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).

Claire Zhou | Stille Dorst (High Tide) / 2018

peace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claire Zhou (screenwriter and director) Stille Dorst (High Tide) / 2018 [22 minutes]

 

Tarik (Mouad Ben-Chaib), a Moroccan married man with a child, is in the midst of divorcing his wife, and escapes to a nice woodland cottage rented out to him by an attractive gay man, Jonas (Joshua Albano).

     The brick cottage is quite beautiful, but when Tarik goes to take a shower there is no water, which brings Jonas back in order to try to fix it. It will take another day, and in the meantime, Jonas promises him a “jerrycan,” back to basics, bathing in a tub.

      In the meantime, his hunky landlord has gotten all sweated up and has stripped off his T-shirt. Tarik loans him is as the other is put out on the line to dry. But in the meantime, Tarik has somewhat explicably been attracted to his bare-breasted landlord. And alone again in the next morning he can’t resist going to the clothesline to touch the drying T-shirt. Something unexpected is happening to him or perhaps it was been at the base of what he wife and he finds in their life together now impossible.

      Soon the landlord his back, taking a walk, and wants to know if Tarik will join him. Tarik talks about his 8-year-old daughter Laila, “way too smart.” Suddenly Jonas stops on their walk and closes his eyes for a few minutes, and then asks Tarik to try it. “What do you hear?” he asks. Tarik clearly hears nothing, until Jonas explains it: “Peace.” And so begins the cure this unintended self-help guru provides the confused and hurt elder man.

      By that evening they are drinking beers and looking in to a box containing Jonas’ memories of a confused youth, in which evidently his own father left them, retreating into the house his son still owns and rents out. Finding a packet of his now-friend’s adolescent poetry, Tarik asks to read.

      Humorously, they’re basically all about sex. As Jonas suggests, they call me “the Shakespeare of jerking off.”

      When Tarik asks him to read another, Jonas picks one but asks Tarik to read it, the content obviously suggesting the hidden feelings of the reader as well as the young boy who wrote the poem:

 

                          With no sight of daylight

                          I swim in the deep

                          hunted by need

                          and my desire for men

 

                          because I float lonely

                          with my wish unheard

                          floating as a coward

                          who does as he should.

                          

                          So I keep searching for love

                          with a heart that can’t breathe.

                          And the light of the world

                          I drown in my own deceit.

 

    (Presumably it reads better in Dutch). That poem, which Tarik describes as “beautiful,” truly troubles him as he spends a sleepless night. When he rises for a glass of water, however, he finds his young landlord sleeping on the couch, obviously too drunk from all their beers to return home.

     Of course, they fall into a kiss, Tarik pulling back with the shock of it, but Jonas reassuring him that it’s okay. And after a few brief touches, Jonas returns to the couch to let Tarik work out his own feelings.

      In a roundabout route Tarik eventually joins him on the couch for sex.

      The film ends with Tarik and Jonas once more in nature, sitting, as Tarik sheds tears, recognizing, as he simply says, “32 years, I did this to her.” He has finally come out. Jonas asks him to close his eyes. Peace has finally arrived.

       This is a truly lovely but somewhat odd film, given that it almost seems like many of young gay man’s dream, to help a handsome older man to come to terms with his own sexuality with himself as the new object of his affection, all written by a Dutch woman of Asian descent. Claire Zhou made this emotionally moving film for her thesis project at HKU The University of Arts Utrecht after discussing the creator of the Moroccan float for the Amsterdam Gay Pride celebration just how many married men over 40 from his country were secretly gay, another example of the way film programs in colleges and universities throughout the world have helped to stimulate over the last several decades an explosion of LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

Stef Smith | Joy Boy / 2018

the queen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonny Hawkins and Stef Smith (screenplay), Stef Smith (director) Joy Boy / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

While his parents are busy chatting it up at a dinner party with their current pastor (Paul Capsis) and his wife, little Johnny Hawkins (the child version played by George Holahan-Cantwell) grows bored and wonders off. His mother, missing him, calls after him to know his whereabouts, using their pet name for him: Johnny Joy Boy. Their evangelical pastor mouths his usual cliches, “God has a plan, God has a plan.”

    Their “Joy Boy,” however, returns soon after in one of his mother’s blouses to sing, in memory of Marilyn Monroe’s infamous and embarrassing performance for John Kennedy’s 45th birthday celebration in 1962, her “Happy Birthday” song. He is utterly charming, Australian Cinematographer reviewer James Cunningham describing it as “one of the best performances of the entire festival.” Although, his mother (Alison Bell) giggles throughout, the others all look rather aghast, perhaps their pastor almost ready to choke on his words of God’s plans.

   In the very next scene, we see a group of young people singing with evangelical spirit, headed, quite surprisingly, by a grown up Johnny, now going under the name of Johnny Flash. He now speaks in almost double-talk, asking is congregants to repeat after him, “I am blessed to be a blessing.”

    But when he repeats the phrase, demanding his members repeat it with more enthusiasm, we hear the words, “I am blessed to be a filthy fucking faggot,” Johnny awakening from what appears to be a nightmare in tears.

     This is not the happy little boy of those years before. This time the performance is most clearly disingenuous. He pauses along at the ocean, considering his situation. But in the next scene we watching him kiss a young woman named Felicity (Stef Smith), evidently his girlfriend. She expresses her love, but it takes a few minutes for he can respond with the same statement.

      She expresses her love, but it takes a few minutes for he can respond with the same statement.

In he shower, with remnants of glitter on his neck and a rather large necklace, Johnny seems obviously to be suffering again, tortured by his dual performances in life.

     Soon after we see him at what appears to be a group conversion therapy session, where a terrible effeminate man tells that its impossible to be cured of the way he talks, but Pastor Roberts, he claims, has done such a good job of healing him from homosexuality, that he has change his orientation, despite the residue. God gave his voice and wrist, he proclaims, “but what he did not give me was lust and want of a man’s touch.” He asks them to close their eyes, asking them to lift their hands at the count of three if they still struggle with same-sex attraction. Johnny raises his hand.

     But during the wait, we have already seen Johnny, who has still been attending the clubs and having sex with other men, admits in prayer that he can no longer go on as he has been doing.

     And in the very next scene, we see a completely different Johnny at the beach, made up partially as a man in drag. A young girl sees him as a princess, and asks if he is one. He answers, with a smile, “No honey, I’m a queen!” He smiles in joy.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026)