Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This venture begins in appropriately gruesome style with the beheading of the late Sax Rohmer's durable archcriminal, who has already survived the perils of 14 books and four feature films, the last made in 1932. As Fu, "cool, callous, brilliant . . . the most evil and dangerous man in the world," Britain's Christopher Lee slithers in the footsteps of Warner Oland and Boris Karloff, and despite a vaguely Oxonian Oriental accent he doesn't look a hair sillier than his predecessors...
Smith's dialogue smacks of a vintage Saturday-afternoon serial, but his fears are well grounded. A kidnaped professor possesses a secret formula for distilling the lethal essence of the Black Hill Poppy from Tibet ("A pint can kill every living thing in London"). Fu's evil daughter (Tsai Chin) seizes the professor's daughter as hostage and undertakes the dirty deeds formerly assigned to such exotics as Anna May Wong and Myrna Loy. There are vestiges of the old potency in the farfetched fights, a sinister drowning apparatus in a hideout below the Thames, the mass...
...bassoons. Finally the inevitable tuba, and a great off-beat joke by the percussion utensils. The Dream of a Witches' Sabbath flaunted its own goodies, notably the raucous way the clarinets, flutes, and bassoons treat the witches' dance tune (a perversion of the Beloved's theme). The brasses' evil parody of the dies Irae plainchant seemed to have more downright nastiness to it than ever before...
...truth about Stalin, who in the film has nothing to say and "just keeps puffing away on his pipe." Huffed Red Star: "The authors evidently felt that historical objectivity has thus been given its due," making it quite clear that the Kremlin thinks the old killer, for all his evil deeds, deserves more than just a quick walk-on cameo for those early years that also shook the world...
...conscience, Giulietta is wounded by the discovery that her husband (Mario Pisu) has a mistress. She consults a seer, seeks refuge in spiritualism, tries to distract herself by befriending an elegant trollop (Sandra Milo) next door. Meanwhile, she begins to live more and more in fantasy - images of abstract evil, dreams of sexual abandon, phantoms of childhood fears. Not until she at last loses her husband does Giulietta find herself and make peace, albeit rather arbitrarily, with her "spirits...