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THE VENGEANCE OF FU MANCHU
Rating: 
West Germany. 1967.
Director – Jeremy Summers, Screenplay – Peter Welbeck [Harry Alan Towers], Based on the Characters Created by Sax Rohmer, Producer – Harry Alan Towers, Photography – John van Kotzke, Additional Photography – Stephen Dale, Music – Malcolm Lockyer, Art Direction – Peggy Gick & Scott MacGregor. Production Company – Pabasdave Films.
Cast:
Christopher Lee (Fu Manchu), Douglas Wilmer (Sir Dennis Nayland Smith), Howard Marion Crawford (Dr Petrie), Tsai Chin (Lin Tang), Horst Frank (Rudy Moss), Noel Trevarthen (Mark Weston), Tony Ferrer (Inspector Ramos), Mari Rohm (Ingrid Svenson), Wolfgang Kreling (Dr Lieberson), Susanne Roquette (Maria Lieberson), Peter Garsten (Kurt Heller)
Plot: Fu Manchu abducts a missionary doctor and forces him to surgically turn one of Fu Manchu’s Dacoits into a double for Sir Dennis Nayland Smith. The double is substituted for Sir Dennis and, under hypnotic command, kills Sir Dennis’s maid. As ‘Sir Dennis’ is placed on trial and sentenced to be executed, England reels in shock and Fu Manchu makes plans to disrupt the world by substituting doubles for the police commissioners of other countries.
This was the third of Harry Alan Towers’ Fu Manchu films. It is generally considered that the series went downhill after the first entry The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and particularly during director Jesus Franco’s last two entries. Two of the strengths throughout the series were Christopher Lee’s icily inscrutable performance, which was always finely balanced out by Tsai Chin as his dedicated-to-the-death daughter, and the fine period production values, which are marked here by a return to Ireland’s Kilmarnock jail which added immeasurably to the look of the first film. All of these are up to scratch once again here, but in most other regards the film is a routine effort.
The plot lacks a real credibility – Fu Manchu’s rather far-fetched world domination plot this time around involves creating surgical doubles of all the top police officials around the world, placing the doubles in trances and sending them to kill. As a plot it is all over the place – there seem long subplots that don’t really go anywhere such as the one involving Moss’s girlfriend’s stint as a Shanghai nightclub singer, and a surfeit of characters. The film also makes the mistake of trying to turn the hanging of the Nayland Smith double into suspense – while Dr Petrie doesn’t know it is a double we do and it feels rather false when director Summers tries to make us involved in the race against time to save ‘Nayland Smith’ because it doesn’t really matter to us whether the double is hung or not. The surgical techniques involved in the facial reconstruction are far too advanced for the film’s time period, least of all for a lone missionary operating amidst the Chinese peasantry. Wilmer does the iron-willed moral imperative thing with typical stolidity as Nayland Smith. The film was German financed and casts Germans as Americans with bizarrely unconvincing results.
The other entries in the Harry Alan Towers/Christopher Lee Fu Manchu series are:– The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Blood of Fu Manchu/Kiss and Kill (1968), The Castle of Fu Manchu/Assignment Istanbul (1968).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1994
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