Jess Franco, the walking death of Eurocrime (Part III): The Case of Sumuru

 The Thesis: Every Eurocrime-Franchise that Jess Franco touched, had to be buried afterwards. Basically his movies are the sleazy epitaphs of once-well-regarded serials and characters: the last chance to squeeze some money out of an already dead topic.

Jump to each chapter HERE 

After having Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution) finishing off his eurospy/crime movies, Jess Franco then put the final nail in the coffin of Dr. Fu Manchu, only to let his spirit be guiding one of his daughters. Now let's see what he did to Fu Manchu's sister in spirit: Sumuru.

3. The Case of Sumuru

Sax Rohmer had been successful with his Fu Manchu novels, depicting the chinese super-villain who had to be beaten by the western empires. Remember that was written in the early 1900s under the influence of the joint western war against the chinese uprising. In world war II, things were not so clear any more and Rohmer decided to add another supervaillain to his roster. And what was the second biggest threat to western civilisation next to the Chinese? Right: Women. So we are introduced to a sinister, beautiful eastern evil empowered woman called Sumuru (please put the accent on the last u: Sumuru). She appeared first in a radio-show for the BBC in WWII. 

Her main agenda is to rid the world of uglyness (=men) and in this world, only the beautiful people rule. To do this, she leads a secret order of female spys that use their bodies to lure men into traps. Yes.

If you read the novels, they are very explicit for the time and Rohmer turns the kink-dial up from his Fu Manchu books. Already on the first page of the first book we learn that Sumuru is "Nude under the Mink"and our hero knows, because he gets a good look. Sumuru herself has oriental looks, but no nationality attached to her.

The Franchise: 

Harry Alan Tower's 2 for 1 deal with Sax Rohmer purchased the characters (not the books) of Fu Manchu and Sumuru. Sumuru had no cinematic heritage and so Towers was free to do conceptually whatever he liked. The first installment is solid entertainment with lots of mini-skirts, a few bikinis and firmly tongue-in-cheek. Shirley Eaton is a near-perfect impersonation of the character with her green eyes, high cheekbones and obvious enjoyment of being cruel. This is an entertaining reminder of how innocent cinema used to be. The movie did not fare worse than the 3rd installment of Fu Manchu (Vengeance) but is by far the superior movie.

The title "The Million Eyes of Sumuru" certainly is a reply to the "1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse", indicating that all the women in the world are on her side. Basically her plan falters because women simply love men too much. Interestingly, Sumuru is portraied villainous, but with a good amount of sympathy. The movie itself does not take itself too seriously and basically is a typical non-essential Towers movie. Besides the character of Sumuru itself and her "million" (I counted 36) eyes in various states of undress (but not too much), this is pretty bland.

Case opened: The Girl from Rio (The Seven Men of Sumuru)

Torturing men with sex in 1969

The plot: In Brazil, Sumuru has built a city just for her and her army of women called Femina. Accidently arriving there on a plane, our "hero" is being captured and tortured as he is believed to have ten million dollars he has stolen. In the end another crimelord attacks the city and Sumuru pushes the self-destruction button, but is able to flee. 

But  this is not what this is all about. This is all about style and asthetics and in the sequences where Franco can play to his own tune, the movie looks astonishing. The HAT-scripted sequences of plot clearly fall apart as they are treated basically with disrespect by Franco. All he is interested in is creating a future world where latex-cled young amazones rule over post-modern cities. And in these parts of the movie, Franco fully (and I might say - for the last time) is able to bring his "vision" the the screen. 

Torturing men with sex in 1984

Again highly influenced by "Lemmy Caution vs. Alphaville" and other french sf-movies Franco here throws an unruly, analog man vs an organized, digital community. But as sterile as the inhabitants of Femina are, the brooding sex underneath erupts in artful episodes  (filmed with care by Franco) of lust. Obviously inspired by the emerging fetish scene around latex and using bits and pieces of "Gwendolin", "Phoebe" and "Pauline" to create a unique enviroment (that was only explored once more in the "Gewndoline in the Land of Yak-Yak" movie). 

Although the nude scenes are done with great care and restraint by Franco, the whole subject of forced sex is undeniably disturbing so that Sumuru's name had to be changed to comply to the late Sax Rohmer's widow's concerns about damaging the artistic property. Co-producer Constantin had no such problems and kept the title in, as "Million Eyes" had done good business, basically cashing in as much as the 3rd "Fu Manchu" installment of the same year.

The character of Sumuru remains untouched, more a ruthless politician with a criminal mindset than a gangster-bosslady, but the sf elements cannot be found in Sax Rohmer's work. The casting of the same actors that were used in the first part however, is an obvious sign for the attempt to establish a franchise, as is the open ending with S. being able to flee.

Nope, this did not help gaining the 
support of Eaton for another sequel

Lead-actress Shriley Eaton, the "Face of Sumuru" had decided to leave the movie industry all together. Franco stated that she basically was a housewife who would do occasional acting jobs to earn some additonal living and that she was not made to be "in the movies". 

Eaton herself expressed a deep dissatisfaction with the conditions of working for these films and made it clear (polite as they are, the british) that she would not work with Franco again as he intercut her scenes with more explicit scenes that she did not do. Eaton did not appear naked in the film, she was wearing a skin-toned suit under the see-through dress in one debatable scene.

This sounds like a "amicable seperation", although Eaton stated that "she cried the whole way back in the plane from brazil"

. 

It certainly did not help that german distributor Constantin photoshopped her head on the naked body of another actress on the big movie posters! 

Franco finished the movie a week ahead of schedule and while the basic crew had to stay in brazil to film the carnival in Rio scenes for the film, everybody else was sent back and HAT together with Franco quickly filmed material for a WIP-movie called "99 Women" in the spare time. 

This is how Franco 1969 thought women in plexiglass-cages would look like in the future

Box-Office returns for Sumuru II were dismal. I mean bad, really bad. Much worse than this movie deserved. In 1969 this one came in at the bottom-10 grossing movies in germany with only about 100.000 tickets sold. This was much lower than the already dismal returns on "The Castle of Fu Manchu" (ca 350.000) . Ticket sales in other markets were bad as well so that AIP decided to sell the movie directly to Columbia TV where it was released as "Future Women" in an obviously heavily cut (75min) version. It never made it to the cinemas in the US.

It is debatable why this happened. The movie feels disjointed and offers the same kind of bland unexcitement that basically was a staple of the  previous eurospy-films. The Femina-parts however are stunning and gorgeous but few and in-between.

Maybe the brand Sumuru, like Fu Manchu smelled stained, and those folks that went in to see these kinds of films now had a wife and children and a tv-set at home. The younger audience basically did not care about the pulp-heroes of the previous generation. 

And to start with, Sumuru never had been a "hot property", she was just a "plan B" even from Sax Rohmer and thrown into the deal with HAT. Sumuru is like a third-born child that is free to do whatever it wants in life as the parents never had a plan for her. 

The 100.000 ticket sales desaster definitively led to an end of the Sumuru-franchise although HAT produced a Sumuru-movie in 2003 that takes place in outer space and sadly lacks entertainment value. A Jess Franco in his prime would have made that movie a classic. There is a 15-minutes cut of the movie on youtube. That's all you need. 

Harry Alan Towers had obtained the rights to Fu Manchu and Sumuru for the legal lifespan (70 years after the author's death), so both HAT and Jess Franco would play with the thought of re-visiting these properties. HAT stated that "Jess Franco was a good and fast director, when he was being entertained." Bsically that's HAT saying that JF is unreliable.

Verdict: There is little doubt that the bad box-office returns led to an end of the franchise, but is Jess Franco really to blame? The movie is not worse than a dozen other eurospy-flicks but contains stunning visions that were maybe ahead of it's time. The only reasonable way to continue this franchise in a commercially successful way would have been movies like "Blue Rita". But here, Elizabeth Rohmer firmly stood against the sexploitation of Sumuru.                        

Acquittal

The Relapse: Blue Rita (1977) and Linda (1981) 

Blue Rita is the head of an amazon organisation that lures wealthy men into a high-class brothel only to torture them to get money and information for different secret agencies.

The whole plot sounds like a low-key Sumuru-sexcapade. It helps that Sumuru is not specified in Sax Rohmer's work, she is merely described as seductious mistress of disguise (like some female sexual Fantomas). So now we have a caucasian "Rita" with her oriental sidekick "Princess".

The movie features a lot of outre-sf-noir stylistics and Franco obviously tries to recapture the feel of Femina. The movie is done with relative care and can be looked upon as a worthy successor to Sumuru. I can totally see this being remade in Blade-Runner style. And to me this is the inofficial "Sumuru 3: Slaves of Sumuru" - movie...

Princess explaining advanced yoga techniques to her tribe

Raquel Evans

Linda works in a hotel and gets entangled in the evil doings of Sheila, the manager of the night club "Amore". Women are drugged and given to wealthy business men to whatever use they can imagine. This sounds like a rework of "Blue Rita", and while writing this entry, I was immediately reminded of Raquel Evans, who plays the night club manager. I re-checked "Linda" and indeed again a lot reminded me of the Sumuru-movies. The scale is much, much smaller (but basically more akin the the later Sax Rohmer novels), the sf-motiv is gone,  but the care and general coherence suggest that Franco had something bigger in mind. Indeed some scenes have a direct connection to Sumuru and Raquel Evans is a perfect substitute for Shirley Eaton. 

This is how women in plexiglass-cages looked in 1981

The three Sumuru-style movies are all above-average entries in Jess Franco's work, showing his affection to the character. Sumuru seems to have been some kind of catalyst for Franco's work and the diffusion of motives from movie to movie (Sumuru in the end just cares for herself, there is no political agenda left) basically reflects Franco's own cinematic carreer.

Was Franco a male Sumuru who, with a group of acolytes (his cast and crew) tried to steal money from rich movie-producers by casting them under his audio-visual spell and basically abducting them by secretly robbing them of their time and money and getting the movie audience under mind-control??????

In the end, Sumuru failed.

99 Women was a big box-office success, as was Justine, making it clear to everybody where the money lay. "Count Dracula" and "Witchhunter" performed reasonably but the collab with Towers ended (obviously due to mutual distrust) and Franco was employed by Arthur Brauner, who held three franchises: Bryan Edgar Wallace, Doktor Mabuse and some original Edgar Wallace stuff.

Coming next: Jess Franco vs. Edgar Wallace 

Jess Franco, the walking death of Eurocrime (Part II): The Case of Dr. Fu Manchu

 The Thesis: Every Eurocrime-Franchise that Jess Franco touched, had to be buried afterwards. Basically his movies are the sleazy epitaphs of once-well-regarded serials and characters: the last chance to squeeze some money out of an already dead topic.

Jump to each chapter HERE

In installment  one , I did examine the Lemmy Caution series, coming to the conclusion that he did not kill that one off, but he did use Eddie Constantine (the star) for a last time in eurocrime with his 1969 movie "Residence for Female Spies". 

2. The Case of  Fu Manchu

The Fu Manchu series is a well known pulp ficton novel series from the 1910s and had already been filmed numerous times.  The prime example for this must be the hilariously pre-coded "Tha Mask of Fu Manchu" with Boris Karloff in the title role. Prior to this, Paramount had already produced three talkies about our asian businessman that had already spawned a female spin-off with "Daugther of the Dragon". 

From the start, these movies had been - well - sensationalist, basically leading to calls for censorship which was introduced in late 1933. But I advise any one of you to watch the newly restored, uncut version of "Mask" to witness its kinkyness in all its glory.

After the 1940 serial "Drums of Fu Manchu", things became quieter however and Fu Manchu was relegated to the cheapo tv-series league. The renaissance of eurotrash, however, brought our trusted diplomat and worldshaker back into view, curtousy of the Brits:

The Harry Alan Towers "Fu Manchu" series

Harry Alan Towers was one of those film-entrepreneurs that seemed to be the essential ingredient in european film-making: Scandalous womanizer who caught every possible angle to make a profitable low-budget movie. After two crime movies, he purchased the rights to the adventure novels by Edgar Wallace, the only thing the Germans obviously had left over in their rush to the goldmine. So in 1963 he tried to cash into the EW-hype with "Death Drums along the river" that featured the adventurer Sanders who would pop up in a few further movies that obviously did not as well as their crime counterparts but returned reasonable profits.

In 1966 he actually co-produced a "real" Edgar Wallace "Circus of Fear". In between he tried to establish his own eurospy-series called "Mike Foster" but that was unsuccessful. 

In the search of something to compete the Dr. Mabuse Films of CCC, he stumbled upon the Fu Manchu series and obtained the  rights to the name (but not the novels). 

Thus the HAT-Fu Manchu cycle was born with "The Face of Fu Manchu" in 1965. Spending basically all his money on the actors, Towers was able to get the best of both worlds and basically the hottest names in the genre field at that time: Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu and Joachim Fuchsberger (Scotland Yard Inspector) as well as Karin Dor (dame in peril, of course), who were THE faces of the Edgar Wallace krimis. Directed on the cheap by Hammer's Don Sharp, this is an enjoyable action-romp, set in the 1900s. The movies were co-produced by the german Constantin-Film, who had their fingers in basically every krimi-soup back then.

Bringing together the exotic locations of the EW-Sanders series and Fu Manchu in what clearly was a cost-effecient move. locations are then moved from London to some jungle,

At this point, Towers had made connection via the american distributor of "Cartes sur la table / Attack of the Robots" (see Part 1) with Jess Frano. That distributor was acquired by CUC who obviously saw a good investement and set the Towers/Franco tandem up to do their magic. And - oh boy- did they do magic (The whole story is well documented by Stephen Thrower in his marvellous fist book on Jess Franco "Murderous Passions").

But after 3 years, the 3rd installment of the Fu Manchu-series had bombed, reaching an audience of roughly 700.000 (german sales), so the intent to put in much more money was basically very low. 

Starting off with "The Blood of Fu Manchu", Jess Franco introduces us to his own vision of supervillains whose sole interest is to dominate the world and their only way to do so is to put women in chains. What a concept. Somewhere in South America, magical spells are woven, bones and feathers are cast into a pot of bubbling blood and the results are those deliriously famous masterpieces like "Girl from Rio", "99 Women" and of course the last two Fu Manchu movies.

Case opened: "The Blood of Fu Manchu"

The Fu Manchu series was in full swing and the british-produced first three movies are cheap, but entertaining. Christopher Lee and Don Sharp do their Hammer thing and Constantin co-produces and lends out enough german Scotland Yard coinspectors to make these enjoyable. The series experienced a serious artistic  dump with the 3rd installment, "Vengeance of FM".

Now, however, Towers has to step up the production to meet the growing demands by CUC and the returns on Manchu#3 had not been good. Here comes Franco, who in a space of 4 years directs numerous HAT-movies, starting with "The Blood of Fu Manchu" in 1968. 

The Plot: Fu Manchu has found a secret venom to kill all the men in the world somewhere in cheap South Amerca (tbh. there are actual venem-raiders walking in the jungles to find some unknown species to sell them to the pharma-industry to produce profitable vaccines - so this is not as far fetched as it sounds).

Women are immune but can pass the venom on by kissing men. Sure. Basically Towers had invented Aids. Where is the conspiracy theory for that? Now Jesse comes in and cries: "Mind control, put in mind control" and so the women are of course telepathically controlled to kiss men. What a plan. 

And so? Yes we are in Francoland. 10 films shot simultanously with actors being paid to appear in only one, but with their footage appearing in all the other ones to. Why not chop-it-up and stick-it-back together. BTW no-one cared (maybe the actors who did not get paid). Co-Production is handled by Bad-Movie-Bank-Tax-loophole Terra Films who always got what the rest did not want (here it was Constantin, handling only the distribution). Needless to say, Manfred Köhler (who gave us "Daughters of Darkness" and the EC-Dietrich epic "Coffin from Hongkong") messes up the screenplay as good as possible, but he gets "mind control" in there somehow (I am pretty sure it was Franco himself while shooting and giving sht about any scripts). 

With a certified 3% audience score in Rotten Tomatos you know you will be disappointed. Even to me, this is tame and uninspired. Yes, there are rows of scantily-clad women hanging in chains from the ceiling, but Franco had done better on previous occasions. Maybe it was the presence of Christopher Lee or some kind of hesitance towards the Fu Manchu character, but this is neither as sleazy as it should be, nor as enjoyable as it could be. BO-returns however were on-par with the predecessor "The Vengeance of Fu Manchu", so why not throw another one in there: 

Further Investigation: "The Castle of Fu Manchu"

Still in Barcelona, where he mostly shot the interieurs for his HAT-films, Franco came to an end with his spy-films with "The Castle of Fu Manchu" - and yes, it is still 1968. 

The castle in question was re-used for Franco's HAT-Dracula production "The Count Dracula" with Lee a few years later (when Lee, like Eddie Constantine before him had run out of lucrative roles).

"The Torture Chamber of Dr. Fu Man Chu"

The Plot: Ah. The Plot. Ah. Crystals, Carribean Ocean, Turkish Mafia. Kill 'em all, kll 'em all. This is so confused that I doubt that actually any script had existed. If so, it must have been found in the used-sheets bin of a toilet in a turkish opium den. This is much more liquid-plot Franco than "Blood" and hence we get a 300% higher Rotten Tomatoes score of 9%.  It is obvious that Franco was just given the rest of the sets, days and money to produce "any" Fu Manchu film. 

I  do agree with S. Thrower that this is the better movie, simply because it is technically the worst one of the two Franco Manchus. There is so much do be delighted by: shobby landscape, cheap sets, completely boneless plot. It is no wonder that after this farce, the only way to film another Fu Manchu was an obvious comedy with Peter Sellers  1980 which, however,  is far less entertaining than this one.

If there is a movie that cries out: I'm off. Let's finish this thing. Then it is that one. And yes, when the end credits roll, you just don't want to see another one. So did the audience - with around 370.000 tickets sold in germany, this is by far the worst of all the Fu Man Chu - BO returns (though better than Bava's Planet of Vampires with 310.000....) . 

Tower had obtained "lifelong" rights to the character of Fu Manchu (70years after the author's death), so obviously he was willing to produce another Fu Manchu movie. But I honestly believe that after "The Castle of Fu Manchu), there were no investors to find for such an enterprise.

Franco finished and buried this series for good.

Verdict: Guilty as charged.

Joint Plaintiff: Collateral Damage to the "Four Daughters of Fu Manchu" in "Slaves of Crime"

Right at the beginning I wrote about the Fu Manchu - spinoff "Daughter of the Dragon" (1931) in which Fu's daughter Ling Moy tries to take over the world herself. In the Boris Karloff vehicle "Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932), he has a daughter called "Fah Lo Suee" who was born to his russian lover and is into all kinds of kinky stuff (did I tell you to go and watch this miracle of a movie?).

In our HAT-series, the daughter is called Lin Tang and she was played by chinese-born actress Tsai Chin in all 5 movies, so in the two JF as well.

The 1986 Jess Franco production "Esclavas del Crimen" now introduces us to the fourth daughter of Fu Manchu called ..... Tsai Chin (yes, he uses the actresses name!!). Other than stated in some sources, this is not an audult movie but bascally an updated version of the first one, played for laughs and with some wicked humour.

Tsai Chin (in best Dr. Mabuse fashion) is able  to communicate with the spirit of her late father (as Franco wrote the script we got the prove that he in fact murdered Fu Manchu!!!!!). Knowing that world domination does not come cheap she raises money by abducting rock stars on tour in china. She lures them into her high-end brothel, just to press the money out of them and then discharges them into the asian sea. We get Lina playing the title-character and she is quite convincingly yellow-faced. 

What exactly drove Jess Franco to make this movie  between a few depressing pornos and before "Dark Mission" and "Faceless" is a bit beyond me. Maybe he had been approached by HAT for a suggested Sumuru-sequel (which HAT then actually pulled through in 2003). The title sequence even states "based on characters by S. Rohmer". Maybe Franco thought he could get away with that as the spanish copyright law differed from the international one until 1986.

 Dark Mission then even stars Christopher Lee, so maybe something had been cooking broodingly under the surface in these years. As it is, this movie has good ideas but basically lacks funding, so Franco has to conjure things up his way. Nevertheless this is a good JF movie. Until now, all that is out there is a spanish VHS-cassette, and no-one's sure whether or not this movie actually made it to the spanish cinemas....

Parole Violation: Dr. Wong (1983)

IMDB lists an obscure kung-fu movie called "La sombra del judoka contra el doctor Wong" which uses footage of the 1973 HK Kung Fu Film "Seven to One". Here, Jess Franco stars as evil "Dr. Wong" who orders his daughter, evil Lina Romay as "Maggie Smith" to kill a kung-fu fighter. 

Here Franco uses the "Wong"-spoof of "FuManchu" (from "The Mysterious Mr. Wong" 1934) but to make clear, who this is about, he calls him Dr. Wong

Dr. Wong's Virtual Hell (2001)

Dr. Wong, played by Jess Franco himself has not grown wiser, still he tries to lure wealthy people into shady etablissements to capture, torture and ransom them. This time, however he will use VR-glasses to capture them in a virtual reality where they encounter (bad) sex and can be manipulated. Lina plays his daughte under the name of Nelly Smith, who owns the nightclub. The VR-Glasses are normal glasses with cartoon eyes painted on them. The VR-Enviroment is achieved by gimmicky Home-PC effects wich actually makes everything unwatchable. Interestingly Franco uses here still frames as comic book panels to explain the story. This is (in my opinion) one of the better late Francos. His concepts of mind control through glasses dates back to "Cartes sur Table", so I was expecting the corpse of Eddie Constantine to pop up here and there. 

Taken seriously the concept of people being captured in VR and held ransom is a very clever and prophetical one. Given some more resources, this would have become a very interesting movie.

Sax Rohmer, who had written the pulp novels on Fu Manchu also had a female supervillain in store: Sumuru. Towers had obtained rights for both at the same time (2 for 1-deals are clever). Needles to say, Franco was given the task to handle this Manchu-Spinoff as well and so we get: 

Jess Franco vs Sumuru

The Complete Series is HERE

Sources: Lots of internet pages, the movies themselves and of course: 

Stephen Thrower. Murderous Passions - The delirious cinema of Jesus Franco

Peter Osteried: Fu Manchu (Der Klassische Kriminalfilm Band 4)