• Directed by Sam Neufeld
• Written by Orville Hampton
• Starring
  • Richard Travis
  • Sheila Ryan
  • Sid Melton
  • Michael Whalen
  • Lyle Talbot
• Produced by Sigmund Neufeld

This movie is the cinematic equivalent to the stuff that holds a Chicken McNugget together, the flavorless but inoffensive filler that tries to be invisible to your mouth. (Note to self: Gaah. Change that.) Its purpose is to bulk up the chicken content of the McNugget — yes, there is chicken in a McNugget — inexpensively, allowing the customer to get more “matter” for their money.

Typically, a 53-minute feature would have been the second half of a double feature, meant solely to extend the audience’s time in the theater and make them feel that they had gotten more for their money, even though a second feature like this is nothing that an audience member would deliberately spend money on; it’s meant to be innocuous, inoffensive, and forgettable. So it’s a little unfair to wrench Mask of the Dragon out of the intended context in which it is the invisible filler and review it by itself, just like it’s unfair to review the filler ingredients of a McNugget without the chicken that it’s meant to support.

But do you know what? I’m going to do it anyway.

I’m not saying this prop is the most convincing actor in the whole movie, but it’s in the top three.

There had been enough Oriental-flavored mystery movies in Hollywood through the ’30s and ’40s, ranging from the more racist “Yellow Peril” diatribes to simple Asiansploitation¹ flicks (still insensitive, but mostly harmless) like The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1943), that the props, plots, sets and tropes could be put together by shaking the elements together in a jar and dumping out the churned result on a reel of film. By 1951, the focus of America’s gaze to the Far East had shifted from China or Japan to Korea, but what the heck — an Oriental is an Oriental, right?

Serviceman Daniel Oliver (Richard Emory) drops by a curio store in Korea, where the proprietor makes him an offer: transport a certain artifact back to L.A, a jade dragon, and be well-rewarded with several hundred dollars. Not that there’s anything illegal about the dragon, certainly not; the storekeeper simply doesn’t want to wait for the months-long lagtime that clearing customs would take. Oliver takes the job.

When the boat gets him back home to California, we find out that he’s not just a military man; he’s also half of the Oakleaf Detective Agency, and the office is the first place he goes. It’s after hours and his partner, Phil Ramsey (Richard Travis), isn’t there; he’s over at the apartment of his girlfriend, Ginny (Sheila Ryan), who’s also a police lab technician. Daniel calls over there, has a “Hi, I’m back, did Ginny get the package I sent her?” conversation, and then dies in mid-call as two professional shady types creep into the office and knife him. While still on the phone. Because that’s just how professional shady types do it.

“Yeah, that trans-Pacific jetlag just lays you out, doesn’t it?”

Since we’re going to spend a lot of time around these two thugs: Kingpin (ex-wrestler Karl “Killer” Davis) is the larger one, a beefy older guy with a flat pug’s nose. Murphy (Sid Melton, later of Green Acres) is the smaller one, an energetic underworld up-and-comer with a Brooklyn accent. They search his bags for, y’know, something, then leave emptyhanded.

Pretty soon it all ends up in the hands of the friendly homicide detective, “Mack” McLaughlin (Lyle Talbot!). And let’s throw in a couple of people who exist entirely because they’ve got hidden roles in the story: Major Clinton (Michael Whalen), who’s interested because Daniel was still technically actively enrolled at the time, and Terry Newell (Dee Tatum), a singer floozy who says she had gotten very cozy with Daniel while she was entertaining the troops over sea (I bet she was, I bet she was). What could Daniel’s assailants have possibly been after, and did they get it? While the audience is screaming, “He mentioned a package to be delivered, you idiots!”, Phil decides to follow his one lead: a flier in Daniel’s luggage for a curio shop in Chinatown called “The Jade Lotus,” which we the audience know was where Daniel was supposed to deliver the jade dragon. (Heh. We never see inside the flier, but from the outside it looks like a Chinese restaurant menu that was swiped as a prop.)

This is where the old complaints about Caucasian actors in “yellow-face” get more of a workout than they bargained for. Not only is Prof. Kim Ho, the proprietor, played by a Euro-American (Jack Reitzen), but his assistant is Murphy, the shorter thug, disguised as a Chinaman. I think we’re all used to actors playing roles in genotypes to which they bear no resemblance — Caucasians for Chinese, Italians for Indians, Japanese-Americans for Kryptonians, what have you — and we willingly suspend disbelief to a functional level, hooting derisively all the while. But in this instance, Melton is supposed to be a Caucasian (a Jewish-American counts, right?) who can cunningly and undetectably disguise himself as Chinese with some eyeliner, a droopy moustache, and a skull cap. Are we to understand that in the center of Chinatown, the criminal overlords couldn’t find another mysterious and inscrutable Oriental to man the store, and had to settle for an ersatz Chinaman?

Most honorable sir, you gotta be kidding me.

Ah, well. If it weren’t for this boneheaded plot point, we would not have the opportunity to notice that Reitzen’s fake Chinese accent (more Japanese, really, but Oriental is Oriental, right?) clashes horribly with Melton’s Brooklyn-inflected approximation.

Anyway. I have no wish to rehearse the plot for you — and at 53 minutes, there’s terribly little of it to tell. Phil gets grabbed, then gets rescued, and basically stumbles into everything until the jade dragon is finally revealed — and even then, we don’t know until after the story is wrapped up why everyone was after it. (I didn’t know “McGuffin” was a Korean name!) What we do see convinces us that this was one of the most ill thought-out criminal ventures ever. To wit:

- The hire a serviceman to smuggle, then kill him when he gets home? Wouldn’t it be easier simply to let him deliver the goods as promised, and pay him off? Even if they stiff him for his promised fee, it’s not like he’s going to go to the authorities and confess to smuggling.

What makes matters worse is that this is NOT supposed to be a Caucasian in disguise.

- I don’t need to rehearse again the bit about killing Daniel while he’s on the phone; just include it in the list.

- When Kingpin and Murphy search Daniel’s luggage, the only thing in there that isn’t clothing is the huge brochure for the Jade Lotus. But instead of lifting it, they leave it behind as an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven clue to Daniel’s partner, a private detective.

- The Jade Lotus is obviously a front for distributing something illicit. It would behoove such an establishment to maintain a low profile. Instead, Murphy (in Manchu guise) stands outside the shop like a faux-Chinese busker, enticing gwailo tourists off the Chinatown tour bus.

It turns out that Terry is part of it, and wants to spill the beans to Phil. Obviously, Kingpin and Murphy need to dispose of her. And how do they do it? By knifing her — through a curtain while she’s on live TV, getting ready to sing.

“Sorry, guys — even blindfolded, I can tell you’re not really Chinese.”

There’s a lot of stupidity for such a short feature, and even then, it could stand to be shorter. The act before Terry’s on the variety program (Curt Barrett and the Trailsmen! feel the star power!) get to perform most of two songs before the camera. And Murphy gets two scenes which can only be described as “comic relief filler,” which is odd because he’s also supposed to be one of the cold-blooded killers. In one, he steps into the dialogue of an actress rehearsing for a dramatic role later that evening, and ends up getting a kiss out of it. In the second, he practices judo with Mr. Moto (Charles Iwamoto — hey, an actual credited Asian!), one of Kim Ho’s other thugs — if by “practice” we mean “complains loudly of being injured,” and if by “judo” we mean “putting someone in a headlock while flapping one’s elbows.”

Now, no one would mistake this production for a slick studio feature, but black-and-white film stock has a nifty leveling effect. What sets this project apart from cheap fare and identifies it as really cheap fare is the music (I hesitate to call it a “score”), performed entirely on an electric organ and sounding like the incidental music on radio soap operas that lives on in parody.

According to the IMDb, this flick was later edited down to under a half hour for inclusion on a TV series a couple of years later. I salute that unknown editor; were I given the task, I would start cutting away what I thought was unnecessary fluff and end up with the whole feature on the cutting room floor.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0

1. Don’t'cha just hate it when writers take any word and stick “sploitation” on the end of it? Yeah, well, tough.[back]