Starring CHRISTOPHER LEE
With NIGEL GREEN,
JOACHIM FUCHSBERGER.
KARIN DOR
Directed by DON SHARP
Produced by HARRY ALAN TOWERS
In 1913, in Colliers magazine,
author and seer Sax Rohmer first
alerted the world to the sinister
activities of the diabolical Doctor Fu
Manchu, the evil personification of
the Yellow Peril so beloved of the
Yellow Press.
Since then the Doctor's activities, chronicled in countless books and magazines, comic-strips, radio serials and motion pictures, have thrilled, terrified and delighted successive generations.
After a sensational career in 1920's silent serials the deadly Doctor dominated a series of 'thirties and 'forties features. For a while thereafter it was no doubt his world-wide political machinations and the demands of his widespread criminal empire which were responsible for keeping him from the cinema screens (though not entirely absent, for after all who really was 'Doctor No'?).
But in the late' sixties he returned in triumph via a splendid new interpreter, Christopher Lee, in the first of a new film series, The Face of Fu Manchu (1965).
In this rumbustious romp his
long-standing antagonists Nayland
Smith of Scotland Yard (Nigel Green)
and the ever-faithful Doctor Petrie
(Marion Crawford) are once
again called upon to save Western
Civilization from the menace of the
arch-fiend. Set in a stylishly-realised
1920's, wittily directed by Don Sharp
with only the slightest suggestion
of tongue-in-cheek, The Face of Fu
Manchu contains all the classic
elements of the movie thriller -
mysterious alien assassins,
inexplicable disappearances,
fiendishly contrived traps, lethal
poisons, well-bred damsels and
slave-girls, attempted drownings in an
underground hideaway deep beneath
the Thames, fights and chases, all
ending in a final explosive show-down
in a lonely monastery in the Far
Himalayas.
As the only momentarily
frustrated Fu Manchu makes his
exit, his voice echoes with the grim
warning: "The world shall hear from
me again", indeed so successful was
this film that the world had not long to
wait - barely twelve months, in fact,
for the same team's sequel The Brides
of Fu Manchu.
JACK IBBERSON
'packed with thrills, directed with an excellent sense of period.
THE TIMES
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This page was last updated 02 Dec 2002