With another Halloween upon us it is time for my usual October highlighting of a spooky serial and this month is one of the scariest serials ever produced, Republic’s adaptation of Sax Rohmer’s Drums of Fu Manchu (1940).
Sir Nayland Smith (William Royale) is in California on the trail of his old nemesis, Dr. Fu Manchu (Henry Brandon). Outside of his friend Dr. Petrie’s (Olaf Hytten) home, Smith just barely misses being done in by a Dacoit knife. He manages to get inside to safety where he tells his old friend that Fu Manchu plans to find the lost Scepter of Genghis Khan which will allow him to unit all of the hill tribes in Central Asia into an army for his eventual conquest of first Asia and then the world.
The location of the scepter is on a series of scrolls, one of which is secreted in the Dahli Plaque which Archeologist Prof. Parker (George Cleveland) has brought back from a dig in Asia. Smith discovers he has arrived too late, Parker has disappeared. Smith and Petrie go to see Parker’s son Allen (Robert Kellard) to see if they can learn anything. During their discussion Allen receives a phone call to tell him to turn on famed radio newscaster Wally Winchester (Norman Nesbitt) for some important information about the abduction of his father.
During the broadcast, Winchester announces that he knows where Prof. Parker is being held. Before he can elaborate, the supernatural beat of the Drums of Fu Manchu sound in the studio and Winchester suddenly collapses, dead. Smith, Petrie and Allen rush over to the studio where Smith discovers a shattered glass vial in Winchester’s microphone. The vial had contained a deadly gas and was released when the glass shattered from the vibrations of Fu Manchu’s drums.
Allen suddenly remembers that Prof. Randolph (Tom Chatterton) accompanied his father on his expedition and may also be in danger. They rush over to Randolph’s Mongolian Museum and warn him of his danger. Meanwhile Fu Manchu’s daughter (Fah Lo Suee) has been smuggled into the museum in a mummy case. She slips out of the case and lets he father’s Dacoit slaves into the museum. They attack Smith’s party and during the confusion head Dacoit Loki (John Merton) overpowers and abducts Randolph.
Randolph is taken to Fu Manchu’s hideout in Chinatown where he and Parker are tortured until finally they reveal that Randolph’s daughter Mary (Luana Walters) is bringing the plaque in on the Sunrise Limited. Fu Manchu leaves them in the room protected by a deadly disintegrating beam and makes plans to get the plaque, and then destroy the train (well after all, he is pure evil personified).
Our heroes return to Winchester’s office and go over his notes for the ill fated broadcast. Smith finds a carbon of the radio script which contains the address Winchester had been about to say on the air. Rushing to the address, the three men are attack by several Dacoits. After a furious fight, they defeat the Dacoits and Allen uses a gun to shoot the glass lenses of the disintegration beam’s electric eye. One Dacoit comes to and tries to kill Allen but his father jumps in front of the thrown knife. Before dying he tells Allen to go save Mary. Allen and Smith head for the airport to grab a plane.
A Dacoit gets aboard the train by hiding in a mail bag. After killing the mail car attendant, he goes up front and shoots the engineers. Bursting into Mary’s compartment, he grabs the satchel with the plaque and makes his escape. While this has been happening, Smith has flown a plane to the train. While it is hovering over the moving vehicle, Allen climbs down to the plane’s landing gear and drops onto the top of the train. He comes upon the Dacoit leaving Mary’s room and engages in a battle to death for the satchel.
Farther down the line Fah Lo Suee has had Loki kill the switch back operator and switch lines so the Limited is now on a collision course with an oncoming train. Allen knocks the Dacoit off the train, grabs the satchel and heads back to Mary’s compartment to see that she is okay. Just then the two trains collide in a stupendous crash…..
This is by far one of Republic’s best serials (and director William Witney’s personal favorite) perfectly combining action, mystery and horror into a seamless whole. It is also one of the best adaptations of a Sax Rohmer novel. Ironically Republic didn’t adapt the actual novel, which had Fu Manchu sending his Dacoits to assassinate several key world leaders in an attempt to try and prevent the approaching war. Such a controversial storyline probably would not have gone over too well with the movie going public, or the studio heads (not to mention the Hays Office). So they reworked the plot of an earlier book Mask of Fu Manchu, which had been made into a Boris Karloff vehicle in 1932, replacing the mask and sword of the book with a scepter.
Drums of Fu Manchu, like SOS Coastguard (1937) and Fighting Devil Dogs (1938) is more a horror film than a serial, it just happens to be broken up into fifteen installments. It has an atmosphere of menace that pervades throughout, with much action taking place in shadow filled rooms or claustrophobic alleyways. Even when the film switches to the urban setting of the Mongolian hill country there is a plethora of action set among dark and eerie ancient tombs and cave tunnels.
But that is nothing to the devices Fu Manchu utilizes. His Seven Gates to Paradise is one of the nastiest devises every thought up. A person is placed in a box that is separated into seven sections, or gates. Starting at the feet, starved rats are released to gnaw on the person’s body in that section. As time goes on more and more sections are opened and filled with rats. Manchu helpfully mentions that many have gotten past three but never four of the gates right before putting the victim in the box. When Allen won’t give with info in Chapter Four, he straps him under a pendulum and then takes time to give proper credit to Edgar Allen Poe before turning it on.
Of course Manchu’s most ghastly tool are his Dacoit slaves, men who have had brain surgery to bend them to his will, one cliffhanger even has him about to perform this operation on Smith. They are a scary sight with their shaved heads, huge scar across the forehead, dead white eyes, and totally silent. Most scary is head Dacoit Loki who also has snake like fangs for some inexplicable reason.
But of course scariest of all is Fu Manchu himself. His total disregard for any human life, his overly polite remarks right before he plans to cause someone excruciating pain, even if he isn’t after any information, he comes off as a true sadist. Plus he seems to have supernatural powers, causing the sound of drums to appear out of nowhere just by concentrating, he uses this ability in one cliffhanger to cause razor sharp stalactites to drop on the heroes. So great is his hypnotic power he can send a Dacoit out to spy for him and actually see what the man is seeing.
One of the best cliffhangers is in Chapter Five. Manchu’s Dacoits attack the heroes and all of them are knock unconscious. As the mysterious drums beat louder and louder, Manchu enters the room, surveys his helpless enemies, looks into the camera and smiles, fade to black. That is more suspenseful and unnerving than any explosion or fall off a cliff. After having seen what the man is capable of doing you’re left with a quaking fear of what he plans to do to them.
As Fu Manchu, Henry Brandon is perfect, putting to shame Warner Oland, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. Brandon is Fu Manchu, from his high pitched carefully enunciated dialogue (Brandon uses his normal voice when disguised as a Mongolian ambassador), to the fiendish gleam in his eye he exudes evil for evil’s sake with every breath. Yet for all of his cruelty he has his own sense of honor, regretfully admonishing the heroes in Chapter Three for trying to trick him when they had an agreement to exchange a prisoner for the plaque and he now feels compelled to leave them to fate they had planned for him. Brandon’s delivery almost makes you sympathize with him.
As good as Brandon is, the film wouldn’t work without just as strong an actor as Sir Nayland Smith, and again the choice was perfect. Despite being in his obvious fifties, William Royale gives an energetic performance that believably blends Sherlock Holmes style deductive ability with Race Williams style physical heroics. Many times in the early chapters he is shown to find some obscure bit of information or small piece of clothing that leads him right to were Manchu is, races there and gets into a fight with some Dacoits. Royale is so commanding in the role that it’s a little disappointing that he wasn’t allowed to carry the serial himself, but Republic always felt the need for a young hero, so as the serial progresses he is involved in less and less action, letting Kellard take on the baddies and doing most of the legwork while he coordinates back at their base camp.
Not that I’m running down Robert Kellard. He gives a good, solid performance as the earnest youthful hero, partly fueled by personal revenge and partly fueled by a need to protect society from a madman. Kellard’s best scene is in Chapter Six when Manchu disguises himself as Allen to get out of the country and Kellard mimics Brandon’s facial expressions and physical gestures perfectly.
Gloria Franklin gives a good performance as Fah Lo Suee. As ruthless as her father, she seems to take too much delight in the pain he inflicts while also glancing at Kellard in a few scenes when he is a prisoner with a bizarre mixture of curious lust and outright contempt for his race. She and Brandon play well off of each other and give off a real father/ daughter vibe.
Walters isn’t given much to do. She does participate in the early chapters, even attempting to take out the villain by herself a couple of times, but once the serial leaves the States she is left more and more out of the action. Hytten is even more underused. After Chapter One he is almost entirely left with nothing to do but tag along, look worried when Royale and Kellard go off, and patch them up when they return.
Horror fans are also in for a real treat with Drums of Fu Manchu. Popping up in Chapter Five is Dwight Frye as a museum curator. Get this, he isn’t a hunchback or demented henchman, he’s completely normal looking and acting. And get this, he isn’t a villain but a good guy who even helps Kellard clobber a bunch of Dacoits disguised as museum statues. Who knew?
A sequel tentatively called The Return of Fu Manchu had been planned with Brandon reprising his role as the world’s most evil mastermind, but the war caused Republic to cancel the proposed film. Fu Manchu just didn’t seem like relevant escapist entertainment in light of the Axis Powers. Plus we were allied with China at the time, and having a film depicting a Chinese villain might not have gone over too well.
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