Review: Five Golden Dragons

Ugh…I’ll try to set this one up. A dopey international spy spoof in which Robert Cummings plays a photographer and wannabe ladies man who gets entangled in all kinds of spy plot confusion. The plot is concerned with a ring of international gold smugglers who, as the title suggests, don elaborate disguises to their secret meetings so as to remain a mystery from even one another. Margaret Lee plays a lounge singer, whilst the title characters are played by ‘guest stars’ Christopher Lee, Dan Duryea, George Raft, and Brian Donlevy. The fifth golden dragon is absent for much of the film and not difficult to figure out the identity of (despite it not making a lick of plot sense at the same time). Rupert Davies and Roy Chiao play a Scottish police inspector and his Chinese colleague, whilst Klaus Kinski plays a creepy goon. Maria Rohm and Maria Perschy play a couple of hot sisters whom Cummings tries to ingratiate himself with.

 

Cheap crime-comedy nonsense from 1967 flatly directed by Jeremy Summers (“The Vengeance of Fu Manchu” with Christopher Lee, and a bunch of British TV work) and wasting a pretty good cast in mostly throwaway cameos. The print I viewed was especially shoddy in both sound and visuals, and the golden dragon masks are too silly and cheap-looking for words. Robert Rietty apparently dubs Klaus Kinski, but in my view there’s several others who seem very much dubbed including Rupert Davies and Roy Chiao (who often did English dubbing of HK actors himself, and I’m pretty sure spoke English in his own voice in 1987’s “Bloodsport”). I’ve heard Davies’ speaking voice many times over the years and it sounds nothing like he does here. It’s really distracting, and just plain odd. Perhaps both Davies and Chiao did do their own looping and it’s just shitty sound quality confusing me, but I don’t think so.

 

Written and produced by Harry Alan Towers (the man behind way too many adaptations of Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” as well as the “Fu Manchu” series), it’s one of his typically cheapo foreign-lensed stinkers, with Hong Kong looking rather crummy here I must say. Slackly directed, it takes forever to get off and running, and feels like three (very bad) films poorly cobbled together. It barely even makes any damn sense, I’m still not sure what the point of it all was.

 

The film’s lead actor Robert Cummings is fatuous, fey, and irritating in apparently his last film role. Constantly chewing gum like a tool, he’s completely obnoxious, the wrong note to be playing when you’re the chief protagonist. Imagine a horrible mixture of Jack Lemmon, Eddie Haskell from “Leave it to Beaver”, smarmy Roger Moore, and Liberace. That’s Cummings here, and if he’s meant to be comic relief he’s not funny nor relieving. As for the cameo players, Dan Duryea looks old and extremely weathered, and there’s nothing he, Towers regular Christopher Lee, or old gangster pic favourite George Raft can do in roles that frankly only require that they show up seated at a table and look around suspiciously at each other. Hell, they have their masks on at times so who even knows if they were on set for all of their scenes. Mr. Lee might’ve managed to get a golf game or two in while a stand-in was used, who knows. Despite being dubbed, veteran Euro creep Kinski isn’t bad, but he’s not around much for it to matter a damn. Although she unconvincingly lip-synchs in a club act, Margaret Lee probably gives the best performance here and looks lovely. The weird thing about the dubbing is whoever is doing the singing for her can barely even sing. How bad was Margaret Lee’s own voice then? Speaking of singing there’s a third song from some random Japanese singer named Yukari Ito, and it’s not welcome. This film didn’t even need one song sequence let alone three, it’s dreadful and shameful padding from the utterly shameless Mr. Towers.

 

The kind of film where (to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert paraphrasing someone else) you’d imagine that a film of these same actors having lunch would be more interesting to watch. Cheaply made nonsense, a waste of time and acting talent, with Robert Cummings hitting all the wrong notes in the lead. The women are hot, Klaus Kinski is creepy, but this adaptation of an Edgar Wallace story makes barely a lick of sense.

 

Rating: C-