Fritz Kortner goes full mongol in CHU CHIN CHOW.
A lot of fascinating elements in this film, but not enough made of them, somehow. A musical Arabian Nights extravaganza, it gets by for a few minutes on sheer spectacle, and Walter Forde’s voluptuously gliding camera. But George Robey, music hall legend, seems at this historical distance like the least funny man who ever lived. I always associate him with an obscure line in the short film LE PETOMAINE, written by Galton & Simpson, where Queen Victoria is ruling that a Frenchman who farts on cue is an unsuitable entertainment to set before the Great British Public: “Mr. George Robey is bad enough.” She’s right.
Fritz Kortner makes a rousing bandit baddie, burying men alive and perpetrating other acts of cruelty unsuitable for a musical comedy, and Anna May Wong is a seductive slave girl, but neither of them gets either a song or enough of a real stand-out moment. How many more rogue talents would have to be shoehorned into a stodgy play like this before it showed signs of animation? I think you’d need four or five, and you’d have to digitally paint Robey out of the picture too.
shadowplay 