me as well. In a lesser writer’s prose this would have been a poor book; done by Block, it just wasn’t a terribly good one.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #15, September 1994.
M. K. LORENS – Sweet Narcissus. Winston Marlowe Sherman #1. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1990.
A mystery introducing Winston Marlowe Sherman, semi-retired professor of English, pseudonymous author (as Henrietta Slocum) of the G. Winchester Hyde mystery novels, and in his own right, the most overtly eccentric character in detective fiction since Gideon Fell.
Unfortunately, that’s all he has going for him. The first 100 pages or so are readable, mostly because of the characters, but only three really interesting things happen in all that time. That’s 30 years worth of book time, and it’s far too slow.
Getting down to details, however, should you be interested. II mentioned three things that happened that I found interesting. Let’s enumerate: (1) Back in 1953, a rare manuscript of a 17th century play turns up, the suddenly disappears. A servant of the man who bought it is murdered at the same time, but I tell you this only in passing as dar more attention is paid to the missing play
(2) Thirty or so years later, some of the other items in the same collection are donated to Sherman’s school, but when they arrive, they’re discovered to have been severely vandalized. (3) The manuscript is found, hidden all these years in a secret hiding spot under the lid of an ornate lectern.
This is all that really happens in the first 100 pages. And to tell you the truth, I still don’t understand the paragraph on page 100 in which the mechanism that opened the lectern’s hidey-hole is discovered, losing the entire impact of interesting item #3 in the rigamarole. Someone should read John Dickson Carr again. (Maybe me.)
Where I really lost interest, though, is on page 110, when Sherman gets down to the business of checking out the alibis of the people at the party where and when the manuscript first disappeared, only a few decades late. The person who suffered the loss was the father of Sherman’s soon-to-be lifelong live-in partner, and apparently he wasn’t interested enough to check into the whereabouts of the people involved right then and there, when the skulduggery actually happened.
I don’t believe it for a moment, and neither should you.
— Reprinted from Mystery*File #22, June 1990 (somewhat but not significantly revised).
Bio-bibliographic Notes: As I had discovered at the time I wrote this review, the use of initials was intended (one presumes) to mask the fact that the M. K. stood for Margaret Keilstrup. One wonders if such a device ever mattered to anyone, except maybe in the early days of science fiction, when it was believed that nerdy teenage boys were not interested in reading stories written by those of the female gender.
This was the five of five cases tackled and solved by its protagonist, who really was (as I recall) a fussy old English professor. Three were published in paperback by Bantam in 1990, followed by two in hardcover from Doubleday in 1992-1993.
GEORGIA. Miramax, 1995. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mare Winningham, Ted Levine, Max Perlich, John Doe, John C. Reilly, Jimmy Witherspoon. Director: Ulu Grosbard.
There are few onscreen performances that I can think of where an actor so intensely takes on the role of the character so as to completely disappear into it. Heath Ledger’s uncannily vicious Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) is one example. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in Ulu Grosbard’s Georgia is another.
In one of the best performances of an actress in 1990s indie cinema, Leigh portrays Sadie Flood, a tortured lost soul who wants nothing more than to be a singer like her talented and successful sister, Georgia (Mare Winningham). She portrays Sadie with such grit, pathos, and tortured anguish that it’s at times almost painful to watch. But I suppose that was the whole point of Grosbard’s direction and his approach to the project. What is more sad – pathetic, even — than an artist who has no real talent, but has all the demons often associated with the tortured musical genius. Alcoholism, heroin, unstable romantic relationships, Sadie’s got them all and more.
Not Georgia though. Georgia is emotionally distant, cold even. She’s married to the laid back Jake (Ted Levine), lives in her childhood home, and has two young kids. The contrast between these two is evident from the get go.
But sibling rivalry isn’t the real them of Georgia. The film’s real theme is talent. Who has it and who doesn’t? Can talent be gained or learned or are some people just born with it? Who is more authentic? A singer with pure raw emotion and no talent or a completely talented professional with a cold heart and no real passion?
Grosbard, who worked extensively with Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight, and Robert DeNiro, knows a thing or two about spotting and directing talent. But in Georgia, he leaves the question open-ended, culminating in a final sequence in which the two sisters, at completely different musical venues, perform their own renditions of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.â€
Because it was summer, nobody considered the motive of the birds. And motive they have, namely to pick at the corpse of a young woman found in the river, stabbed and mutilated, drowned, and tarted out replete with all you would expect to find in a prostitute’s possession, save for one thing, the girl is a virgin.
Thus begins one of the fine suspense novels by British writer John Blackburn (Ring of Roses, The Scent of New Mown Hay, The Gaunt Woman) featuring General Kirk, his brilliant and ruthless secret service chief, and various continuing characters, here Michael Howard and Penny Wise who first appeared in A Sour Apple Tree.
Broken Boy is a detective novel and a thriller, but also a horror novel (some Blackburn novels are also science fiction of a very British tradition) with society itself threatened by outside forces. It deals with a witch cult, its historical roots found in the evil reign of Queen Ranavalono of 19th Century Madagascar, who reduced the population of her island by half during her reign (from five million to half that), the Broken Boy of the title being her weakling son for whom she ruthlessly tried to secure the throne (unsuccessfully) and the name of the cult Kirk must battle.
In Blackburn’s novel a modern witch cult risen from the activities of a defrocked priest who aided Ranavalono to defeat a French invasion, poses a threat to modern England as bloody and dangerous as any political or scientific enemy, and to Blackburn’s credit it is all grounded in well observed psychology and believable motives. His heroes and villains are human, and more frightening for it.
No one has to tone down their critical faculties to enjoy a Blackburn novel. This sort of thing has a long history in British thriller fiction dating at least as far back as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, up through Sax Rohmer’s novels (both Fu Manchu and not), John Buchan (The Three Hostages) Sydney Horler (The Vampire). Dennis Wheatley, Francis Gerard’s Sir John Meredith series, John Creasey’s Dr. Palfrey tales, Philip McCutchan’s Commander Shaw series (especially the later ones), and works by John Christopher and L. P. Davies.
Even James Bond encounters voodoo in Live and Let Die, Roderick Alleyn a cult in one of Ngaio Marsh’s books, and Albert Campion fantastic threats in several late Allingham entries. But few writers combined the elements as successfully as Blackburn, who ratchets up the suspense to unbearable levels while keeping the reader too distracted to notice how easily he is swallowing the whole thing.
Whether his monsters are human or not Blackburn has a true gift for combining Gothic elements with modern concerns, and wringing the last drop of cold sweat from the reader without once going over the top or spoiling the game.
As Inspector Hailstone says toward the end: “The whole thing sounds more like one of Grimm’s grimmer fairy stories than real life.†To which Kirk replies: “I suppose it does, old boy. Not Grimm though, much earlier and much more basic in every way.â€
That sums up the pleasures of a Blackburn novel as well, something “much more basic in every way,†than just a spy novel, detective tale, or horror novel. If you have never read Blackburn you are in for a treat, though I wouldn’t start one before bedtime if you expect to get much sleep.
THE BLACK CAMEL. Fox Film Corporation, 1931. Warner Oland (Inspector Charlie Chan), Sally Eilers, Bela Lugosi, Dorothy Revier, Victor Varconi. Based on the novel by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Hamilton MacFadden.
DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON. Paramount Pictures, 1931. Anna May Wong, Warner Oland (Fu Manchu), Sessue Hayakawa, Bramwell Fletcher (Ronald Petrie), Frances Dade, Holmes Herbert (Sir John Petrie). Based on the novel Daughter of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. Director: Lloyd Corrigan .
As it turned out, Cinevent 1990 featured a number of films with Oriental characters and settings. The first of these was The Black Camel, featuring Warner Oland as Charlie Chan in the first film version of the Biggers’ novel. We were warned about the noisy sound track which did not, however, significantly reduce ny enjoyment in this well-made, atmospheric classic.
Charlie’s co-star was Bela Lugosi skillfully playing a phony psychic who is advising an actress with a shady past, The print was worn, but the acting of a good cast shone through.
The other Warner Oland starrer was Daughter of the Dragon, directed from a story by Sax Rohmer. An older Fu Manchu (also stouter, as played by the well-nourished Oland) comes to London after being thought dead for ten years to avenge the death of his wife and son.
He murders Petrie (upgraded from Dr. to peer of the realm) but is himself killed, after pledging his daughter, Ling Moy (the beautiful Anna May Wong) to continue his mission. Unfortunately for the honor of the family, Ling Moy is not, unlike her father, ruthless and she falls in love with Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa), a Scotland Yard detective.
The actors play with utter conviction in a plot riddled with contrivances as patently manufactured as the secret passage that leads from Petrie’s house to the Fu Manchu/Ling Moy residence. The superb cinematography is by Victor Milner who takes advantage of half-tones, London fog and menacing shadows to capture the nighmarish night-world of Oriental intrigue.
The film is slow-paced but so arresting in the visuals that this is nor a major drawback. The Cinevent film notes claim that Oland “brought an almost spiritual suffering to the role [of Fu Manchu].” As I recall what I saw, there was an overlay of fatigue and sadness in Oland’s performance that might pass for spiritual suffering. I won’t argue the point.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
