The Adventures of Fu Manchu

"The Adventures of Fu Manchu" was a 1956 American television series.

From September 3, 1956 till November 26, 1956, Hollywood Television Service, a subsidiary of Republic Pictures produced a 13-episode syndicated programme, "The Adventures of Fu Manchu". [Hardy, Phil "The BFI Companion to Crime" University of California Press 1998] The show featured Glen Gordon (13 Mar 1914-16 September 1972) as Dr Fu Manchu, Lester Matthews as Sir Dennis Nayland Smith, Clark Howat as Dr John Petrie, Carla Balenda as Betty Leonard, Laurette Luez as Karamaneh and John George as Kolb (his dwarf flunkey).

Republic Pictures had paid US$4 Million to Sax Rohmer and announced they would film 78 episodes, but only 13 were made. [Mank, Gregory William "Hollywood Cauldron: Thirteen Horror Films From The Genre's Golden Age" McFarland & Co 2001 p. 84]

Each episode would start off with a chess game, with a narrator telling us that the white pieces were good/life and the black pieces bad/death; that the Devil was said to play chess for men's souls and so does Fu Manchu who is evil incarnate. At the end of each episode, after Nayland Smith and Petrie had foiled Fu Manchu's latest fiendish scheme, he would signify that it was over by breaking a black chess piece.

The series was directed by noted serial director Frank Andreon as well as William Witney. Unlike the Holmes/Watson type relationship of the films, the series featured Smith as a law enforcement officer and Petrie using his medical knowledge to complement each other.

The series was similar in some ways to a serial but each episode ended in a resolution rather than a cliffhanger. Republic sent out a film crew to Hong Kong to shoot background footage and supplied stock footage from its library of films.

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