The Drums of Jeopardy is the best Fu Manchu movie Warner Oland never made. No sooner had Oland finished playing Dr. Fu Manchu in two pictures for Paramount than little Tiffany Pictures grabbed him along with Fu Manchu scenarist Florence Ryerson and set them about a new rendering of Harold MacGrath’s venerable melodrama The Drums of Jeopardy, previously filmed with Wallace Beery in 1923.
In the Paramount films Oland was a brilliant Chinese doctor who vows to destroy the entire Petrie family when his wife and child are killed in the Boxer Rebellion; here, as the brilliant Slavic chemist Dr. Boris Karlov, he vows to exterminate the Petroffs, a family of White Russians whose black sheep son is responsible for the compromise and death of his daughter. The formula is adhered to precisely, handsomely produced by Phil Goldstone and directed by George Seitz (an old hand at Pearl White serials and later factotum of the Andy Hardy features for MGM).
The Drums of Jeopardy is a final showcase for Oland’s ethnic diversity before Charlie Chan would claim him forever. Karlov’s rabid Bolshevik leanings are limned by a gleeful sadism (awaiting torture, a stoic Petroff assures Karlov that he will make no outburst while Karlov cheerfully admonishes him, “But I want you to cry out!”). Oland’s nemesis is Clara Blandick, the heroine’s bulldog spinster aunt, and seeing Auntie Em spar with and hold her own against Dr. Fu Manchu is worth the price of admission alone.
Tiffany productions are an especially endangered species. Reissued as The Mark of Terror then sold briefly to early television, The Drums of Jeopardy film elements eventually deteriorated to the brink of total extinction. The restoration has been serendipitously cobbled together from six different sources. —Scott MacQueen
Production: Tiffany Productions, Inc. Distribution: Tiffany Productions, Inc. Producer: Phil Goldstone. Director: George B. Seitz. Screenwriter: Florence Ryerson. Based on the novel The Drums of Jeopardy by Harold McGrath. Cinematographer: Arthur Reed. Art Direction: Fay Babcock. Editor: Otto Ludwig. Cast: Warner Oland, June Collyer, Lloyd Hughes, Clara Blandick, Mischa Auer. 35mm, b/w, 65 min.
Restored from two reels of the original nitrate picture and track negatives, two reels of 35mm nitrate composite print and three original 16mm reduction prints. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Simon Daniel Sound. Special thanks to: Greg Luce—Sinister Cinema; Karl Thiede; Rita Belda—Sony Pictures Corporation; the Library of Congress; The British Film Institute.
