PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* Question: What did actor Peter Sellers and writer Sax Rohmer have in common? Answers: If you said, "they both worked on projects with the name "Fu Manchu" in the title, you would be right. But you would also be right to say that they both worked in the tradition of the entertainment-form known as "British music hall." And you would also be right to say that in one way or another, the things they did with "Fu Manchu" were at base about the passing of social conventions. Now, with Answer #2, one would have to specify an important difference. Writing music-hall sketches was a very small part of Sax Rohmer's authorial career, while Peter Sellers' associations with Fu Manchu were a very small part of his repertoire. Rohmer wrote for the British music hall for a few years before he gained popular acclaim upon publishing the first installment of a Fu Manchu novel in a 1912 issue of the British magazine THE STORY-TELLER. And Sellers would not have existed at all but for the marriage of his parents, both music-hall performers, who raised their precocious offspring "in the trunk" of their traveling engagements. Sellers therefore worked in music-hall at a young age, though his first claim to fame came from a British radio program, "The Goon Show"-- arguably patterned on the variety format of music-hall, with its combination of skits and songs. That exposure in turn led to Sellers' cinematic career. Sellers was with "the Goons" when Spike Milligan essayed a skit about a character called "Fred Fu Manchu" in 1955 (four years before Sax Rohmer's passing, incidentally). I don't know how many moviegoers in 1980 remembered the Spike Milligan skit. But Sellers certainly did, since he recycled the same basic joke, about the diabolical mastermind preferring to be called "Fred" by his intimates since he'd used that name during his school days at Eton. As for Answer #3, Rohmer created his master villain against the backdrop of real Chinese history, as Imperial China essentially lost its "clash of civilizations" battle with Great Britain and other European powers. Fu Manchu represents the doomed efforts of a criminal genius to turn back time and restore Old China. Ironically, in the period of Milligan's "Goon" skit, Great Britain was somewhat in the position China had been in at the start of the 20th century. And that decade of the 1950s also brought about the steady decline of the British music-hall tradition, brought about by competition from radio, television, and one other venue I'll mention a little later. So-- back to THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU, the last work in the uneven repertoire of Peter Sellers before heart issues claimed his life. Though Sellers was ill during the movie's production, that didn't keep him from ousting director Piers Haggard toward the end of the shoot. Even if IMDB didn't assert that Sellers did uncredited writing-work on the original script, I would have suspected that he was in a position to add anything he pleased to the script, as well as either directing scenes himself or having them directed by his favored insiders. What resulted was only secondarily a spoof-pastiche of Rohmer's Fu Manchu series. FIENDISH became primarily a salute (or recycling if one prefers) of a lot of goofy comedy skits, some of which explicitly reference oldie music-hall acts, like Helen Mirren singing an old Brit favorite, "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow." Of course, some of these shout-outs may have come from Haggard or the two credited writers, but if Sellers hadn't wanted to do those bits, they probably wouldn't have been filmed. According to a couple of statements, the story begins "possibly around 1933" (which is loosely around the time that Rohmer's Fu Manchu began having prose and sound-cinema adventures after the character's absence for roughly 14 years). In his Himalayan refuge, Fu Manchu (Sellers) celebrates his 168th birthday with his all-male coterie of Si-Fan henchmen. On his natal day, Fu, who looks very aged, plans to drink his elixir vitae and restore his youth. But a clumsy acolyte (Burt Kwouk of Sellers' PINK PANTHER films) wastes Fu's last supply of the elixir, so he must send his Si-Fan minions forth to gather a handful of improbable ingredients, in order to preserve his life. In contrast to the books, in which Fu is usually involved in serial assassinations, here all of his crimes involve serial thefts, all to save his own life. Once Fu starts committing his crimes, both Scotland Yard (represented by David Tomlinson) and the FBI (represented by Sid Caesar and Steve Franken) confer on the best way to counter the mad genius. They elect to bring Fu's most persistent enemy out of retirement, Sir Denis Nayland Smith (also Sellers). In addition, when they suspect that Fu is going to abduct the Queen, they have her impersonated by lookalike female constable Alice Rage (Mirren). Nayland Smith prevents Fu from getting one of his needed ingredients, but the supervillain does capture Alice. In a development that resembles nothing in Rohmer, Alice falls in love with Fu despite the fact that he's still incredibly old-- and what they bond over is a shared love of music-hall entertainment. After taking Nayland Smith prisoner, Fu gets his missing ingredient, makes his elixir, and de-ages. He then generously lets his old foe leave with a sample of elixir, if he chooses the immortality route, and reveals an absurd threat that will supposedly destroy the world-- again, more on which later. FIENDISH was roundly panned and just barely made back its ten million dollar budget. I found it extremely unfunny when I first viewed it, and time has not improved its charms. At most, some of the humor made me smile from its sheer quaintness. Sellers' performance is akin to his ersatz Charlie Chan in the superior MURDER BY DEATH, but his faux Chinese accent for Fu is not nearly as exaggerated here. As I am a fan of the books, I'm moderately pleased at a few Rohmer tropes that, by hook or crook, made it into the finished film. Fu and Smith, for instance, maintain a sort of decorous respect despite their enmity. Sid Caesar's FBI guy is mostly a waste of space, but he does resemble some American characters from Rohmer's U.S.-based novel PRESIDENT FU MANCHU, in that Americans are shown as being much more free than Brits with voicing ethnic slurs. One of FIENDISH's opening scenes shows Fu's dacoits performing involved acrobatic stunts, and though this resembles nothing in Rohmer, the scene did remind me of Marvel's 1970s MASTER OF KUNG FU series, in which the revived Fu Manchu was served by numerous kung-fu assassins. And what's the big threat to the world, according to the devil-doctor? Well, it's rock and roll, and the movie ends with Fu dressed up in Elvis-gear. This is the entertainment venue I referenced earlier, and while rock and roll didn't end the world, arguably it contributed to the marginalization of the music hall, according to one Wikipedia essay on the subject. In 1980, did Sellers or others associated with this doomed project intuit rock music's complicity in destroying the type of entertainment Peter Sellers knew from his youngest years? For that question, there is no definitive answer.
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