SLEEPER (1973) is the first of Woody Allen’s films to have a real narrative rather than a series of sketches (not counting Play It Again, Sam, which was a filmed play), as Allen wakes up 200 years in the future due to a hospital accident to discover that deep-fat frying and tobacco are the new health regimen and Allen, as the only American without a computer file, is now the one person who can undermine the regime. With Diane Keaton as a vapid intellectual who turns into a revolutionary firebrand, this is only fitfully funny, maybe because Allen’s trying so much for Buster Keaton slapstick rather than his usual style of humor (and physical comedy of this sort isn’t quite his forté). “My last apopinted with my analyst was 216 years ago—if I’d been going all this time, I might be cured.”
Orson Welles is MACBETH (1948) in a Shakespeare adaptation that also stars Roddy McDowell as Malcolm, Dan O’Herlihy as MacDuff and Jeannette Nolan as Lady Macbeth. Although well-performed, the production isn’t anywhere near as inspiring (for want of a better word) as, say, the Ian McKellan lear I watched recently; the theatrically stark, stylized sets are really stunning though. “Where we are, there are daggers in men’s smiles.”
EMPEROR FU MANCHU was Sax Rohmer’s last Fu Manchu novel and I wonder if he didn’t write it in that spirit—this has lots of continuity references to earlier books and it ends with Fu Manchu suffering a truly major defeat (Sir Denis Nayland Smith acquires a complete list of his agents in the Red Chinese government). The story has a Eurasian British agent attempting to penetrate Fu Manchu’s Si-Fan operation in China, where the Devil Doctor is plotting to destroy a Soviet germ-warfare lab and overthrow the Chi-Coms (whose glorification of the worker offends his Chinese imperial soul) which as he points out, is a goal Sir Denis should be sympathetic to. A good one, though it’s amazing a British agent in the heart of China can find almost as many of Sir Denis’ agents as if they were in London or Egypt.
THE WRATH OF FU MANCHU was a collection of Sax Rohmer short stories including four Fu Manchu tales from the fifty, three of them unremarkable. The title story, which includes the last appearance of Fah Lo Sueee and yet another attempt to take down the Chinese Communists (by threatening to transmute the gold in Fort Knox if the US doesn’t support him) is worth the reading, though. And with that, my rereading of Fu Manchu is done …
