The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)

A Masterwork of Organized Chaos, or How Peter Sellers Accidentally Invented Post-Modern Cinema While Dying

[embed]Trailer. 3 minutes.

“Beware! See This Movie. An Hour Later You’ll Want to See It Again.” The Greatest Lie Ever Told in 72-Point Helvetica Bold

There is a particular kind of courage required to stand in a lobby of a movie theater in the summer of 1980, hold a glossy one-sheet in your hands, read the tagline printed across the top, and think to yourself: yes, this sounds about right. “Beware! See This Movie. An Hour Later You’ll Want to See It Again.” That is not a tagline. That is a hostage note. That is the kind of promotional copy that gets written at two in the morning by someone whose contract explicitly forbids them from seeing the finished product.

And yet.

Here we are, forty-some years later, discussing this film in the context of a book about cinema. Not because it was good. Certainly not in any conventional, awards-friendly, Pauline Kael-approved fashion. But because The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), directed officially by Piers Haggard and unofficially by the collective nervous breakdown of everyone involved, is one of the most singularly important films in the canon of late twentieth century British comedy, American studio cowardice, and the very specific subgenre of movies that can only be described as: a genius man falling apart in real time, and someone left the cameras running.

This is that film. This is the one.

The promotional materials leaned hard into a kind of cheerful menace. The poster art featured a cartoonish Fu Manchu rendered in broad strokes of yellow and blue and red, his mustache reaching architectural ambitions that no actual human face could support. It looked like the cover of a children’s book written by someone who had been asked to explain the Cold War to a six-year-old. The artwork was charming in the way that a potholder made at summer camp is charming. You hang it in the kitchen. You don’t put it next to your Caravaggio.

The campaign that Orion Pictures assembled around this film was, by any honest measure, an exercise in institutional faith over documented evidence. They had a movie. They needed people to see it. Peter Sellers was the name above the title. Helen Mirren was also there, which in retrospect is the kind of casting decision that future generations will study the way present generations study the Hindenburg: awe-inspiring, catastrophic, and somehow still beautiful if you squint.

What the Hell Is an Elixir Vitae When You Really Need One, and Why Did No One Think to Give It to the Production

The plot of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is, generously, a plot. It has the structural integrity of a dream you have after eating gas station sushi. Fu Manchu is 168 years old. He has been kept alive and vital by his elixir vitae, a potion of considerable and unspecified power, and when a hapless flunky spills it during his birthday celebration, Fu must dispatch his global network of villainous operatives to gather the ingredients for a new batch.

The centerpiece ingredient is the Star of Leningrad, a diamond currently on display at a Soviet exhibition in Washington, D.C. The FBI, operating with the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that suggests no one has briefed them on anything useful, sends agents Capone and Williams to England to consult with Nayland Smith, who has spent his career as the world’s foremost authority on Fu Manchu and is the sort of man who knows things that are not, in any professional sense, useful to know.

This is the architecture of a perfectly respectable comedy thriller. Sax Rohmer’s original Fu Manchu stories were pulp adventure of the highest and also most nakedly racist order, and by 1980, the character had been through enough cinematic iterations that the whole enterprise carried the weight of its own complicated history. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu was to be something different. Something irreverent. A comedy that understood the absurdity of the source material and weaponized it. A film that knew what it was.

Reader, it did not entirely know what it was.

But here is the thing about elixirs. The word itself, the one highlighted in the film’s own synopsis, the one that sits at the center of this entire enterprise, is doing enormous work. An elixir is a thing that restores. A thing that reverses entropy. A thing that makes the old new and the dying vital and the broken whole again. The central dramatic engine of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a man in desperate need of something that will make him what he once was.

Peter Sellers was dying.

He had been dying, in the medical sense, for years. His heart was a ruin. He had survived multiple heart attacks and carried with him the knowledge, the intimate and daily knowledge, that his body was engaged in a process of negotation that he was losing. He made Being There in 1979, a film of such stillness and grace and genuine philosophical weight that it stands as one of the great performances in American cinema, a film that should have won him the Academy Award and did not because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has, historically, the aesthetic instincts of a parking garage.

And then he made this one.

There is a reading of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu that is almost unbearably poignant if you allow yourself to sit with it. A man who needed an elixir, playing a man who needed an elixir. A performer at the absolute end of his physical resources, investing whatever remained in a project that was, by all accounts, falling apart from the moment principal photography began, playing a villain whose entire dramatic motivation is the desperate pursuit of the thing that will keep him alive.

That is not an accident. Peter Sellers knew exactly what he was doing. He always knew exactly what he was doing. That was the whole problem and also the whole gift.

Piers Haggard, or The Man Who Survived the Unsurvivable, and What That Says About Human Resilience

Piers Haggard directed this film. This is a fact that requires context, and the context is this: he was not the first director on The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. He was also not the second. He was the third. The production had already consumed two directors before Haggard arrived, which in the context of a Peter Sellers production was not especially unusual but was, even by those standards, a remarkable rate of attrition.

The directors who departed before Haggard are not the subject of this chapter. They are the subject of a separate kind of study, one that would involve large quantities of alcohol and possibly some kind of support group. What matters for our purposes is that Haggard, a television director of genuine competence and real craft, walked onto a set that was already in a state of organized collapse and was asked to finish a movie.

He did finish a movie. Whether the movie that was finished bears any meaningful relationship to the movie that was started is a question that invites a kind of philosophical investigation that is beyond the scope of this chapter and possibly beyond the scope of organized philosophy.

What Haggard managed to do, under conditions that would have broken lesser people, is create a film with visual coherence. The shots are composed. The scenes have beginnings and ends. The editing is not random. These are not trivial accomplishments when you are working with a lead actor who is visibly struggling to breathe, a production that has been through multiple creative collapses, and a script that was in active revision throughout.

There is a kind of direction that is essentially archaeological in nature. You arrive at the dig site after someone else has been through it, and your job is to figure out what was there, document it carefully, and get everyone home alive. This is what Piers Haggard did. This is a form of filmmaking that does not get celebrated at festivals, does not generate thinkpieces, and does not result in retrospectives at the Criterion Collection. But it is essential. Without it, there is no film. There is only footage.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu has scenes. It has sequences. It has, in several key moments, genuine comedy. The sequence in which Fu Manchu is being electrically recharged by his minions, his failing body hooked up to machinery that is both absurd and somehow poignant, is a piece of physical comedy that works in the way that physical comedy works when the performer’s actual physical condition is informing the performance. Sellers plays exhaustion as a comic register. He plays frailty as timing. He takes the fact of his own diminishment and turns it into craft.

That is not something a director creates. That is something a director recognizes, frames, and does not ruin. Haggard did not ruin it.

Helen Mirren Is In This Movie, Which Is a Sentence That Deserves Its Own Chapter But Will Have to Make Do With a Subheading

The casting of Helen Mirren in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is one of those decisions that makes complete sense within the logic of its own moment and makes absolutely no sense in the rearview mirror of history. In 1980, Mirren was a serious and seriously regarded actress, a Royal Shakespeare Company alumna with screen credits that demonstrated range and ambition. She was also, by 1980, exactly the kind of person a production puts in a film to signal that the project has artistic credibility.

The production needed to signal artistic credibility.

Mirren plays Alice Rage, an Interpol agent who becomes entangled in the pursuit of Fu Manchu and who brings to the proceedings a quality that can best be described as: someone who has read the script and decided to act it anyway because a commitment is a commitment and she was raised to finish what she starts. She is competent, grounded, and convincingly human in a film that is occasionally uncertain about what it wants its humans to do.

The presence of Dame Mirren in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is, in retrospect, the kind of historical accident that becomes a footnote of genuine warmth. She is not diminished by it. She survived it. She went on to play Queen Elizabeth II twice and win an Academy Award and become one of the most respected performers of her generation, and somewhere in the credits of that career is this film, sitting quietly in the corner, not making eye contact, hoping no one brings it up at the BAFTA dinner.

But here is the thing about Helen Mirren in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu that is actually worth discussing in the context of film studies, because this book is supposed to be useful: she demonstrates, in scene after scene, the thing that separates a trained and disciplined actor from a performer who is simply reacting to whatever the room gives them. She commits. She does not indicate. She does not wink at the camera. She plays the scenes as written and in doing so provides a kind of tonal anchor for a film that is, in many of its other components, visibly adrift.

This is what good acting does in bad movies. It creates a gravitational center. It gives the surrounding chaos something to organize itself around, even when the chaos refuses to organize. Mirren in this film is like a load-bearing wall in a building that is also slightly on fire. She is doing real structural work.

The Supporting Cast, or The British Comedy Cavalry Arrives Just in Time to Watch the Fort Burn

David Tomlinson. Sid Caesar. John Le Mesurier. Burt Kwouk. Clive Dunn. Stratford Johns. The supporting cast of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu reads like a guest list for the world’s most specific dinner party, the kind where you absolutely need a seating chart and at least two of the guests have worked together before under circumstances that were not fully resolved.

David Tomlinson, who had spent the previous two decades as the reliable comic backbone of family entertainment from Mary Poppins onward, brings his particular brand of bewildered English gentility to a film that required bewildered English gentility in the same way that a house fire requires oxygen. He is precisely calibrated. He is exactly right. He is also, in the context of this film, operating in a register that occasionally has no one to play against because the film keeps changing direction around him.

Sid Caesar is here too, which in the context of a British comedy production is approximately as surprising as finding a pelican in your kitchen. Caesar, by 1980, was a figure of legend in American comedy, the man whose work on Your Show of Shows had helped invent the grammar of American television comedy, and his presence in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a reminder that great comedians exist in a state of permanent availability, ready to appear wherever the work is, regardless of whether the work has fully figured itself out yet.

Caesar plays his part with the kind of professional ease that only comes from having done more difficult things in more demanding circumstances for a longer time than most people have been alive. He is funny. The film occasionally allows him to be funny. These are not always the same scene.

John Le Mesurier, who was the definitive British comic supporting player of his era, a man whose face contained entire novels of dignified disappointment, appears in a film that would prove to be, along with Sellers and Tomlinson, his final screen appearance. The presence of three performers whose last film this would be gives The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu a quality that sits just below the surface of every viewing, a memento mori delivered by people who were funnier than death and knew it.

The Question of Race, Which Has to Be Addressed, Because Not Addressing It Would Be Its Own Kind of Cowardice

A white British man playing an elderly Chinese supervillain in yellow makeup in a film released in 1980 is not something that can be waved away with period context and a firm handshake. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu carries this problem in every frame that features Sellers in character, and it requires honest engagement.

Sax Rohmer created Fu Manchu in 1913. The character is a product of Edwardian anxiety about China, about immigration, about the perceived threat of a culture that was geographically vast and historically deep in ways that the British Empire found unsettling. Fu Manchu is, in the original novels, the embodiment of Yellow Peril panic dressed up in exotic villainy and given enough intelligence to be genuinely threatening. The character is racist in its foundational conception, and all subsequent iterations carry that original sin.

The 1980 film does not resolve this. It does not attempt to resolve it. It is aware of it in the way that a person can be aware of a splinter while declining to remove it, acknowledging the discomfort while continuing to function. Peter Sellers as Fu Manchu is a white man performing a caricature of Asianness that has, by 1980, been critiqued, discussed, and documented as harmful by everyone who has taken the time to think about it.

What makes this worth discussing in an academic context, beyond the obvious, is the question of what the film does with its own racial politics. And the answer, frustratingly, is: very little. The film is not interested in interrogating its source material. It is interested in being funny about it. It takes the Rohmer conventions, the secret lairs, the global criminal networks, the inscrutable villain, and plays them for comedy rather than adventure.

This is not redemption. Parody of a racist archetype is not the same as critique of it. Laughing at the Fu Manchu character does not dismantle the assumptions that built him. What the film does, perhaps inadvertently, is expose the absurdity of the archetype by taking it to such an extreme that it collapses under its own weight. But collapse through excess is not deconstruction. It is just a louder version of the original problem.

Peter Sellers had done this before, in Murder By Death, and the critical response then as now was a mixture of discomfort and reluctant appreciation for the craft involved. Sellers was a transformative performer, a man who disappeared so completely into characters that the character became primary and the performer became secondary. In The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, that disappearance is more literal than usual, and it raises questions about whether the craft of transformation can coexist with the harm of the transformation’s subject.

These questions do not have clean answers. They have the kind of answers that require several paragraphs of careful thinking and still leave you with something uncomfortable to carry around afterward.

The Production History, or How Three Directors Walked Into a Film and Only One Came Out

The production history of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is the kind of story that gets told in hushed voices at industry functions, the kind where everyone leans slightly forward and someone refills the drinks before the important parts. Peter Sellers was not just the star of this film. He was, in many meaningful senses, its author.

Sellers had developed the project himself. He had been attached to it for years. He wanted to make a comedy that took the Fu Manchu mythology and turned it inside out, that found the humor in the machinery of villainy, that asked what it would mean for a man of 168 years to be running out of time. That last part, again, carries a weight that is not fictional.

The first director hired was Guy Hamilton, a man with genuine genre credentials, most notably several James Bond films, and therefore someone who understood the relationship between elaborate villainy and comedy, because those two things have always been closer to each other than either would prefer to admit. Hamilton departed. The specific reasons have been discussed in various accounts of the production with varying degrees of diplomatic restraint, but the common thread is Peter Sellers, who had, by this point in his career, developed opinions about creative control that were absolute in a way that made collaboration essentially theoretical.

The second director was Richard Quine, an American filmmaker whose career had included some genuinely fine work in the 1950s and early 1960s, and who arrived on this production with presumably adequate preparation and departed with presumably adequate trauma. Quine left. Haggard arrived. The film continued.

What this production history reveals, and what makes it genuinely fascinating from a film studies perspective, is the question of authorship. The auteur theory, which has done enormous useful work in establishing the director as the primary creative intelligence of a film, runs into a very specific problem when the film’s star is also its producer, its primary creative force, its writer in practice if not always in official credit, and the person whose vision, however chaotic and contradictory, is the organizing principle of the entire enterprise.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a Peter Sellers film in the most complete sense of that phrase. It is his vision, his project, his obsession, his mistake, and his final statement, all at once and sometimes in the same scene. The fact that another man’s name is on the director’s credit is not deception. It is simply the way that the industry manages situations in which the usual organizational hierarchy has been replaced by something more honest and more dangerous: one person’s unmediated relationship with a camera.

The Comedy That Actually Works, Because Honesty Demands It

It would be both critically irresponsible and personally dishonest to spend this entire chapter treating The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu as a monument to noble failure without acknowledging that it is, in several specific and documentable moments, genuinely funny.

The recharging sequence, in which Fu Manchu is connected to an elaborate electrical apparatus while his minions scurry around him with the focused anxiety of people who understand that their employer’s survival is directly connected to their own, is a piece of sustained physical comedy that Sellers executes with the timing of a man who has spent forty years learning exactly where the laugh lives in a given moment. He plays exhaustion as though it were a musical instrument. He plays diminishment as though it were a comic choice rather than a medical condition. He takes his own body’s betrayal and turns it into performance.

This is what great comedians do. They make the specific universal. They find the thing that is most intimately theirs and offer it to a room full of strangers and somehow, impossibly, the room recognizes it. Sellers’ Fu Manchu, gasping and declining and desperately in need of his elixir, is funny because we have all felt the particular desperation of needing the thing that makes us functional, the coffee, the medication, the person, the idea, the moment of grace, and having it taken from us by a clumsy subordinate who didn’t mean any harm.

The Nayland Smith sequences have their own rhythm, a kind of tired competence that David Tomlinson inhabits with complete conviction. Smith has been chasing Fu Manchu for decades. He knows the playbook. He is exhausted by it. He is also, in some way that the film handles more deftly than it handles most things, genuinely fond of the chase in the way that a person can be fond of the thing that has organized their life, even when that thing is a 168-year-old Chinese supervillain who keeps trying to destroy Western civilization.

There is a running gag involving Fu’s minions and their relationship to instructions that achieves something close to genuine comic precision. The minions are not stupid. They are, in fact, reasonably competent by the standards of cinematic henchmanry. But they operate in an environment of such baroque complexity and such contradictory demands that competence becomes impossible, and their failures are the failures of systems rather than individuals. This is funnier than it sounds written down, which is generally true of comedy that actually works.

The film’s climax, which arrives in a manner that is genuinely surprising and genuinely baffling and which subsequent viewers have described in terms that range from “unexpected” to “what the actual hell,” has the quality of a punchline that does not connect on first hearing and then sits in your head for three days until you start laughing at it alone in your car. Whether this is good filmmaking or accidental surrealism is a question worth leaving open.

The Theatrical Experience, or What It Was Like to Watch This Film in a Cinema in 1980 With No Prior Warning

The summer of 1980 was not, by any measure, a slow season for cinema. It was the era of the blockbuster as dominant cultural force, the post-Jaws, post-Star Wars landscape in which the major studios had learned that certain films could make money in quantities that required new accounting software. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu opened into this environment carrying the name Peter Sellers, which should have been sufficient, because Peter Sellers was one of the most beloved and recognizable comic performers on the planet.

The trailers did not help the film. This is worth dwelling on because trailers in 1980 were not the precisely engineered psychological operations that they have since become. They were, in many cases, a representative selection of scenes accompanied by voiceover narration that told you approximately what kind of film you were about to see. The trailers for The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu communicated, accurately, that the film was a comedy involving Peter Sellers in dual roles, elaborate villainy, and a certain amount of slapstick. What the trailers could not communicate, because they were made of the film’s best available material, was that the best available material was not consistently the film’s actual material.

Audiences went. They went because Peter Sellers. They went because the poster was cheerful and the premise was accessible and because in 1980 the idea of a comedic Fu Manchu with Peter Sellers at the controls sounded like a reasonable proposition for a Tuesday night. They sat in theaters that smelled of industrial carpet cleaner and popcorn oil that had been used since approximately the Korean War, and they watched a film that was not quite what they had come for.

The critical response was not favorable. This is the polite way of saying that the reviews were, in several notable cases, openly hostile in the manner of critics who feel that their time has been treated with insufficient respect. The phrase “disappointing” appeared with such frequency that it began to feel like a coordinated effort, and perhaps it was, because critics do read each other, and the consensus on a film can calcify before the film has finished its first weekend.

What the contemporary critics missed, and what subsequent viewing has revealed with increasing clarity, is that The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is not a failed attempt at a conventional comedy. It is a successful attempt at something that does not have a clean genre designation, something that exists in the space between parody and elegy, between slapstick and genuine sadness, between a film about a man who needs an elixir to survive and a film made by a man who needed an elixir to survive.

The exhibitors, for their part, did what exhibitors do, which is sell tickets and popcorn and hope that the word of mouth is better than the advance press. In this case, it was not. The film did not perform well at the box office. It was not a disaster of catastrophic proportions, but it was a disappointment measured against the expectations that a Peter Sellers film was reasonably expected to generate. The theaters moved it out of their primary screens and into the smaller rooms relatively quickly, and then the film migrated to the second-run houses and the drive-ins and eventually to cable television, where it found an audience that was not burdened by the weight of expectation.

Peter Sellers Dies Six Months After This Film Is Released, and History Does What History Does

Peter Sellers died on July 24, 1980. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu had been released on May 16 of that year. He was 54 years old, which is, by any reasonable standard, not enough years for a man of that talent, and the fact that the last film he completed is this one rather than Being There is the kind of thing that requires you to sit very quietly for a moment before continuing.

The retroactive significance of a performer’s final film is a complicated subject in film studies, and it is made more complicated when the performer in question knew, with reasonable certainty, that their time was limited and chose to spend it on a project of their own creation regardless of the outcome. Sellers was not tricked into The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. He was not a victim of it. He built it. He maintained it. He insisted on it. He fired directors over it. He performed in it while his heart was doing things that a heart should not do.

This is worth taking seriously as an act of creative will. The impulse to make something, to complete something, to put something in front of an audience that says: I was here, this is what I found funny, this is what interested me, this is the specific angle at which I chose to look at the world, that impulse does not weaken as the body does. If anything, it intensifies. And the film that results from that intensified impulse, compromised and chaotic and unmistakably his, is a document of that impulse.

The critical rehabilitation of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu has been slow and partial and is still very much in progress. It will never be the film that Being There is. It does not occupy the space that Strangelove or Lolita or The Party occupy. But it is the film that Sellers chose to end on, and that choice deserves more than the condescension that has historically been directed at it.

The film is the elixir. The act of making it was the thing that kept him going. He needed new ingredients, constantly. He sent his people out to gather them. He assembled them in his laboratory and produced something that was not exactly what anyone expected, and it kept him alive long enough to finish it, and then it was done.

What the Film Studies Classroom Does With a Movie Like This, or The Value of Productive Difficulty

A film like The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is worth teaching precisely because it is difficult in ways that are not immediately obvious. It is not difficult in the way that Tarkovsky is difficult, which is to say it does not demand a particular kind of meditative patience or a willingness to sit with ambiguity as an aesthetic experience. It is difficult in the way that a meal prepared by a great chef who is visibly not well is difficult: the technique is evident, the ingredients are good, some courses are genuinely transcendent, and the whole experience is undercut by a sadness that has nothing to do with the food and everything to do with the person making it.

Teaching this film productively means engaging with several distinct threads simultaneously. The first is the question of performance under physical duress, specifically what happens to the relationship between a performer and their craft when the performer’s body is actively working against them. Sellers in this film is not performing at full capacity. Anyone who has seen his work in the late 1950s and 1960s knows what full capacity looked like. What is remarkable is that diminished capacity is still, in this film, more interesting and more alive than what most performers can generate at their best.

The second thread is the question of production chaos and the finished film. Every film carries the evidence of its own making, and The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu carries more of that evidence than most, sitting closer to the surface, visible in the tonal inconsistencies and the structural looseness and the moments when the film seems uncertain about where it is going. Teaching students to read those inconsistencies as evidence of production history rather than as simple failures is a skill that transfers to the reading of any film, because all films are produced under some degree of constraint and difficulty.

The third thread is the racial politics of the film and its source material, which have been addressed earlier in this chapter but which bear continued examination in the classroom because they are not resolved by discussion. They remain uncomfortable. The discomfort is part of the lesson. A film studies education that does not include films that make you uncomfortable about what you are watching and why you are watching it and what it means that the film was made and that you are sitting here watching it is an incomplete education.

The fourth thread is the question of legacy and finality. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is, for three of its principal cast members, the last film they made. The film does not know this. The film cannot know this. But the viewer knows it, and the knowledge changes the experience of watching in ways that are worth examining. The concept of the retrospective shadow, the way that knowledge of subsequent events alters the perception of earlier ones, is one of the central challenges of film criticism, and this film demonstrates it with unusual clarity.

Rock-a-Fu, the End Credits Song, and the Unexpected Genius of Ending on That Note

The film ends. The credits roll. And then there is a song.

[embed]Rock-a-fu-man-chu. They said it, not me.

“Rock-a-Fu” is the end credits song of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, and it is, without any qualification or apology, one of the most purely delightful pieces of film music to emerge from a motion picture that otherwise had limited cause for delight. It is a rock and roll song performed in a style that cheerfully plunders the musical conventions of the late 1970s, and it commits to its own absurdity with the complete conviction of a thing that knows exactly what it is and has decided that what it is is good enough.

End credits songs in 1980 were not yet the mandatory presence they would become in certain genres. They were a choice. Someone looked at this film, this troubled and complicated and ultimately moving piece of work, and decided that what it needed at the end was a rock song about Fu Manchu, played over the credits, at full volume, with enthusiasm. This decision is correct. It is the right decision. It is possibly the best decision made in the entire production.

There is a philosophy of endings that argues that the final note of a film is the note that persists in the audience’s memory, the taste that lingers after the meal, the chord that continues to resonate after the music has stopped. By this logic, “Rock-a-Fu” is a stroke of genuine genius, because it does something that the film itself struggles to do consistently: it commits fully to joy. It does not hedge. It does not apologize. It does not acknowledge the troubled production or the racial complexities or the physical decline of its star or the box office disappointments that lay ahead. It simply rocks out about Fu Manchu, and in doing so it retroactively gives the entire film permission to have been exactly what it was.

This is what the best endings do. They reframe everything that came before them. They do not explain the film or summarize it or correct its flaws. They offer a different way of holding it. “Rock-a-Fu” holds The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu as a comedy. Not as an elegy, not as a cautionary tale, not as a monument to what might have been. As a comedy. A silly, flawed, deeply human comedy made by people who were doing their best under circumstances that were, by any reasonable measure, not their best.

The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made, by Which We Mean Something Specific and Complicated

The claim embedded in this chapter’s premise, that The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu might be the greatest motion picture ever made, is a claim that requires careful handling. It is not a claim that can be defended on the grounds of technical achievement, narrative coherence, cultural impact, or the vast majority of criteria by which greatness in cinema is conventionally assessed. The film did not win awards. It did not change the language of cinema. It did not inspire a generation of filmmakers to follow in its particular footsteps, partly because its footsteps are extremely difficult to follow and partly because the path they trace leads somewhere that most filmmakers are sensibly unwilling to go.

But greatness in cinema is not only a technical category. It is also a human one. And by the human criteria, the ones that ask what a film is about at the level beneath its plot, what it reveals about the people who made it and the moment they made it in, what it offers to a viewer who approaches it with generosity and patience and a willingness to meet it where it is rather than where it was supposed to be, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu has a legitimate claim.

It is the greatest film ever made about wanting to keep going when your body is telling you to stop. It is the greatest film ever made about the specific comedy of needing to gather your ingredients before you can make the thing that will save you, because all of us, at one point or another, are sending our minions out to find the Star of Leningrad, whatever our Star of Leningrad happens to be. It is the greatest film ever made by a man who knew he was running out of time and decided to spend what was left on something that was his, entirely and unapologetically his, regardless of what the critics would say, regardless of what the box office would do, regardless of what history would make of it.

That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, an enormous thing. It is the thing that separates artists from craftsmen, not the quality of the output, but the nature of the commitment. Sellers committed to this film the way you commit to something when you understand, at a cellular level, that the number of things left to commit to is finite and shrinking. He committed to it the way a man commits to a meal he knows he shouldn’t eat but is going to eat anyway because it is his meal, he chose it, and nobody in this restaurant is going to tell him otherwise.

The greatest films, the ones that genuinely alter your relationship to the medium and to your own experience of being alive in the world, are not always the ones that succeed by conventional measure. They are sometimes the ones that fail in ways that are so specific and so revealing and so completely saturated with the humanity of the people who made them that the failure becomes its own kind of success. The failure becomes the point. The failure becomes the film.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a failure in this mode. A glorious, absurd, deeply felt, occasionally hilarious, terminally sad, rock-and-roll-ending failure. And in the category of failures that tell the truth about human beings, it is, without serious competition, the greatest of them all.

The Elixir, Revisited, Because Everything Eventually Comes Back to the Elixir

Return, for a moment, to that word. Elixir. The one highlighted in the synopsis, the one that sits at the center of the plot like a koan that the film keeps circling without quite arriving at. The elixir vitae. The water of life. The substance that reverses the process of dying and restores the thing that was.

Alchemists spent centuries looking for it. Rohmer invented a villain whose entire motivation was built around possessing it. Sellers spent the last years of his life making the film that would be his final statement, and he organized it around a man who needs the thing that keeps him alive, who will move heaven and earth and the contents of a Soviet diamond exhibition to get it, who sends his people to every corner of the world to gather the ingredients because without those ingredients he is simply an old man in a room, waiting.

The elixir in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is never described with any specificity beyond its effects. It reverses aging. It restores vitality. It makes the old young and the dying living and the diminished whole. The film is not interested in what it is made of in any chemical or botanical sense. It is interested in what it does, which is the more important question anyway, because what a thing does is more revealing than what a thing is made of.

What Sellers was making, when he made this film, was his own elixir. The act of creation as the act of continuation. The film as the thing that kept him going, that gave his days the structure and purpose and forward motion that prevented them from becoming simply days spent waiting for the obvious conclusion. This is why he fought for it. This is why he fired directors. This is why he kept showing up on set when any reasonable physician would have told him to stay in bed. The film was his elixir vitae, and he was going to finish it or die trying, and he did both.

There is a scene in the film, not the most celebrated scene, not the one that shows up in whatever brief clip packages have been assembled about Peter Sellers over the years, in which Fu Manchu sits alone in his elaborate lair and speaks, quietly and without performance, about the weight of 168 years. The scene is played for comedy, technically. The surrounding context is comedic. But Sellers in that moment is not entirely playing a character. He is a man in his fifties who has lived a life of extraordinary intensity and extraordinary pain and extraordinary achievement, and he is sitting in a lair that is also a film set, wearing makeup that is also a kind of mask, and saying things that are also true, and the comedy and the truth are not in competition with each other. They are the same thing.

This is the highest achievement of comic performance. The moment when the joke and the reality it describes are indistinguishable from each other. The moment when the laugh and the recognition arrive simultaneously. The moment when a man in yellow makeup and an improbable mustache tells you something about mortality and desire and the desperate human need to keep going, and you believe him, completely, because he believes it too.

On the Subject of Being Charitable to Films That Did Not Ask for Charity and Probably Wouldn’t Accept It

There is a school of film criticism that treats charity as a weakness. The argument goes something like this: a film either succeeds or it does not, and the job of the critic is to assess that success or failure with as much accuracy and as little sentiment as the craft allows. The film is the film. The circumstances of its production are interesting as context but irrelevant as evaluation. You judge the thing on screen, not the story behind the thing on screen.

This is a coherent position. It is also, in the specific case of The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, an insufficient one, and not because of sentiment. Because of rigor. Because a rigorous reading of any film has to account for what the film is actually doing, not just what it was supposed to be doing, and what The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is actually doing is considerably more interesting than what it was supposed to be doing.

It was supposed to be a comedy. A cheerful, profitable, star-driven comedy that would remind audiences of what Peter Sellers could do and generate the kind of warm reception that would send everyone home happy. It was supposed to be the thing that followed Being There, the levity after the depth, the proof that a serious performance and a silly one are not in contradiction but are simply different expressions of the same underlying gift.

What it actually is, is a film about a man running out of time who makes a comedy about a man running out of time, and in the spaces between the jokes, in the moments when the timing is slightly off or the scene runs slightly long or the energy drops slightly below where it needs to be, you can see the running out of time happening in real time, captured on film, preserved with the same fidelity as the jokes themselves.

To read that as simple failure is to miss the most interesting thing about it. To read it as intended failure is to give the production more coherent self-awareness than it possessed. The accurate reading is: this is what happened. This is what a man made under these conditions, with these resources, at this point in his life. This is the film. Judge it on those terms, and it is not a failure. It is a document. It is evidence. It is the closest thing to a personal statement that Peter Sellers ever committed to celluloid, precisely because it is not trying to be a personal statement, because it is too messy and too compromised and too much itself to be anything as organized as an intention.

The Long Tail, or What Happens to a Film Like This Over the Decades If You Give It Room to Breathe

Films do not have fixed meanings. They have meanings that shift with time and context and the accumulated knowledge of subsequent events and the changing cultural frameworks through which they are viewed. A film made in 1980 is a different film watched in 1985 and a different film again watched in 2024, not because the film changes but because the viewer does, because the world does, because the information available to the viewer changes, and the information changes the experience.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu watched in 1980 was a disappointment. A film that had promised something and delivered something adjacent to it, something recognizable but not quite right, like a meal that used all the correct ingredients but in the wrong proportions. The reviews said so. The box office agreed. The film was filed, not ceremonially but practically, in the category of things that did not work out.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu watched after Peter Sellers died, in the months and years immediately following July 1980, was something else. It was the last thing. It was the film that existed in the place where Being There should have had a successor, and it was judged in that light, which is to say it was judged against an absence rather than a presence, against the film it was not rather than the film it was. This is not a useful way to judge anything, but it is a very human way.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu watched now, with forty-plus years of distance, with the complete filmography available for comparison and context, with the production history documented and the cultural moment understood and the racial politics at least somewhat more openly interrogated than they were in 1980, is a different film again. It is a film that can be appreciated for what it is without the burden of what it was supposed to be. The expectation has expired. What remains is the thing itself.

And the thing itself is, as has been argued throughout this chapter, genuinely interesting. Not in spite of its flaws but through them. Not despite the chaos of its production but because of what that chaos reveals. Not because it is Peter Sellers’ last film but because it is a film in which Peter Sellers is doing something that is absolutely, specifically, recognizably his own, in a way that his more polished and more celebrated work sometimes obscures.

The great performances hide the performer. The great performances make you forget that a human being made a series of conscious choices that resulted in what you are seeing on screen. The great performances are seamless. This performance is not seamless. You can see the joins. You can see the effort. You can see, if you look, the man behind the mustache, and the man behind the mustache is more interesting than the mustache, and the film that contains him is more interesting than its reputation suggests.

Epilogue: “An Hour Later You’ll Want to See It Again,” Reconsidered

Go back to the tagline. “Beware! See This Movie. An Hour Later You’ll Want to See It Again.”

It was written as a joke. A self-aware piece of promotional copy that acknowledged the film’s modest ambitions with a cheerfulness that bordered on the accusatory. It was the marketing department admitting, in the most public way possible, that this film was not going to change your life but might pleasantly occupy an evening.

But here is what nobody who wrote that tagline anticipated: time. The passage of it. The way it works on films the way water works on stone, slowly and continuously and with results that are not always what you would predict. The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, watched now, watched with everything that has happened since 1980 as context, watched with the knowledge of who made it and why and what it cost them, watched with the patience to let it be the thing it is rather than the thing it isn’t, watched with the generosity that good art extends to its audience and occasionally needs to receive in return, is a film that you will think about afterward.

Not because it is perfect. Because it is true. Because it is the work of a dying man who needed an elixir and made one, and the elixir was imperfect and strange and not quite what anyone had ordered, but it was real, and it kept him going long enough to finish it, and it is still here, still playing, still offering its particular mixture of comedy and sadness and terrible makeup and Helen Mirren doing her absolute professional best and a rock song over the credits that has no business being as good as it is.

An hour after seeing it, you will want to think about it again. The tagline was right. It was just describing a different kind of wanting than it thought it was.

The film is its own elixir. It turns out they always are.