Adventure, intrigue, racism, and a few healthy drops of S&M are the main ingredients of this entertaining and unintentionally campy old Hollywood adaptation of Sax Rohmer’s stories of Dr. Fu Manchu, the Chinese criminal genius. It’s the Yellow Peril as rendered in glistening black-and-white.
Every scene pulses with racial fears. If you somehow don’t pick up on Fu Manchu’s first statement about destroying the white race, you can still catch the second, third or fourth one. He’s played by Boris Karloff, who was uniquely comfortable buried under make-up and who does his best here to conjure up the kind of villain who enjoys torture, likes murder, and cares little about his sex-crazed daughter (Myrna Loy). He’s after the ancient sword of Genghis Khan because it somehow holds mystical powers that will help him rule the world. Meanwhile, a team of goodhearted British government agents seek to stop him by finding the sword first.
This film drew protests from everyone from the Chinese embassy in the US to the Japanese American Citizens League. A few incendiary scenes (mostly Karloff’s rants) were eventually cut over the years, but the current DVD release restores it all—you can easily spot the censored scenes from their fuzziness compared to the rest of the film—so one can truly appreciate the strange and naive antique.