Fu Manchu and the Giant Squid

by Cal Meacham

We get our ideas about the way things are from the movies.

Don’t worry — this isn’t going to be a rant about how Hollywood is corrupting our morals or about the declining standards of our education. But I do want to recognize at the start that motion pictures do have a profound effect on how we perceive the world. People pick up their ideas about how law enforcement works, how politics works, how wars are fought, how science is pursued, and how athletes train from watching the movies. These ideas are very frequently wrong. People recognize this, of course, but I suspect that they’re not allowing for it enough. Even when you discount 90% of what you see as flawed, you’re still likely to be caught off-guard by another 5% that’s in error.

Take adaptations of books. Everyone has had that feeling that when they make a book into a movie that something has been lost, that the movie isn’t as good. Some of this is due to meeting the restrictions of condensing a long novel into the two hours or so that films normally run. Characters are simplified, motivations made clearer, secondary characters and subplots are eliminated. Some things are changed because of he differences in media. Things that “work” on paper and in the theater of the mind look stupid or juvenile on the screen, even with the best special effects. (The hedge animals from Stephen King’s The Shining didn’t make it into the Kubrick film. They would have cost a small fortune, and they wouldn’t have improved the horror.)

Hollywood also has a great love of the Happy Ending – even when it’s not appropriate. You can understand why – people generally want to be entertained, and not to leave the theater on a “down” note. You can get away with the occasional tragedy, especially if it occurs in a biographical film. But after you’ve been sitting through a long adventure film you don’t want to see your heroes abruptly killed by a freak accident, or your Horatio Alger character struggling to the top of the financial heap, only to be wiped out in a sudden depression.

So when John Huston filmed C.S. Forester’s The African Queen he was careful to change the book’s downbeat ending to a triumph. The Pride and the Passion was also based on a C.S. Forester novel, The Gun. The book is uniformly depressing – everyone who comes in contact with the titular piece of ordnance dies. The movie fixed that. (Most of Forester’s novels seem to be pretty pessimistic except for his Horatio Hornblower novels, in which he indulged an optimistic streak – Hornblower gets away with it all and emerges at the end of the saga with high rank, fortune, a beautiful wife, and social status. It’s probably a good comment on the wisdom of giving your audience a happy ending that the Hornblower novels are easily Forester’s most popular and successful works.)

Disney is notorious for altering stories to fit its template. They gave The Little Mermaid an anomalous happy ending, and they did the same to the “Tin Soldier” segment of Fantasia 2000. You expect that of Disney, though. People were less happy when the recent Demi Moore version of The Scarlet Letter changed the ending to a happy one. It was squarely in the Hollywood tradition, though. The 1926 John Barrymore silent version of Moby Dick (called The Sea Beast) ends with Barrymore’s Captain Ahab killing the whale (!) and sailing home to his lady (!!!!)

My interest in the essay is a restricted class of ideas and images engendered by the movies. I want to look at images and ideas that have been so firmly entrenched by the motion picture versions of stories that people find it hard to separate those images from the stories – even when they didn’t actually appear in the original novel.

One of the most familiar cases of this is the story of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s novel told the story of a young philosophy student who creates an artificial being, then abandons it, neglecting to nurture and educate it. Buffeted by the world because of his ugliness, even when his intentions are of the best, the philosophical monster turns to evil. Many bad things occur.

Edison’s studios made a silent version starring Charles Ogle in 1910 (long thought to be lost, this film has recently been found), but the version that was widely seen, and which had an enormous impact, was the version released by Universal Studios in 1931, starring Boris Karloff. This version gave us the tall, stiff monster with the squared-off head and the neck bolts – images totally unlike those of Shelley’s novel. Karloff’s monster grunted—Shelley’s enunciated. Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein was a Doctor, Shelley’s Victor an undergraduate. Only in the film is the Monster created in an old stone watchtower by Frankenstein using electrical devices (the novel hints at Galvani’s experiments, but doesn’t explicitly invoke them). Only in the film does Frankenstein have a hunchbacked assistant (The Popular Legend has the assistant named Igor. I have to note that the twisted assistant played by Dwight Frye was named “Fritz”, and was killed by the Monster. But I guess “Fritz” doesn’t sound as outré and as threatening as “Igor”. Frye came back to play a similar assistant in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. Not until 1939’s Son of Frankenstein did the doctor acquire an assistant named Ygor – and played by Bela Lugosi, to boot! Bela came back as Ygor in 1942’s Ghost of Frankenstein.) . And the 1931 film also has the typical Hollywood Happy Ending, something that is exceptionally odd in this case, since the book piles calamity upon calamity.

There have been a lot of other versions since, with their own images of the Monster. The British Hammer films of the late 1950’s featured a very different image, as have TV movies, European versions, Roger Corman’s adaptation of Aldiss’ Frankenstein Unbound, the 1993 TNT version, and Kenneth Brannagh’s surprisingly faithful adaptation of Shelley’s story. In addition, Shelley’s novel continues to be read, so that there exists a large enough base of people familiar with the real story. Nevertheless, the images and situations from the 1931 Universal version have become icons. Cartoons and Comic Books and Comedy acts can make a reference to “Igor” or show a picture of a flat-topped green monster, and it is instantly understood. I’m sure that this is partly due to the efforts of Universal studios in promoting its monster and protecting its interests, but I believe that it’s also because the movie came around at the right time to a receptive audience. It was a useful image and metaphor to have around.

Whatever the reason, we have here a case where the Icon has taken on a life of its own, independent of the literary source that gave it nominal life, and becoming even more familiar to most people than the image as it appears in the source. The example of Frankenstein’s Monster is a familiar one, and many people are aware that the popular image is not the one that appears in the book. But I hope to surprise you with a few that I will mention below.

When I first picked up a copy of The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer (the exotic pseudonym used by the more pedestrianly-named Arthur Sarsfield Ward), I was utterly surprised to find that there is no mention at all of his moustache. Ward gives a full description o his villain, and the moustache s conspicuous by its absence:

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man." (The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu Chap. 2)

But the moustache is arguably the defining characteristic of the Evil Doctor – we have even adopted the name to describe that long, drooping moustache. Nevertheless, it is absent from the books and the early cover art. It first shows up – of course – in the movies. Warner Oland was the first to portray Fu Manchu on screen, in the 1929 film The Mysterious Fu Manchu. His moustache was rather short, but it established he precedent. John Harwod, writin in a letter to The Rohmer Revew , suggested that moustaches were associated with Oriental villains in those days. Oland had himself worn one as a Oriental villain in the 1917 serial The Fatal Ring. When Boris Karloff appeared as Fu Manchu in the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu he not only retained the moustache, but lengthened it considerably. Ever portrayer since has kept that long spaghetti moustache. This annoyed the serious fans, as serious fans are always annoyed by such pop-image shorthand. Sherlock Holmes fanatics are still upset about the way Holmes is always shown with a calabash pipe and a deerstalker hat – not the way he normally dressed.

The hero or heroine is in an apparently hopeless battle with the Vampire. They’re hopelessly outmatched — the Vampire has the strength of a dozen men, and is immune to bullets, unfazed by abuse that would kill a human being. The usual weapons – a stake, holy water – are ineffectual, or not to be found. As the revenant advances for the kill, the hero/heroine remembers that hours have passed since the hunt began. He/she throws an object at the window or door, or tears down a curtain. Sunlight floods in! The day s upon them, and the vampire is caught unawares, away from the safety of its coffin. In vain it tries to retreat, but it is forced back, or more windows are opened up. The sunlight erodes the body of the vampire as if it were acid. The vampire disappears into nothingness, perhaps with a little explosion or puff of smoke at the end.

The way that vampires evaporate under sunlight is so familiar that Ray-Ban sunglasses recently launched a campaign in which one hapless vampire flares out with the rising of the sun because he hasn’t got any dark glasses. His friends laugh at his predicament (a tough bunch, those vampires. The kind of friends I wouldn’t want to have.), revealing their enlarged canines. No other explanation is given. It’s not needed – we all know what happens to vampires who get caught without protection. In the HBO/Takes of the Crypt movie Bordello of Blood one vampire escapes the effects of the sun by using sunblock. Again, they don’t really have to tell us why.

Except it’s not really true. Vampires DON’T evaporate under sunlight the way the Wicked Witch of the West evaporates under water. At any rate, it was not always the case. One day I must write a history of the development of the vampire legend as we know it today. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there WAS a legend of the vampire, but the vampire didn’t resemble the figure we’re familiar with. It was a reviled figure, usually a suicide or criminal buried at the crossroads. A rotting, blood-drinking corpse without much intelligence or couth. It could be diverted by placing beans in its path. Its obsessive-compulsive behavior would keep it at this task until the sun rose, and it returned to its wayside grave.

The picture started to change with John Polidori’s The Vampire, conceived at the same party on Lake Lucerne that gave birth to Frankenstein. Some say that Polidori was influenced (and may have stolen) the work of his friend and companion, Lord Byron. I’ve long suspected that Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, was inspired by Byron. Whatever the case, Polidori gave us the first Titled vampire. From then on literary vampires always seemed to be Lord this or Count that. With their rise in social status they got a rise in appearance, respectability, and intelligence. The penny-dreadful magazine “Varney the Vampire” ran for a long time, familiarizing people with the concept. There were other 19th century interpretations, but “Varney” was a big influence on Bram Stoker, who used a lot of the material in Varney to construct his own vampire, Count Dracula. Dracula had an incalculably large influence in the field. Stoker himself wrote a play based on it, but it was the Hailton Deane version that took London by storm. With additions by John Balderston, it played well in New York, especially with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi taking over the title role from Raymond Huntley, who had created it. But in not one of these versions is there a suggestion that vampires expire under the influence of sunlight. Stoker even had Dracula walking around the streets of London in daylight. (This image was brought to the screen in Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Gary Oldman playing the Count in top hat and – shades of the Ray-Ban commercial – tinted glasses!)

So where did this image of the sunlight-dissolving vampire come from? The very first hint of it appears in the German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1922). Fritz Murnau’s atmospheric film was the first adaptation of Stoker’s story on film. Amazingly, he did it without any attempt to secure the filming rights. As a result, Stoker’s widow prosecuted Murnau’s company, Prana Film, and won. They were ordered to destroy all copies. Fortunately, they did not succeed, and the film still exists today.

Max Schreck played the Dracula character (named “Count Orlock” in the film). He has a bulbous head and rat-like teeth and clawed hands. A lady-charmer he is not. The bride of Hutter, the Jonathan Harker character offers herself as a willing victim, so that at the end the Count is delayed until the sun comes up. Caught unawares, the vampires vanishes in a puff of smoke. I have no doubt that this demise was adopted both because it ended the story rapidly and dramatically, and because it was made possible by the new medium of film. Such an effect was possible on stage (Dracula has a high collar precisely because it allows the wearer to perform a transformation into a bat on stage by dropping though a trapdoor. The collar disguises the fact that the actor has already disappeared through the trap, the now-empty cape screening his departure.), but it was a lot showier on film. Besides – such a demise is very clean. There’s no messy blood and guts, which you would get if you dispatched the vampire with the more traditional stake through the heart.

However, just because an image appears in film doesn’t mean that it becomes accepted. The big-headed rat-toothed vampire clearly was NOT a big success. It remained dormant for fifty years, resurfacing on in the remade version of Nosferatu in 1979 and the TV movie of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in the same year. The next appearance of the vampire on film was that of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight (1927). Chaney’s film has been lost, which is a pity. His image of the vampire is totally unlike anything before or since – a long-faced, top-hatted figure with a huge grin in which each and every tooth comes to a sharp point.

The film which made the biggest splash as the 1931 Tod Browning version of Dracula, adapted by Balderston from his stage play (with the addition of a long opening section in which Dwight Frye (“Fritz” from the movie Frankenstein) plays a combined Renfield/Jonathan Harker character). This film as phenomenally successful, and gave us the Hungarian-accented, opera-caped suave and sophisticated vampire. Yet even this film, which secured in the mind of the public the popular image of the vampire, did not suggest that daylight was fatal to the monster. That came about in 1943 in the film Son of Dracula . Writer Curt Siodmak (already single-handedly responsible for much “ancient” monster lore that has lodged in the American moviegoers consciousness) must have seen Murnau’s film and been influenced by it. That clean and dramatic death was just too effective cinematically to be ignored. It was used to dispatch John Carradine as Dracula in the 1944 film House of Frankenstein. And so another brick was added to the very modern legend of the vampire, to be endlessly repeated in movies to come.

If you go to the Science Fiction section of any bookstore, or perhaps to the Classics section, or General Fiction, look up Jules Verne. Odds are you won’t find anything. If you do, it’s likely to be 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or Around the World in Eighty Days, or A Journey to the Center of the Earth. It might just possibly be The Mysterious Island. This is really a pity, because Verne wrote over sixty novels, and most of these have been translated into English. But just try to find them.

They’re good novels, too. People know that he is one of the founders of Science Fiction, but they don’t, by and large, know exactly why. He wrote about a submarine, of course, and they might vaguely know that he wrote about some other science-fiction ideas, such as going to the moon. These statements are true, but they don’t begin to do Verne justice. He researched his topics meticulously, studied the science and engineering of his day, and extrapolated brilliantly.

When Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues in 1870 the state of real submarines hadn’t advanced much beyond the Civil War ship Huntley, which was basically a steel cigar with a crankshaft worked by hand by eight men crammed into its tight interior. Verne’s Nautilus, with its self-sufficient economy, its secret and enclosed power source, and its ability to cruise for months without docking represents several quantum leaps from the Huntley’s poor example. In Robur the Conqueror Verne wrote of a heavier-than-air ship in an age when balloons had not yet advanced very far. The hull of Robur’s ship isn’t made of steel, or even aluminum. It’s made of what we would today call composite materials. In The Tribulations of a Chinaman his titular hero escapes from a shipwreck wearing a rubber survival suit. Verne’ description of this lifesaving device is marvelous – I wish I had one.

In two stories Verne describes television (calling it the “telephote”). He also wrote the first “haunted mansion” story in which the “ghost” effects were created by scientific means – magnets, projectors, and the like. (Who would have thought that Verne was the effective godfather of Scooby-Doo?) In The Barsac Mission/City in the Sahara he wrote the first story in which someone calls for help using a radio. In The Weapon for Destruction he predicted a kind of Guided Missile. In The Hunt for the Meteor he introduced the Tractor Beam, ages before Star Trek, or E.E. “Doc” Smith. (He called t the “Neutral Helicoidal Ray”.) In Around the World in Eighty Days and in Michael Strogoff he gave us brilliant twist endings. Verne’s books are well worth digging out.

There are at least two misconception about Verne’s works that have become commonplace. They involve two of his most commonly reprinted works, so it’s likely that you’ve come across these yourself.

One is that, at some point in the story, the hero of Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg, accomplishes one leg of his journey in a balloon. My paperback edition shows what must be Phileas Fogg and his servant Passepartout riding in the gondola of a balloon. The 1956 motion picture version of the story, directed by Michael Todd and starring David Niven and Cantinflas, depicts such a journey. It appeared on the poster for the film, and was prominently featured I the advertising. When the novel was adapted for television a few years ago, it featured a balloon segment.

Nevertheless, there’s not a word about balloons in the book. It’s true that Verne used balloon journeys in his other books and stories – his first success was Five Weeks in a Balloon – but he didn’t use one in Around the World in 80 Days. Its first appearance in an adaptation of that work was in Todd’s movie, and he admitted to making the incident up in order to punch up the first part of the movies with some visual flair. As he reported it, the Jules Verne Society in France gave him a medal for it.

The other icon that did not appear in a Verne book, but which has become inextricably linked with him is The Attack of the Giant Squid. If there is one thing that audiences seem to know about Verne, it’s that image of the Giant Squid. It shows up in numerous movies based on Verne works. Yet, amazing as this may sound, in no book by Jules Verne is there an attack on a submarine (or any other vessel) by an enormous octopus or squid. I’ll actually have to squirm a little to get that through, but, strictly speaking, it is correct. There aren’t even that many opportunities for such an attack. Verne wrote only two books in which submarines take an active part – the famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Weapon for Destruction.(The Nautilus appears at the end of The Mysterious Island, but doesn’t play an active role in the book.)

Nevertheless, it shows up in many of his films. Most readers are probably most familiar with the Disney Version of 20,000 Leagues, made in 1954, starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas. There is an extensive battle at sea with a giant squid that has grabbed the Nautilus. For added drama, the battle was portrayed as taking place during a storm. The squid’s tentacles snake into the vessel itself. Mason’s Captain Nemo is later grabbed up by one tentacle, and he is rescued by Douglas’ character, Ned Land. Seven years later, the Harryhausen film The Mysterious Island features a return of Nemo and his submarine (as in the book), and features an undersea battle with an enormous Ammonite (a prehistoric cephalopod with a tightly-curved shell) –a scene manifestly not in the book.

But the scene had already appeared many times before. A giant sea creature attacks underwater dwellers in the 1929 version of The Mysterious Island (which has nothing to do with the Verne book, aside from the title and technology). The 1916 film Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is amazingly faithful and ambitious, attempting to tell the stories of both 20,000 Leagues and The Mysterious Island. It features some excellent early underwater camera work, the only Captan Nemo that actually matches Verne’s description – and a Giant Squid. I believe this film has the distinction of being the first to introduce the single oversized cephalopod into Verne mythology.

Movies since have employed that squid as well. The 1958 Czech film Vynález zkázy (released in the US as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) features an animate giant squid. Two TV-movies appeared in 1997 of 20,000 Leagues on competing networks. They both felt compelled to feature underwater attacks on the Nautilius, although one substituted a sort of giant mutant fish for the cephalopod.

Secondary media based on these followed the moves in this error – the comic book adaptation of Disney’s film, as well as the View-Master slides inspired by it, featured a single large octopus or squid menacing the submarine. The Marvel Classic Comics adaptation of 20,000 Leagues has on its cover Captain Nemo, axe in hand, curled in the tentacles of a giant squid, a scene clearly inspired by the Disney film, not by a careful reading of Verne’s book.

The only interpreter who got it right was the Classics Illustrated edition devoted to 20,000 Leagues. This comic-book adaptation depicted a swarm of moderately large squid, called “poulps” in Verne’s book. Each measures eight yards in length. That’s pretty damned big, but not as gargantuan as the monsters portrayed in the movies. More than a dozen of them overwhelm the Nautilus. They are repelled by the crew with axes, as in the Disney film. Unlike that filmed version, however, it is Nemo who rescues the Canadian harpoonist Ned Land from the squid, not vice versa.

Verne probably was inspired to include the octopus by Victor Hugo’s use of a menacing octopus in his 1855 novel The Toilers of the Sea. There was also a general interest in giant sea creatures in the years Verne wrote (not unlike that described in the opening chapter of 20,000 Leagues, in fact) from 1861 onwards. The scene is certainly a memorable one. It was illustrated in the first edition, and has become a set piece not only of every film adaptation of the novel since, but has spilled over into other Verne films.

But why a single gigantic octopus or squid instead of an army of large ones? There are two reasons, I think. Th first is that a single large opponent serves much better than a lot of smaller ones. It focuses the attention of the shot on the single menace. It also keeps the image from being too confused – the audience can only follow s much at one time.

The second reason is the limited ability of special effects to produce believable (and suitably menacing) squid. If you only have a limited budget, you are better off putting it into making one squid that works well, rather than many that don’t. You are also much better off, in a visual medium that demands that you make things clear and concise, in making a single very large and obviously menacing monster.

So there it is – the constraints of filmmaking are what have initiated these images. Because you have imperfect ability to produce effects, because you want menace to be immediately obvious, because of audience expectations, and (above all) in order to produce a visually striking image, the movies have created a set of images and cultural cliches that did not exist when the stories were told in other forms. The Moustache of Fu Manchu, the Vampire that Dissolves in Sunlight, the Giant Squid of Jules Verne fantasies, Hunchbacked Igor and the Square-Topped Frankenstein would not have existed if the movies had not been invented.