The Return of Fu Manchu

 

I watched The Blood of Fu Manchu last night. Known in the USA as Kiss and Kill and also Kiss of Death and Against All Odds (?). Released in 1968 and directed by Jesus 'Jess' Franco, it's not very good and I got bored after about half an hour. The cast is fairly star-studded: Christopher Lee reprising his yellowface role (there were 5 FM films starring Lee), Richard ('Robin Hood riding through the glen') Greene as Nayland Smith, Fu Manchu's arch enemy and upholder of British values and Howard Marion Crawford as Dr Watson, sorry, Dr Petrie (looking unwell and as if he was on the bottle, it was no surprise to find out that he died the following year at 55). 

There's even an unusual appearance by Bond girl Shirley Eaton in a short scene which seems to come from an entirely different film - in fact it did come from another film, The Girl From Rio (a Franco-directed film based on the character of Sumuru, also created by Sax Rohmer, essentially a female Fu Manchu) and Eaton only found out years later and never got a fee. 

Starting promisingly, a group of beautiful women are brought to an ancient South American temple where Fu Manchu is hiding out with his daughter Tsai Chin and 'Dacoit' henchmen - cue plenty of gratuitous whipping, bare breasts and hanging from chains. They are bitten by a poisonous snake, whose poison has the rare quality of preserving their life but spells death to anyone they kiss. The glamorous girls are sent around the world to give the 'kiss of death' to Fu Manchu's enemies, all of whom suffer, except for Nayland Smith who is blinded but survives. He travels thousands of miles to find the temple and a possible antidote.

Unfortunately the film soon changes tack and turns into a bandit film for about half a boring hour with the chief, named Sancho Lopez, straight from central casting - at least he doesn't say "Badges! We don't need no steenkeeng badges!"

We also have to put up with risible dialogue like: 

"Dr Wagner is dead." 

"Completely dead?"

"Yes, completely dead."

In the film's favour the ambassador's residence is an interesting set and the proto-Indiana Jones archaeologist played by Gotz George is quite fun and some of the locations, such as the waterfall at the end, are pretty. However, if you've never seen it you haven't missed anything. The sequel The Castle of Fu Manchu (also directed by Franco) makes it look like Citizen Kane and is truly awful. Recycled footage from A Night to Remember is used to show the sinking of an ocean liner by the evil genius and this film essentially sank the entire franchise.

The DVD I watched was a twofer of Blood and Castle, but was obviously hastily produced, as on the box the plots of the two films are mixed up. The reason I'm writing this is that a new box set has been released by Indicator of all 5 Fu Manchu films - the first three of which are worth watching (Dublin often standing in for London) - with tons of extras. The other Indicator films I have are excellent packages. Despite that enticing prospect I'm probably going to stick with the DVDs I already have. It seems unfortunate timing to bring this set out at a moment when the role of China in world affairs is held in mistrust and suspicion and Fu Manchu will always be a deeply racist character who most people under 40 have probably never heard of, but who refuses to go away. Time to also plug the book Lord of Strange Deaths.

A very detailed review here has made me change my mind about acquiring the boxset, if only for the extras - maybe a Christmas present?

King Mob, Malcolm McLaren and Selfridges

My most popular post has been The Mystery of Subterranean Selfridges wherein I excavate the widespread rumour that there exists beneath the famous Selfridges department store on Oxford Street a row of well-preserved Victorian shops complete with cobbled street.  The conclusion I have drawn, is that it is an ingenious and charming piece of modern folklore in the form of a prank perpetrated by the late Sex Pistols manager, performer and clothes designer Malcolm McLaren through the medium of his Channel 4 film The Ghosts of Oxford Street see here.  The post and its various addenda can be found here.

I hadn't realised that McLaren's interest in Oxford Street went as far back as 1970 when he chose to make a film about the tawdry commercial thoroughfare as an art project at Goldsmith's College, when he was known as Malcolm Edwards; it was known as the Oxford Street film.

According to Jon Savage's definitive 1991 Sex Pistols history (see also Music For Pleasure post below for The Damned) England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock: 'Due to lack of money and lack of conceptual focus, Oxford Street drifted along for eighteen months before being left unfinished....when it came to shooting, Malcolm involved a variety of his friends at various points, Jamie Reid was used as cameraman and Helen [Mininberg] as assistant director.  They worked around Oxford Street: the shot list includes many shop facades and exteriors, as well as close-ups of advertisements and human gestures of frustration and incorporate hostility.  They were hampered by the fact that hardly any of the stores would allow them access: only Selfridges let them in.' (p.40)  The project was hugely influenced by McLaren's interest in the ideas of the Situationist International (too much to go into here, see England's Dreaming and Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989).

Reading King Mob Echo: From Gordon Riots to Situationists and Sex Pistols by Tom Vague (2000) on Saturday reminded me of a notorious incident at Christmas 1968 at Selfridges when a member of British Situationist offshoot King Mob dressed as Father Christmas and accompanied by fellow Mob members walked into the store and started taking toys off the shelves and giving them to grateful children.  'Not long afterwards,' Richard Neville wrote in Playpower (1970), 'shoppers were treated to the spectacle of police confiscating toys from small children and arresting Santa Claus.'  A flyer saying IT WAS MEANT TO BE GREAT BUT IT'S HORRIBLE was also handed out (see pic above).

In England's Dreaming McLaren claimed to be part of this protest: 'We were all handing out the toys and the kids were running off.  The store detectives and the police started to pounce:  I ran off into the lift.  There's just me and this old lady: the doors start to open and I can just see all these police.  I grab the old lady really tight and walk through like I'm helping her.  As soon as I got out of the store, I belted out of there.' (p.34)  But, he later admitted:'That was organised by Christopher Gray and the Wise twins were involved as well.  I never actually went to it but I heard of it.In those days nobody would tell you how things were going to work.  There was all this rumour and hype.  So, no I was never involved as such.' (King Mob Echo p.47)

More on King Mob here.

Nevertheless McLaren definitely had previous as far as Selfridges was concerned.

To quote again from England's Dreaming (p.36):  'The libertarian currents of the late 1960s shaped the lives of many of those that they touched: for Malcolm McLaren and his associates, like Fred Vermorel and Jamie Reid life would never be the same.  In those currents they could swim, and select a language for their multiple angers, resentments and ideals.  It was largely through the SI's (Situationist International) influence that they developed a taste for a new media practice - manifestos, broadsheets, montages, pranks, disinformation - which would give form to their gut feeling that things could be moved, if not irreversibly changed.'

Incidentally, Guy Debord's Situationists were also interested in the Limehouse area of East London and held a meeting there.  Limehouse was of course the haunt of Sax Rohmer's fiendish Fu Manchu and a piece on this cultural crossover appears in the book I edited with Phil Baker:  Lord of Strange Deaths.   See also here and here.

Lord of Strange Deaths reviewed in the TLS

I was very pleased to find a review of Lord of Strange Deaths by Rosemary Herbert - 'King of Pulp Exotica' - in this week's Times Literary Supplement.  Maybe Secret Tunnels of England may also appear there one day.

Reviews of Lord of Strange Deaths

Apparently reviews of Lord of Strange Deaths are in the pipelines  of various prestigious publications.

At the moment I'm perfectly content with this one from William Patrick Maynard at Black Gate.

Here's another from this week's Spectator.

Lord of Strange Deaths

It would appear that the much-delayed Lord of Strange Deaths, which I co-edited with Phil Baker (in case everyone's forgotten, it's about Sax Rohmer and amongst other things his most famous/notorious creation Fu Manchu) will emerge from the printer on the same day at the end of this month as Secret Tunnels of England, a rather bizarre coincidence that will mark the culmination of three years' work.  Available from Strange Attractor - I'm hoping to have a few copies to sell on my promotional travels, but we shall see.

The Corvo Cult, The Yellow Peril and Netherwood

The launch party at Maggs for The Corvo Cult by Robert Scoble was very enjoyable.  Some reports with pictures here and here.  Fortunately, I resisted the temptation of buttonholing Barry Humphries and probably making a fool of myself talking about the 1890s.  I've always wondered if he's read Decadent London - I asked my publisher to send him a copy on publication, but I doubt that happened.  The book itself is very entertaining and would probably be of interest to non-Corvines: AJA Symons, author of the classic Quest for Corvo appears in an unflattering light as an untrustworthy individual and avid collector Donald Weeks as a belligerent obsessive - see earlier posts on Corvo.  One strange mistake - twice we are told that the Corvines celebrated the centenary of his death in 1960 - he was born in 1860 and died in 1913 aged 53.

Christopher Frayling's new book on Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril was reviewed in yesterday's Guardian.  It's a pity that Lord of Strange Deaths was not out last year as was intended as it's unlikely to be reviewed, given the fact that this book with a major publisher is already on the market.  I have to say this is not a new experience for me in the dog-eat-dog world of publishing.  The book is still being worked on and is unlikely to appear for the talk in December I would imagine.

Frayling's book is an admirable attempt to cut through the more fantastic aspects of Rohmer's biography - rather than revealing any new information about him, he trawls through the types of newspapers and journals that Rohmer wrote for in the period just prior to the First World War, uncovering the roots of the spread of Yellow Peril coverage in England and the appearance of proto-Fu Manchu figures in their pages.  I found this the most interesting part of the book - it clearly showed the influences, not just on Rohmer, but on an entire population, of this type of journalism.  The historical side of things was less sure I felt, but the final chapter on the long lingering death of Rohmer's fiendish villain in popular culture is characteristically encyclopedic.  There was stuff in there that I knew nothing about, but then Frayling had access to archives in the US that I had no chance of seeing and presumably had some funding for his efforts.  The illustrations are imaginative and excellent.

However, from this week I plan to work solely on my next Accumulator Press book, which is about 25% done, with the aim of publishing it myself as soon as possible.  It will revisit a couple of subjects I've covered in the past, but in more detail and will hopefully be attractively designed, by me and the street artist Stewy and his partner, like Netherwood.

Talking of Netherwood, I recently subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive which includes a long run of the Hastings and St Leonards Observer and have gone through every reference therein to Netherwood.  Fortunately it doesn't appear that I missed much in plodding for weeks through the microfilm version, but one area that I couldn't face scanning every week was the ad section in which for example the date of the sale of Netherwood by Vernon and Johnnie Symonds was recorded.  On 21st December 1949 it was sold to Harry J Kaye and his wife.  In February 1951 a case was recorded in the County Court, with Vernon Symonds claiming a £99 balance on the sale; the plaintiffs eventually withdrew their action and the defendants agreed to pay £75.

Catching Up

Returned from the beautiful Wiltshire town of Malmesbury, where I spoke at the Philosophytown Festival, much expanded from my previous visit and covering much more ground.  Michael Cuthbert and his team of volunteers have produced something of great worth here - it's a very low-key affair and all the better for it.  Mark Vernon, who lectured on 'The Good Life' according to the ancient Greeks, is an excellent speaker and I should search out some of his books - unlike me, he didn't bring his books along to sell.

I have to confess that I wasn't very impressed by the Syd Arthur concert in Brighton a couple of weeks ago.  For once, I probably was the oldest person there - very young and enthusiastic crowd, but I just couldn't get excited about the music I was hearing.  Their much-vaunted 'Canterbury Scene' sound' (one of my favourite genres) was conspicuous by its absence in my opinion, although one member played multiple instruments a la Geoffrey Richardson in Caravan - for some reason the music of Dave Brubeck kept popping into my head.  Incidentally, one group from that period who I never heard at the time was Egg who made some very interesting music, as I've discovered recently.  A very late arrival home marred by train delays made me question the wisdom of travelling quite so far to concerts.

Another recent arrival in the now hugely overcrowded world of underground London books is Subterranean London compiled by intrepid urban explorer and academic Bradley Garrett.  A friend managed to get me a signed copy at the recent launch, which I couldn't attend.  It's possible I might meet Mr Garrett some day.

At the moment the news on the Sax Rohmer book Lord of Strange Deaths is looking good, although apparently it's still touch and go whether it will come out this year.  Pity if it doesn't as I went to the trouble of arranging a promotional event for it on 11th December.  By chance I caught one of the contributors Christopher Frayling talking on the Today programme yesterday about the Yellow Peril, Fu Manchu, and Western images of China.  It will be a real shame if our book doesn't come out in 2014, as it's already a year late.  Despite what it says on bookseller sites the book is likely to be around 350 pages in length, possibly more.

The same publisher is bringing out a new book on the Cult of [Baron] Corvo (see previous posts here).  I'm very much hoping to be able to get to the launch at Maggs Bros next week.

Coming Up

This is pretty much it for the rest of the year, attending and doing events:

Thursday 28th August Westminster  London's Divided Selves

Saturday 13th September Newhaven  Fort Process

Saturday 20th September  London Open House

Thursday 25th September  Westminster  The Big Smoke

Friday 26th September William Burroughs, An Alien in London

Monday 29th September Komedia Brighton Syd Arthur

Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th October Malmesbury Philosophytown

Saturday 15th November London Jazz Festival 2014, Servants Jazz Quarters, Dalston, Strobes and Shiver 

Friday 21st November London Jazz Festival 2014 Hedwig Mollstad Trio Club Inegales, London

Thursday 11th December Kensington Central Library Sax Rohmer Event with Phil Baker and Gary Lachman

Friday 19th December Forum, Kentish Town  Slowdive

I really hope that the Sax Rohmer book will finally emerge in the autumn.  I've made corrections to the typeset pdf file, but there's been a further delay with a redesign of the cover (how very 1970s prog rock).  Sincere apologies to anyone who's been waiting - I know there are a few out there.

Work on another book is well underway and I hope to publish it through Accumulator Press in spring or autumn next year.  I'm so excited by the cover design that I have to get the book written to go with it.

Miscellany

The Motorpsycho show at the Jazz Cafe was excellent, a number of moments of pure transcendence - hard psychedelic rock, few traces of the prog evident on The Death Defying Unicorn (none of it was played) - guitarist from Dungen amazing on mellotron and guitar.  Looking at their gear afterwards someone pointed out a set of Taurus bass pedals as used by Mike Rutherford of Genesis in the glory days; also got to meet the group backstage afterwards, which was nice.

Last week went to the Electric Palace to see the Mott Road Crew reminisce about working for Mott, David Bowie, Queen etc.  Some interesting home movies from Morgan Fisher.

Also went to the London Fortean Society to see Gary Lachman give an impassioned talk to a very crowded room about the late Colin Wilson - Wilson's wife and daughter were there.

This sounds as if it could be interesting.

Details of the Whistler walk here.

The William Burroughs walk I did with Bill Redwood will probably be repeated in early September, in the meantime another exhibition in London.

The Philosophytown weekend events can be found here.  I'm speaking on Sunday, but hope to get there for Saturday.

It looks as if Lord of Strange Deaths, the book about Sax Rohmer may be appearing this summer, a bumper 400 pages now apparently.  I've arranged an evening with Phil Baker, Gary Lachman and myself talking about Rohmer, Fu Manchu and the occult at Kensington Central Library in December.  More details to follow.