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.