The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)

BEWARE! See this movie - An hour later you'll want to see it again!

Fu Manchu's 168th birthday celebration is dampened when a hapless flunky spills Fu's age-regressing elixir vitae. Fu sends his lackeys to round up ingredients for a new batch of elixir, starting with the Star of Leningrad diamond, nabbed from a Soviet exhibition in Washington. The FBI sends agents Capone and Williams to England to confer with Nayland Smith, an expert on Fu.

Date of release
1980-08-08
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (41)
Runtime
1h 48m
Genres
Comedy, Horror, Crime
Director
Piers Haggard

Casting

Interesting facts

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a 1980 comedy film, most notable as the final film of Peter Sellers. Based on characters created by Sax Rohmer, the movie stars Sellers in the dual role of Fu Manchu, a megalomaniacal Chinese evil genius, and his nemesis, English gentleman detective Nayland Smith.

Production

In 1976, Robert Kaufman was writing the script for Fu Manchu to star Peter Sellers and Michael Caine.

Troubles with the film began during pre-production, when two directors—Richard Quine and John Avildsen—were both fired before the script had been completed. Sellers also expressed dissatisfaction with his own portrayal of Manchu with his declining health often causing delays.

The making of the film was quite tense, with Sellers interfering in practically every aspect of the film's production, despite his worsening health problems. Haggard later recalled:

It was a very disagreeable experience on that film. I was brought in on an off-chance. He [Sellers]'d agreed to do a fairly stock Hollywood comedy thriller, similar to The Pink Panther really, playing a detective and a villain. And he'd fallen out of love with that project and didn’t want to do that script.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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