Film Review - The Face of Fu Manchu

After building a fortune producing radio dramas, including The Lives of Harry Lime with Orson Welles (The Third Man was massive in the UK) and a Sherlock Holmes series featuring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Welles again, Harry Alan Towers moved into mid-budget cinema in the sixties and arguably his most famous work in this field was the Fu Manchu series of films starring Christopher Lee as Sax Rohmer's Oriental terror.


All five films in the series were issued in the nineties by Warner Home Entertainment in their red-sleeved budget range alongside a slew of Hammer horrors (not helping the occasional assumption that Towers' Fu series were actually produced by that illustrious house) but since then something seems to have happened with the rights and only the final two instalments - both helped by frequent Towers lackey Jesus "Jess" Franco - are available in the UK on DVD. The opener, The Face of Fu Manchu, has been released as part of Warner's USA-only burn-to-demand Archive series while the next two only seem to be out on disc in continental Europe.

So Face will set you back a few quid but it really is the only good film in the series. You'll have to l eave your political correctness at the door as old London town is menaced by a fiendish Christopher Lee in slap, though he at least gets to largely use his natural booming tones rather than an awful accent, while Nigel Green makes a sturdy but (faithful to the source material) overshadowed Nayland Smith. A solid script and no small outlay makes this one a solid little pulp actioner with a couple of neat scenes and a couple of moments that are a cut above this sort of thing's usual standards. There's even a surprisingly good car chase in period saloons.

The series would rapidly nose-dive after this promising start, but don't let the abysmal quality of the other offerings put you off this one.