Chandu the Magician

Released in 1932, Chandu the Magician is an early example of  a special-effects-driven super-hero movie -- it is the precursor to films like The Avengers and other movies in the Marvel comics franchise.  Accordingly, Chandu is visually impressive, beautifully shot and edited, and afflicted with a script that might have been written in crayon.  Chandu is a stiff-upper-lip Ronald Colman-sort of conjurer, a well-spoken cosmopolitan Brit who has spent many years studying magic (actually hypnotism) in the Tibetan version of Hogwarts -- he is described as a Yogi and the graduate of a Yogi monastery.  In the opening shot, we see a diminutive but atmospheric model of a kind of Himalyan Angkor Wat; the camera slinks through fog and haze and as the tiny model dissolves, we find ourselves tracking toward a bonfire garishly lighting the façade of a sinister-looking Hindu temple.  Chandu is involved in his graduation exercises, a final exam that involves bilocating by projecting his astral body above his actual flesh, a version of the Indian rope trick, and, finally, ambling across a pit full of a fire.  Despite these exertions, Chandu is a regular guy, clubbable, who, now and then, enjoys a gin and tonic on the deck of his papyrus-raft floating down the Nile.  As it happens, in Cairo, a scientist played by the gaunt Henry Walthall (he was the "Little  Colonel" in Birth of a Nation) has invented a death ray.  The ray is an elaborate contrivance made from Tesla coils spurting stray voltage in all directions and it can be deployed to ravage cities on the other side of the globe.  Having invented this device, the scientist finds himself captured by a villain named Roxar (the name sounds like an energy drink:  Rockstar).  Roxar is played by Bela Lugosi who grins and squints at the camera and rolls his "r's" while haranguing the audience with mad rants about destroying the world and making all of its peoples submit to his will.  (There is much chatter in this film about the Will and the Triumph of the Will.)  Lugosi is not particularly frightening -- for some reason, Roxar is made to prance around in black tights and he looks like an escapee from an amateur production of As you Like it or Hamlet.   Roxar is working to reboot the Death Ray from his laboratory incongruously located in an ancient Egyptian tomb, a cavernous maze cut into a cliff high above the Nile.  Chandu is friends with the kidnapped scientist, and, with the man's family -- an annoyingly puerile Boy Scout with his shapely sister and their dignified upper-crust mother -- rushes to the "cliffs above the third cataract of the Nile" to rescue the Death Ray's inventor -- the poor mad scientist is being tortured by Roxar into revealing the secrets of the deadly device.  The narrative is propelled forward at breakneck pace with swarthy loin-cloth clad henchmen attacking the doughty family and their leader, Chandu, at every opportunity -- goblets of poison are switched around on silver trays, hypnotized bad guys find their guns turning into serpents, mummies become animate and march around the labyrinthine tomb where Lugosi is tinkering with the Death Ray and, ultimately, Chandu gets locked in an immense sealed sarcophagus and is hurled into the depths of the Nile.  (Of course, he escapes and the film's imagery is lyrical:  we see the Magician ascending through great undulating fronds of underwater vegetation to reach the surface.)  This is a pre-Code film and the scientist's daughter gets auctioned off as a sex-slave -- feminine underwear in 1932 is pretty revealing and we see her lissome figure very clearly as she struggles against the evil, turbaned Orientals on the auction block.  There is a cell that can be tilted to hurl its occupants into a oubliette that is about five-hundred feet deep and, as added value, we get a comically alchoholic man-servant hypnotized into always seeing a miniature, and disapproving, version of himself whenever he tries to take a drink.  Despite the dire subject matter, the film is full of low-brow jokes -- for instance, when the alcoholic valet sees a revivified mummy approaching him, he rolls his eyes, shrieks with terror and scoots through the tunnels just like Lou Costello in parody horror films he made with Bud Abbott in the forties and fifties.  The special effects and the elaborate sets are exceptionally impressive, the work of William Cameron Menzies, a great set designer and special effects innovator.  (He engineered films as disparate as Alice in Wonderland and the science fiction epic Things to Come, as well as various versions of The Thief of Baghdad.) Menzies' effects are often gratuitously beautiful if not really motivated by the narration -- for instance, we are treated to not one, but three apocalyptic scenes of the Death Ray being deployed, in Lugosi's fantasy as it happens since, of course, the deadly ray gun has to be destroyed before it can really be used:  London and Paris both get destroyed and, then, Menzies' throws in a brilliantly lit and shot image of a huge dam bursting for a good measure as well.  One repeated shot of the hero's  papyrus Nile barge anchored under palm trees in a moonlit Nile lagoon is rapturously beautiful and many of the action sequences are both engaging and dynamically edited -- and since the film is almost all action, most of the picture must be acknowledged as technically effective.  (The acting is comically abysmal.)  A pretty effect concludes the movie:  Chandu is about to kiss a winsome desert Princess (who looks about as Arabian as Zelda Fitzgerald) -- the moon shines brightly over the desert, but, then, Chandu raises his hand, gestures as the lunar orb, and an armada of lacy clouds covers the moon.  As the hero kisses the heroine, the screen darkens chastely but we still see Menzie's glamorous high-gloss rim-lighting making a halo of the heroine's lustrous hair.