Charles Brabin | The Mask of Fu Manchu / 1932

the queer asian menace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allan Woolf, and John Willard (based on Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu), Charles Brabin (director) The Mask of Fu Manchu / 1932

 

Charles Brabin’s 1932 horror adventure, The Mask of Fu Manchu may have been one of the most racist films Hollywood ever produced. Although there is no KKK here, thank god, the entire East, the Orient as it was often then called, is seen as a terrifying threat to the white race, determined with the leadership realized by Fu Manchu, to wipe out Western civilization, and even procreate with its women to bring victory to the Asian people.

    Critic Michael Koresky, writing in Film Comment, summarizes:

 

“The very title should raise instant hackles: the name Fu Manchu has long been a kind of shorthand for the complete villainization of the ethnic Other in Western culture. Maybe the most demoralizing fictional figure for assimilated or immigrant Asians in the West, Fu Manchu was the invention of working-class British novelist Sax Rohmer, and he grew equally popular in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. The mastermind of elaborate sinister plots to kidnap, torture, or kill white people, with the hoped-for end result of wiping out Western civilization, the long-mustachioed brute was a personification of xenophobia and anti-immigrant scapegoating, an embodiment of the “Yellow Peril” who operates from underground lairs, employs slaves and minions to do his evil bidding, and uses witchcraft and poisons. Beyond serial novelization and movies, the character has turned up in comics, TV, and radio programs, and traces of the Fu Manchu archetype can be found throughout the decades in any number of films that turn a distrustful eye toward Chinese laundries and opium dens, from musicals (Thoroughly Modern Millie) to comedies (Alice) to adventure pastiche (Big Trouble in Little China).”

 

     I might add, it extends even into the post Viet Nam war films such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and beyond. The disgusting racist vision of the “gook” was not just a term used by open racists, but extended into popular film, TV, radio, and literature and resulted, in large part, in Japanese citizens of our own country during World War II, being relocated to internment camps, while the Germans and Italians, also born in fascist countries which we were fighting, remained free.

    This “thriller” is utterly watchable, and even somewhat engaging, nonetheless, not because of the valiant behavior of its British white boys and one girl, but because of the fabulous homosexual-like figure, played by Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu, who throughout remains impeccably dressed, with dramatically long fingernails, a drooping mustache, and filled with absolute delight in doing the British boys in through various forms of highly imaginative tortures throughout. Except for his beautiful daughter, whom he describes as ugly despite actress Myrna Loy’s glorious beauty, while playing his sadistic minion, there is no other woman in site except for the British Sheila Barton (Karen Morley), who insists on joining the British mission to rescue Genghis Khan’s saber and mask—the improbable keys to Fu Manchu’s take over and rise to power over the entire Eastern world—because she knows where her father, now a captive of Fu Manchu, believes the buried tomb exists. Even Fu Manchu’s supposed wife has disappeared—likely killed off when she did not produce him a son—replaced by near naked black slaves and others males who do his bidding.

     When they finally capture Sheila’s handsome fiancé Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett), who, with Sheila’s urging, has brought the sword and mask they have finally discovered to Fu Manchu, hoping to trade it for Sheila’s father Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Grant), Fu Manchu’s daughter Fah Lo See, has Granville hung up and sadistically whipped as she watches with excitement and pleasure (Loy herself complained bitterly about her role, describing herself, as Wikipedia puts it, “tossed” into the role by the studio. Reportedly she told a producer: “I can’t do this…I’ve done a lot of terrible things in film, but this girl’s a sadistic nymphomaniac.”)

    When Fu Manchu discovers that, in fact, the sword is fake—Sir Denis Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) having hidden away both the sword and mask in order to protect them for later use—Fu Manchu gets special pleasure in simply stroking the near naked body stretched out on a table, Granville dressed only in a loincloth, Manchu about to inject him with a potent drug made up of poisonous snake venom, and various other elements that will turn Granville into his minion.

     The homosexuality was not easily missed. When MGM determined to re-release the film in 1972, they received an angry letter from the Japanese American Citizens League, begging them to remove the film from distribution, arguing “Fu Manchu is an ugly, evil homosexual with five-inch fingernails while his daughter is a sadistic sex fiend.” MGM did not respond.

     The plot is so poor piece together as a whole that it hardly needs retelling. It consists, basically, of Fu Manchu, one by one, capturing the all the British party, whereupon Fu Manchu plans exorbitant tortures from machines he has created just for that purpose for each of them, and planning to sacrifice Sheila as a virgin. At the last moment, as strapped to a see-saw device Smith his about to be dumped into a muddy room of hungry crocodiles, he miraculously cuts away his own bonds, escapes, and frees Dr. Von Berg (Jean Hersholt) from a machine of huge pointed metal spikes coming at him from both directions, before again freeing Granville from further injections. Together they direct the bolts of electricity with which Fu Manchu often plays upon his rally below, wearing what Monsters in the Closet scholar Henry M. Benshoff describes as looking like “a Carmen Miranda from hell” in his fruit basket hat. Striking first the golden sword he holds aloft, the current quickly kills him, soon after striking down most of his followers, as Granville rescues his lover and carries her off.

 

    When Karloff first came onto the project, fresh from Frankenstein he was told there still wasn’t a script, and as time passed he asked for one often, to which the producers laughed. Finally, as he was being made up each morning they passed on several pages, scripted by gay writer Edgar Allan Woolf, Irene Kuhn and John Willard each day for him to memorize. Karloff himself perceived the sheets of paper he daily received to be more than incoherent: “Some scenes were in written in beautiful Oxford English, others were written in—God knows what!”

      Although they have come to find the treasures of the sword and mask to place in the British Museum, as the survivors return to England, Smith tosses the sword into the sea so that no madman like Fu Manchu can ever come to power again. They might have thrown the script in the ocean as well. Fortunately, the sets and the cinematography by Tony Gaudio are all quite impressive. And strangely enough, this truly crazy film still today, despite its blatant racism and suggest of the evils of homosexuality still is watchable, in large part because of Karloff’s masterful acting.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).