Shadow Of Chinatown is a 1936 serial from Victory Pictures (a Sam Katzman operation) and stars Bela Lugosi as an "Eurasion" villain named "Poten" bent first on destroying the commerce of Chinatown in San Francisco and later on apparently destroying any and all Chinese he comes across. Pitted against him are the usual plucky girl reporter and an author, an evident expert on Chinatown with the whitest name I've perhaps seen in a movie, "Martin Andrews". This virile and handsome hero is played by Herman Brix fresh off his turn as Edgar Rice Burroughs' hand-picked Tarzan in the serial The New Adventures of Tarzan.
So it's quite a thing to see Brix, a very capable action star pitted against Lugosi a classic villain in this very very long serial. Some sources say this is the longest serial ever made, and I'd have to say it's the longest one I've watched. The print I saw was pretty tough, especially the sound which had that can effect you get in older and cheaper productions. The action is pretty decent with such cliffhangers as the sliding walls, the explosion, and even a car tumbling off a cliff, though it's a relatively short cliff. The story does shift at one point to Los Angeles but that's a dodge as it only serves to get the actors aboard a ship for some whodunnit stuff there.
The story alas has many regrettable stereotypes, and gets particularly painful in that regard in the last chapter when Bela tries on a very cheesy disguise. There's a lot of racism in the script itself as Chinese are clearly presented as citizens with fewer rights and protections than the "white" citizens of San Francisco.
Brix is pretty dang good and I'll have to hand it to Lugosi who does the most with a very scattershot part. The villain's motives seem to be revenge but the impetus is unclear and his goal seems uncertain. He's a "madman" so I guess that's all we need to know.
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