Peter Sellers, THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980)
Peter Sellers (arguably) got away with heavy lids and mangled diction in his portrayal of the Charlie Chan-esque detective Sidney Wang in Neil Simon’s 1976 murder mystery spoof Murder By Death partly because the performance matched the film’s smart, silly, good-natured tone: Wang was likeable and sophisticated rather than the butt of, y’know, a bunch of sophomoric “wang” jokes, and what racial humor there was tended to satirize Hollywood’s portrayal of Asians more than making fun of actual Asians (“Moose on wall talk!” Wang says at one point, prompting the exasperated response, “THE moose! THE moose! Say your goddamned articles!”). Unfortunately, Sellers’ portrayal of Sax Rohmer’s controversial master criminal Fu Manchu a few years later was nowhere near as smart or successful, featuring brain-dead groaners like the following lyrics to Manchu’s climactic glam rock number (don’t ask): “The cops they tell you I ain’t nice, the Fu knows how to fry the rice.” Making Sellers’ depressingly bad final performance even more ignominious, though, is the fact that, without Fu Manchu, the legendary comedian’s last film would have been the far more fitting career zenith, Being There. (Although, either way, the actor’s reputation still would have suffered the final ignominy of 2004’s bizarrely overpraised HBO hatchet job The Life and Death of Peter Sellers).
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