The Castle of Fu Manchu (1968)

The Castle of Fu Manchu (1968) - the last and least of the five 'Fu Manchu' films starring Christopher Lee and produced by Harry Allan Towers - starts as it means to go on: with a chunk of footage recycled from previous films.  The whole of the pre-title sequence, with Fu Manchu revving up his power supply to dangerous levels as he tries to remotely sink a passenger liner, is lifted from Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), while the scenes of the liner sinking after hitting Fu Manchu's artificial iceberg are, aptly, lifted from A Night to Remember (1958), about the sinking of the 'Titanic'.  The borrowings don't end there - part way through the film Fu Manchu destroys a dam, depicted via a huge chunk of stock footage taken from Campbell's Kingdom (1957) - although only seen in long shot, both Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker are both recognisable in this footage.  These borrowings pretty much sum up Castle of Fu Manchu, which has a dog eared, overly familiar look and feel to it - like a secondhand paperback you feel sure you must have read before, even though the title and author are unfamiliar.  The main thrust of the film concerns Fu Manchu's attempts use a new freezing process he has stolen from a scientist to hold the world to ransom, with the sinking of the liner an opening salvo.  Which all seems pretty similar to the sound wave device he had in Brides, (with which he also destroyed a passenger liner).  But the sinking of the ship overloads his power supply, destroying his headquarters, (in both Brides and Castle, unsurprisingly as it's the same footage, even down to the bit where one of his assistants - played by Burt Kwouk - tries to stop him and is shot).  

The bulk of the film involves Fu Manchu trying to perfect the instant freezing process, for which he needs a new base - which he obtains by taking over the castle of the governor of Anatolia by force.  He also needs the help of the process' inventor, so kidnaps him.  He has a weak heart, though, so needs a heart transplant, for which purpose Fu Manchu kidnaps a top heart surgeon and his assistant, with the donor heart being provided by one of Fu Manchu's acolytes.  All of which inevitably gives the film a halting, episodic feel.  As ever, Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie are on his trail and also soon turn up in Turkey.  It all culminates with Smith infiltrating Fu Manchu's base (again - he did the same thing in Brides), releasing the prisoners and setting off the by now familiar explosive ending, with Fu Manchu's face appearing above the smoke as the words 'The World Shall Hear From Me Again' are intoned by Lee.  Thankfully, the world didn't hear from him again, as the abject critical and box-office performance of Castle of Fu Manchu ensured that a projected sixth entry in the series was abandoned.  Its poor reception was hardly surprising: not only was the whole concept badly dated by the late sixties, (let alone the seventies, with the movie only getting a UK release in 1970), with the whole idea of a white actor pretending to be Chinese seeming increasingly both ludicrous and offensive, but the film itself is very lazily put together by director Jesus Franco.  Perhaps, working on his second Fu Manchu film for producer Towers, Franco had simply lost his enthusiasm for the subject, not to mention his inspiration.  There's certainly  none of the usual verve or eccentricity one would normally expect from this director's output - even his previous entry, Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), with its female assassins with deadly poisonous kisses and an interlude involving a colourful Brazilian bandit played by Ricardo Palacios, had felt quirky and exhibited some originality.

Like all Harry Allan Towers films, Castle of Fu Manchu was an internation co-production, with locations and cast largely dictated by the origins of the finance and which countries didn't currently have arrest warrants for Towers in force.  (He was accused of a multitude of crimes, from living off of immoral earnings to espionage.  As far as I'm aware, no charges were ever brought in any of the cases).  In this case, the West German finance explains the fact that much of the supporting cast are from that country, while the Spanish money accounts for director Franco (who also appears in an acting role, as a Turkish police inspector) and a smattering of Spanish and Italian actors (many of the latter appeared in Spanish films), most notably Rosalba Neri, (who, for once, doesn't take all of her clothes off).  The presence of Lee, Richard Greene (making his second appearance in the series as Nayland Smith) and Howard Marion Crawford (as ever playing Dr Petrie), ensured an English-language release and probably British money.  The Turkish locations are very colourful and atmospheric and are well-used by Franco, but for large parts of the film, Barcelona unconvincingly stands in for Scotland, London and parts of Istanbul.  What's clear watching Castle of Fu Manchu is that by this fifth entry, the series had completely run out of steam, with scriptwriter and producer Towers having exhausted all of his ideas on the previous four films and having no idea of how to develop the franchise.  Indeed, Lee's Fu Manchu, Greene's Nayland Smith and Crawford's Dr Petrie frequently seem peripheral to the action, each vanishing for significant periods of time and Lee and Greene only briefly appearing on screen together.  Even when onscreen, Lee's Fu Manchu seems content to let others commit the depravities he would, in previous films, have gleefully presided over himself.  The result, along with the episodic format of the script, is to give the film an unfocused feel as the plot is advanced by supporting characters, often minor supporting characters, rather than the leads.  It's notable that, of the five films, only the first three regularly turn up on UK TV, with the fourth only getting intermittent late night outings and this entry, to the best of my recollection, never turning up on terrestrial TV.  Which pretty much sums up the relative merits of the films.