Fu Manchu – This Film Is 100 Years Old

Between 1921 and 1923, Stoll Pictures produced three separate series of Holmes adaptations (The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, The Further Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, and The Last Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes), comprising 45 short episodes and 2 feature length films, all directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes and Hubert Willis as Doctor Watson.

The three episodes here include one from each series, A Scandal In Bohemia from The Adventures…, The Golden Pince-Nez from The Further Adventures… and The Final Problem from The Last Adventures…

A Scandal in Bohemia is probably the weakest of the three episodes here, although that’s largely down to the soruce material, a story that reduces Sherlock Holmes to a petty thief of absolutely buffoonish incompetence. Apparently robbing an innocent woman (and drugging her and also throwing fireworks through hr front room window) is perfectly okay if a German prince asks you to do it.

Luckily Irene Adler (renamed Irene Adair here for some reason, one of the few changes in what are generally very close adaptations of the source material) has the amazing super power of not being an idiot, and sees through Holmes’s elaborately useless plans immediately, earning Holmes’s undying admiration (and also probably his scorn).

The Golden Pince-Nez is better, actually allowing Holmes to do some crime solving. The mystery here is a locked room style problem, where a man has been murdered in his study and the murderer has subsequently vanished into thin air. The police are stumped, Watson is confused, but Sherlock solves it all pretty much instantly, with a twinklish smile and lots of cigarettes.

In the very last episode of the regular series, The Final Problem finally sees Holmes tangling with Moriarty, played with swaggering Orson Welles-esque menace by Percy Standing. Pretty much everything about this episode is great, even the choice to replace the Reichenbach Falls with the Cheddar Gorge, which looks genuinely spectacular on screen, its impossibly imposing cliffs rendered in (perfectly restored) stark black and white.

The slightly shocking end to the episode (although not that shocking if you know the story, obviously) is undercut somewhat by the “Sherlock Holmes Will Return!” title card that immediately follows its conclusion (and indeed Sherlock Holmes did return in The Sign Of Four, the second of the feature length episodes, although whether that actually resolves the end of this episode or simply ignores it I do not know).

After finishing The Last Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, Stoll Pictures moved on to making The Mystery Of Fu-Manchu, which is unsurprisingly quite similar in setting, structure, look and tone (why break a winning formula, really), essentially being an answer to the question “What if Holmes and Watson had to fight Moriarty every single week instead of only once?”.

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Notes

1. I watched these at Firstsite in Colchester, where they were showing as part of the BFI’s current Silent Sherlock presentation.

2. They also showed this ten minute explanation/overview of the BFI’s restoration project (which apparently is going to eventually include restorations of all 40-odd episodes and both films).

3. Anyway, this means that you’ll presumably have to go and see them at a nearby cinema or arts centre for now (if they’re showing them.

4. It also means the pictures above are BFI publicity stills rather than screen grabs I’ve made from youtube.

5. Which is why they look so nice, I suppose.

6. Although it would have been nice to show you how bloody lovely the shots of Cheddar Gorge look in The Final Problem.

7. At least a hundred times nicer than Switzerland ever could have, obviously.

8. Also I think this means I’ve seen two films this year which end with brutal deaths at Cheddar Gorge (along with 28 Years Later).

9. Which is probably two more than I’d ever seen before.

10. Unless you count all the episodes of Robin of Sherwood in the 80s.

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Film Information

Titles: A Scandal In Bohemia; The Golden Pince-Nez; The Final Problem
Director: Maurice Elvey
Duration: 25 minutes each
Further Reading: Inside The Archive: estoring Conan Doyle’s favourite screen Sherlock (10-minute video); Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases (2024 Sight and Sound review); Restoration Of Silent Sherlock (2024 BFI article); The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (wikipedia article on the Stoll series)

The Mystery Of Fu Manchu, the first ever film adaptation of the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, was a series of 15 half-hour adventure stories released in 1923 (although only 13 of these still exist, and a couple of those only in truncated form).

The set-up here is fairly familiar, with the two central characters, Nayland Smith (Fred Paul), and his faithful sidekick Doctor Petrie (played by the magnificently named Humberston Wright) basically replicas of Holmes and Watson, while Fu Manchu (Harry Agar Lyons) is their eternal Moriarty, who has a nice line in both utilising endlessly inventive ways to kill his enemies (in one of the episodes he murders people by dropping poisonous cats onto their heads) and fashioning increasingly ludicrous ways to escape the law and therefore carry on to fight another day/episode/series/century (secret doors/exploding houses/falling into the Thames and drowning/running away slightly faster than they can catch him!).

Every episode is essentially the same (a murder! a chase! a second murder averted at the very last moment! an escape!), but there’s just about enough variety to sustain it all. Unfortunately, there’s also lots of strangely inert scenes where the various detectives and policeman have long drawn out conversations we can’t even hear but which are filmed as if we can (the one that ends with intertitle cards saying “I want some milk… and a trowel!” is definitely the high point here).

One of my favourite episodes was The Knocking At The Door, which combined some excellent pseudo ghost story stylings, where a frightful knock, knock, knocking at the chamber door is slowly driving everyone mad, with a secondary tale about Fu Manchu living in Madame Tussauds now.

Q. Why is Fu-Manchu living in Madame Tussauds now?
A. There is absolutely no explanation of events.

But instead there’s an explosion, which is miles better than any explanation would have been.

Except for the frequently excellent (and often beautifully shot) location shots from a now century old London, by far the best thing in the series is Harry Agar Lyon’s astonishingly weird and terrifying performance as Fu Manchu, from the full scale demented fury in the snarling contortions of his face in practically every scene he’s in, to the unhinged and monstrous violence he metes out to his “slave girl” Karamaneh (Joan Clarkson) in as many episodes as he gets the chance to, as he attempts to throttle and beat her into subservience (while only ever driving her to ever greater defiance).

The very final episode is the only one which has its original tinting intact, with the interiors having a fairly standard sepia tone to them, but the exteriors are all an odd green colour, giving London the air of some distant Neptunian outpost (one of the title cards even says the news of Fu Manchu’s demise quickly spreads “across the Universe” so who knows, maybe it is).

There’s even a happy ending, Fu Manchu getting shot in the face about one hundred times. Which is nice. Especially as it means there’s no chance any of us will ever see him again ever in anything at all at any point ever.

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Notes

1. I watched these all on the BFI Player.

2. And have included the links to the various episodes below.

3. As the first episode is missing, I have no idea how the various characters were initially introduced.

4. Which is a shame.

5. There was a second series of this, The Further Mysteries Of Fu Manchu, released in 1924, but I haven’t dared watch them yet.

6. And obviously am not allowed to for another 10 months or so.

7. But also it seems they no longer exist, which kind of hampers me a little.

8. Then after this, Fu Manchu would go on to appear in just about everything, seemingly forever, for some reason or other (everyone just really loved racist baddies, I suppose).

9. While Harry Agar Lyons would also play Dr Sin Fang, who was definitely not Fu Manchu, in another ten films or so.

10. And then of course there’s Ming the Merciless…

11. Back to these episodes, there’s a lot of scenes in these episodes which are clearly supposed to be set at night but just filmed in full daylight.

12. Which I assume would have been tinted to give them some appearance of night time, but in these versions on the BFI player it just gives a strange sense of surreality to the whole thing.

13. Heightened too by the slightly strange geography they inhabit. Petrie’s house seems to be in the middle of some London suburb from the front, a small terrace in the middle of an entire row, but exits out the back to some quiet country village and a wide expanse of lonely woods.

14. Which may be what London was just like 100 years ago, I do not know.

15. But still seems kind of odd.

16. And in the final episode they somehow go from central London to the outskirts via a single basement staircase and subsequent tunnel.

17. In about five minutes.

18. While following a monkey.

19. I love that monkey.

20. The intertitles in this are also kind of interesting, in that the ones for Doctor Petrie and Nayland Smith are in a normal, boring font, and the ones for Fu Manchu are in a pretend Chinese font.

21. And then in one, where Petrie’s losing his mind with paranoia, they change half way through from his font to Fu Manchu’s font and it’s bloody great.