The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin, 1932)

When I watched The Mask of Fu Manchu for the first time when I was in my late twenties, I remember being able to compartmentalize the film's racism within the context of its era and enjoy it as a well-made, exciting, pulpy, adventure-horror film. Watching it again last night, this time in my early forties, I can't compartmentalize the racism anymore. No matter how much I love Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy, no matter how exciting the story, no matter how powerful the images and set design, no matter how weird and wild the film gets, I can't separate the film's dehumanization of nonwhite people from its aesthetic and genre pleasures.

I'm sick of living in a country that's always dehumanized nonwhite people, and I'm sick of the current administration and its rotten-brained, rotten-hearted supporters who actively get off on hurting others. I'm sick of my own complicity in a corrupt system. Heavy shit to deal with while watching a B-movie with alligators and mummies and snakes and kidnappings and killer electro-rays and hidden passageways and diabolical murder, but that's life.

The Mask of Fu Manchu has impressively sweeping camera movements and awe-inspiring set design and two of my favorite classic Hollywood actors and beautiful shot compositions and an anything-can-happen-and-probably-will story. It also has a palpable hatred of/fear of/psychosexual obsession with Asian and black people, a protective, paternalistic attitude toward white women, and an unquestioned belief that the treasures, artifacts, and historical objects of the nonwhite world belong to the white world.

What do we do with films like these? How do we deal with the barrage of images pumped into our brains our whole lives telling us certain people are lesser than? I don't know, but I wasn't expecting this film to make me so heavy-hearted on my second watch.

The Mask of Fu Manchu sees Boris Karloff take over the titular role from Warner Oland. In this installment, Fu Manchu is seeking the tomb of Genghis Khan and Khan's gold death mask and sword which will endow him with Khan's spirit and help him destroy the white man. Meanwhile, a group of British archaeologists and a government special agent, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone), know where the tomb is and are planning an expedition to beat Fu Manchu to the precious objects, which they are going to steal and bring to the British Museum, because white people deserve to have the stuff so other white people can look at it on holidays.

Manchu kidnaps and tortures Nayland, the tomb is raided by Brits anyway, Nayland's daughter and her boring, stupid boyfriend travel to the East to find Pops, Manchu kidnaps the boyfriend for his sadistic nymphomaniacal daughter Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) to torture and have sex with, and various plots, schemes, intrigues, counter-intrigues, and shenanigans ensue.

The film is strange and exciting and perverse, but it's so disgustingly racist. I can't enjoy it like I did on my first viewing, but it is an excellent historical example of racism's irrationality and distorted thinking. It plays in 2019 like western civilization's id run amok. Everything presented as a virtue or an entitlement in the movie is bankrupt and rotten, as bankrupt and rotten as anything the villainous Fu Manchu does. A day after our grotesque, moronic pig of a president declared a pre-golf-game national emergency to circumvent Congress and build a hubristic monument to his own, and the country's, racism, we're still trapped in the hell of our own making and probably always will be. Maybe The Mask of Fu Manchu is one of the key texts to understand why we are who we are.
I hope my next review is more fun. Sorry for the preaching.

The Body Beneath (Andy Milligan, 1970)

"Let's face it, life is a vale of tears." -- Andy Milligan
I wrote about the eccentric life of Andy Milligan on this site's previous Milligan review (Blood, a film about a marriage of convenience between Dracula's daughter and the Wolf Man's son), and my second viewing of a Milligan film makes me interested to see many more and to read the Milligan biography I own (by Jimmy McDonough, who wrote the great Neil Young biography Shakey and who was Milligan's caregiver when Milligan was dying of AIDS in the early 1990s). Milligan's films don't look, move, or act like other people's films. In my review of Blood, I described his style as resembling a combination of John Waters, '30s and '40s horror, community theater, and Warhol while also acknowledging that was only a ballpark comparison that won't get you on the field.

The Body Beneath comes from the brief but prolific period when Milligan was living in London (part of his insanely prolific 1970, in which he wrote and directed five films), and like a subplot in the later Blood, it concerns a vampire looking for a fresher blood supply. The Reverend Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) presents himself as a new reverend in town reopening the Old Souls Church near Carfax Abbey. The Rev and his wife are really centuries-old vampires doing their once-every-40-years return to human life to track down descendants of the Ford bloodline with the purest Ford blood. Too many Fords have been marrying non-Fords, as is the modern custom, and Alexander is pissed about the dilution of the blood's purity. He uses his minions (three blue-colored vampire women and a hunchbacked servant named Spool (Berwick Kaler)) to track down relatives and have their blood tested. If the blood's no good, his three scary vampire lady servants kill the person. If the blood's good, they kidnap the unfortunately good-blooded soul and bring her to the Rev's place.

Susan Ford (Jackie Skarvellis), a distant relative, gets the attention of the vampire Fords. Newly pregnant and engaged to her boyfriend Paul (Richmond Ross), Susan becomes the key piece of the Rev's evil plan, which involves a plot to kidnap excellent-blooded hunks to repeatedly impregnate Susan, creating a race of Fords with purer and purer blood and allowing the vampire Fords to stay in their beloved England with a great Ford blood supply always available. Understandably, Susan hates this plan. Lots of other stuff happens involving other Fords and Spool and a disobedient maid and Paul and a surprise twist at a feast and another surprise twist after that. All of it is weird, some of it is funny, only a little of it is boring.

Milligan's films, at least the two I've seen, occupy a strange, mostly inarticulable space that is neither amateurish nor professional. They're extremely low budget, but they're not sloppy or generic, and the pace rarely drags. The camera photographs from odd angles, but these angles don't distract or call too much attention to themselves. The tone is neither camp nor deadly serious but some blurred middle ground. The actors' performances, too, touch on realism and exaggeration without belonging to either. It's easier to say what a Milligan film isn't than what it is, but I do see a barely hidden subtext in these two films about gay people having to hide in plain sight. There is some self-loathing there, too. Milligan was a surprisingly conservative man who believed he was gay only because his father was brutal and his mother was controlling and over-protective. It's hard not to see this in his films, but maybe I'm wrong.

The Body Beneath is a bit more subdued than Blood, but it's still a pretty weird experience. Previously a hard film to track down, The Body Beneath is available for streaming on most of the streaming devices out there today in the weird new world of subscribing to 12 different services to get the catalog of one good video store. Check it out.