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| Sinister intrigues are lurking on this handsomely painted poster for William Nigh's Black Dragons |
Black Dragons was one of Hollywood's first responses on screen to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took place just a month before shooting began in January 1942. The film is a weird and fairly awful, exploitative, anti-Japanese and anti-German WWII spy thriller with the telling work title Yellow Menace. It runs only 62 minutes, a testament to its measly, rocking structure and meager substance.
Besides a then arthritic, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi (Die Todeskarawane (1920)) in the villainous lead, there really isn't much to come for in Black Dragons:
Evil Japanese plot to infiltrate powerful positions in the West by assassinating the leaders and switching them out with their own cosmetically altered doubles.
Lugosi does both the incredible operating, - as Doctor Melcher, - and the assassination of the American leaders, under the moniker Monsieur Colomb.
The man who would later become the Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore (The Far Frontier (1948)) plays a handsome detective in the poor Black Dragons, which is directed by William Nigh (Mr. Wong in Chinatown (1939)), a prolific b-movie director, who directed Mack Sennett comedy shorts earlier in his career. It is written by Harvey Gates (Navy Secrets (1939)), based on the story Black Dragon by Robert Kehoe.
Related posts:
William Nigh: The Ape (1940) or, The Costume-Crazed Doctor
Doomed to Die (1940) - Karloff's last Mr. Wong movie is a good one
The Fatal Hour (1940) - Nigh and Karloff return with a humdrum crime flick
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertain
[Black Dragons was released 6 March (USA) and runs 64 minutes. A virtual lightning-speed production, tapping into especially the anti-Japanese sentiment of the time, shooting started in late January 1942, taking place in California, and less than two months later the film was released! Details around its release are regrettably scarce to come by. The film was colorized in the 1990s. It is now available (in B/W) in public domain to watch and download free and legally right here. Nigh returned with The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942), (he directed 7 feature films in 1942 in total!) Lugosi returned in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). 1,2k+ IMDb users have given Black Dragons a 4.3/10 average rating.]
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