William Cameron Menzies was on the shortlist of American filmmakers of his time who could make movies look every bit as exciting and strange as the best pulp magazine covers. Whether working as a director or heading a film’s art department, Menzies was a giant at creating worlds. Menzies didn’t seem to see the point in making movies at all unless they took you a million miles away from where you started. He pushed special effects to their limit, moved his camera more in one scene than most other directors in 1932 did in entire movies and composed beautifully eye-catching shots that played with strange perspectives. Menzies could do it on a big budget (David O. Selznick gave him top brass authority on the visual aspects of Gone With the Wind, for which Menzies earned an Oscar for production design) and he could do it on a small budget, as in the rushed Chandu the Magician.
For all his moviemaking genius though, Menzies had a giant flaw: he had zero interest in stories or characters. That’s why Chandu the Magician is pretty bad despite its cool imagery. Menzies had a co-director, inexperienced French-born comedy maven Marcel Varnel, with whom he split duties. Menzies handled the visual style while Varnel handled the actors. They don’t appear to have been a perfect team though because this film is choppy and uninvolving. Edmund Lowe does a great impersonation of a piece of wood as the hero (a pencil-mustache, proto-Dr. Strange) and the rest of the cast are mere cogs and pulleys in the machine, with the exception of a prime-period Bela Lugosi who hams it up big as the villain, a glowering creepozoid who wants to steal scientist Henry B. Walthall’s amazing new death ray invention so he can take over the world. Both directors plow through the script like it barely matters. That can be a good thing, but this is a movie that doesn’t know how to breathe. Recommended to freaks for Lugosi and Menzies only.