Timothy Liebe Portfolio & Samples: Short Film Commentaries -- Thoughts on Fu Manchu Movies

Short Film Commentaries
by Timothy Liebe

Unfortunately, the odds of any Western director casting an Asian actor as a major Asian character like Fu Manchu in the 1960s were between zip and bloody none. Hollywood and Broadway were still using White actors in yellowface as late as 1988's Remo Williams television series and 1991's MISS SAIGON, despite decades of protests from Asian Actors' groups. It was a big deal in the late Sixties when HAWAII 5-0 actually cast Asians to play major Asian characters, even if they did mix and match Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Samoans and Hawaiians.

I'd love to see a revisionist Fu Manchu with an Asian actor playing Fu….

A Fu Manchu movie could work if you inverted it, the way Paul Verhoeven did Starship Troopers - make Fu the hero (and cast an actual Chinese actor for a change!), and make the movie a pointed satire of British Imperialism.

I was thinking more of Fu and Nayland Smith having grown up friends (maybe schoolmates?), and becoming adversaries as adults - though Sir Denis has to admit, in his more honest moments, that addicting an entire country to opium just to get trade concessions from them is Just Not Right, Old Boy, and that China had been a civilized nation when his ancestors were painting themselves blue and screaming naked into battle!

Fu Manchu was a bit more layered than “’Yellow Peril’ Personified”, as was Sir Denis Nayland Smith, at least in Rohmer's original stories. Yes, he wanted to drive the Whites out of China (and later all of Asia), but at the same time he had a definite code of honor, and there were some Caucasians (like Nayland Smith) who he admired a great deal. On Nayland Smith's part, he did on occasion admit that European Colonialism was often abusive to the local population, and especially in later stories came to accept that Fu Manchu might have had good reason to hate Whites, even while trying to stop him. Had Rohmer given his stories a slight twist in emphasis, Fu would have been the implacable antihero, Nayland Smith the reluctant adversary, and the rest of British society the smug, entitled villains!

It's funny - The Mask of Fu Manchu was an absolutely delicious piece of pulp moviemaking, and Karloff makes a strong and imposing Fu Manchu. It was also so balls-to-the-wall racist in its Caucasian "heroes" that it got me questioning, for the first time in my life (I was in college back then) if all those "Yellow Peril" movies weren't as bigoted as the KKK. It also had me wondering WTF a White guy in heavy makeup was doing playing a an educated Chinese noble - so, for those of you who wonder where I get off growling about "Yellowface", "Whitewashing" and "Racebending", you can blame this movie for having been, probably unintentionally, a consciousness-raising experience for me….

I could not believe some of the racial epithets that got flung at Fu Manchu, repeatedly, over the course of the movie! It's so chock-full of anti-Asian bigotry that the film ends up operating on the level of subversion - after about the sixth or seventh time Fu makes a polite comment, only to get back a stream of invective that would certainly get my comment blocked and me quite probably banned, the whole thing starts to seem like how Sheriff Bart was treated in Blazing Saddles.

As angry as Racebending makes me? I’m down with “And Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu” in Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of The SS, even though it's as blatantly racebending as Benedict Cumberbatch (not really) playing Khan Nooien Singh! Maybe it’s because Cage doesn’t even bother with Yellowface: He looks like he just rolled off Rob Zombie’s couch, glued on a Costume Shop Fu Manchu mustache, snagged a red silk, vaguely Asian-looking robe, wandered onto the set drinking a Starbucks some Fifth Assistant Gopher got him, and when Zombie said, “Nic, you’re up!”?

Walked in front of the camera, and proceeded to devour the scenery for a half-hour.

I just saw MST3K's evisceration of The Castle of Fu Manchu on Comet Channel, and… it was really, truly bad, and almost painful to watch. It was also proof that Jess Franco's worst work was his most conventional.