User Reviews

A creepy-looking Harding Steerman shows up at the Australian home of Richard Norton and asks to look at an ornately carved Chinese stick he owns. On seeing it, he offers its owner two hundred pounds. The counter-offer is six thousand, whereupon Steerman hypnotizes Norton. Fortunately, neither daughter Violet Graham nor the butler are subject to such malarkey, and they throw the blighter out. Neither are they bothered by the sinister Chinese coolies who try to murder them in their beds. Meanwhile Sidney Vautier gets a letter saying he has inherited some property in England, so come right away. So the three good guys wind up on the same ship, where the youngsters fall in love, much to the displeasure of the old man, while Steerman works his sinister, world-ranging plans to make everyone so miserable he gets his Maguffin by spending several times six thousand pounds instead of, say, haggling.

This movie, with a writing credit for Guy Boothby, strikes me as a very short serial, and not a serial of the era, when the form was still a vibrant competitor to the feature film. No, it seems to me of the sort one got in the 1930s and 1940s, when it was intended for the kiddie matinees, when no one could clearly remember what had happened in the previous installment. Plot points are raised and when they no longer support the main narrative, are dropped. Production values are excellent -- there are crowds of extras and the sets are well dressed, but the script starts and stops, and the villain behaves like a frustrated four-year-old with mystic powers.

Perhaps this was deliberate. Mr. Boothby was an enormously popular writer whom no one ever accused of writing well. Perhaps this was intended for the audience who enjoyed his melodramatic tripe. If so, I am not the intended audience.

This serial is a lot of fun to begin with and even promises at moments to come close in quality to the great Feuillade serials. The ingredients are much as usual - a suitable 'mcguffin" to keep the plot turning ("the Tibetan rod of knowledge" sounds a bit like a sexual innuendo one might use in the course of a seduction), a devious master criminal, lashings of fashionable orientalism, a modicum of horror, disguise, drugs, hallucination, magic, hypnosis, a kidnapping...but all rather neatly spun out with none of the constant violence and repetitious patterns of kidnap and escape that mar the US serials.

Valerie Graham as Phyllis Wetherell (who gets a special little vignette on the titlecard every time she intervenes) is a formidable heroine or a very English matter-of-fact kind (with a very English bosom and bum to go with it) who puts up with no nonsense from the villain or his cohorts of Chinese whom she disarms with a certain nonchalance.

It is quite a complex narrative which employs several devices - third-person narrative (to the extent this is possible in silents),flashback, a running clock on events ("at midnight precisely...."). There is an "imperial" scope, to-ing and fro-ing between Britain and Australia with a stop-off in Port Said (the principal route of the great liners) and somewhere that does not look as all like a South Sea island. Alas the Port Said scenes are also a fairly obvious fake-up....No Californian sunshine but some very attractive light fog in the British scenes.

Unfortunately the story becomes steadily more attenuated as it progresses. Our heroine hardly features, except passively after the early scenes and her boyfriend is no replacement. It all becomes just a little too polite and British and the deficiencies in the budget become a shade too apparent. Nonetheless well worth a watch.