Chinaman's Chance

The Face of Fu Manchu. The re-makers of Fu Manchu are clearly aware that the nonsense of yesteryear taps a jumpy vein of contemporary anxiety--all those diabolical Chinese, seeking ways and means to make Western civilization heel to the Yellow Peril.

This venture begins in appropriately gruesome style with the beheading of the late Sax Rohmer's durable archcriminal, who has already survived the perils of 14 books and four feature films, the last made in 1932. As Fu, "cool, callous, brilliant . . . the most evil and dangerous man in the world," Britain's Christopher Lee slithers in the footsteps of Warner Oland and Boris Karloff, and despite a vaguely Oxonian Oriental accent he doesn't look a hair sillier than his predecessors.

Eyewitnesses to Fu's execution are baffled when the corpse count of London's foggy Limehouse district shows an alarming upswing. The victims are strangled with crimson Tibetan prayer scarves, the weapons favored by "a gang of Burmese dacoits." Scotland Yard Man Nayland Smith (Nigel Green) thoughtfully eyes the wall where a death mask of his sworn foe hangs as a trophy. "I dreamt that Fu Manchu was still alive," he muses. "I've been uneasy all day."

Smith's dialogue smacks of a vintage Saturday-afternoon serial, but his fears are well grounded. A kidnaped professor possesses a secret formula for distilling the lethal essence of the Black Hill Poppy from Tibet ("A pint can kill every living thing in London"). Fu's evil daughter (Tsai Chin) seizes the professor's daughter as hostage and undertakes the dirty deeds formerly assigned to such exotics as Anna May Wong and Myrna Loy. There are vestiges of the old potency in the farfetched fights, a sinister drowning apparatus in a hideout below the Thames, the mass destruction of a peaceful English village. The indestructible Fu finally goes up in flames in a Himalayan monastery, taking the High Lama with him and still muttering darkly: "The world shall hear from me again." That news is unlikely to thrill any but the most Fuhardy addicts.

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