Roar of the Dragon (1932) watch online HD

A collection of natives and Westerners barricade themselves in an old Chinese inn against the onslaught of fierce Tartar bandits.

ROAR OF THE DRAGON is a very fine adventure film, with suspense & humor, plenty of excitement, first rate production values and good acting. It is indeed difficult to find anything to dislike about the movie and it stands up nicely to comparison with other similarly themed pictures of the period - SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) & THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933).

Richard Dix creates another sturdy performance as the alcoholic riverboat captain who takes charge in defending the folks sheltering in the inn. Dix gives us a character who's sensible, brave and absolutely no nonsense in dealing with deadly danger. But the film has another champion as well, and this one refreshingly unlikely. Wonderful character actor Edward Everett Horton eschews his normal Nervous Nellie nuances and rewards us with a civil servant who vigorously fights back against the terrorists, heroically aiding Dix despite terrible odds. He even gets to enjoy some tender romance before the film ends, leaving us with a most memorable characterization.

Two lovely ladies grace the film - Gwili Andre as the mysterious gun-toting doll sought by the bandit chief and Arline Judge as the girl from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who finds love in the most unexpected place. Comedienne ZaSu Pitts plays the timid Lady from Omaha, thoroughly regretting her decision to travel around the world. Dudley Digges is the cowardly owner of the stranded riverboat, degraded enough to steal goat's milk from orphans. C. Henry Gordon is delightfully repulsive as the Russian leader of the bandits, whom we first encounter cauterizing the remains of his left ear, bitten off by Dix in a previous encounter.

Movie mavens will spot an uncredited Willie Fung at the end of the picture playing a Chinese sailor.

Travelers in China are trapped in a Manchurian riverside village by marauding bandits. Richard Dix is the hard-drinking riverboat captain who takes charge of the situation, and he has a STAGECOACH-like assortment of tourists under his wing who must unite in the face of danger. This is an ARGOSY magazine pulp novelette version of China, admittedly, a la the work of Loring Brent, but it is quite nicely done with some good atmosphere and plenty of action. And this may be the only movie in which you see Edward Everett Horton blasting away with a machine gun. Solid 7 on the IMDB scale.

Richard Dix was excellent in this movie. I don't know if it was the direction or the fact that his character was drunk most of the time, but the improvement over the Secret Service a yr. earlier was very pronounced. He had subtlety, complexity and nuance here. In the earlier, he was very stagy. Never heard of Gwili Andre before (or since) but she was extraordinarily beautiful and she could act. She must have been a model. The whole cast was very good.

This brisk action movie, set in deepest Manchuria, stars Richard Dix as a dipsomaniac riverboat captain thrust into a precarious situation: rescuing a mixed bag of travelers, children, and ne'e'r-do-wells from a bandit, played with wicked intent by C. Henry Gordon. Amongst the motley crew are Zasu Pitts as a nervous society lady, Arline Judge as a flapper with a heart of gold, and Danish-born Gwili Andre as a Garbo-like woman of mystery. The film is brilliantly shot by Edward Cronjager, with some top-notch action sequences, but Howard Estabrook's screenplay doesn't do enough to establish its characters, perhaps not surprising considering the film's 68 minute running time. Nonetheless, this gets a strong recommendation, especially for fans of pre-code cinema, who will appreciate scenes such as Gordon having a hot iron applied to the hole in his head where an ear used to be.

Almost everything else I planned to say has been said by someone else here-- this is unusually zippy for a movie by the normally mediocre Wesley Ruggles, that big lummox Richard Dix is unusually animated and even amusing at times, the production design and cinematography are very handsome (and female leads Andre and Judge ain't bad to look at either), it's probably the only movie in which Edward Everett Horton handles a machine gun (although he does prove pretty handy with a pistol in 1938's Wild Money), and while the movie seems a bit underwritten (or more likely written in 3 days), it's pretty everything you could want from a 68-minute pre-Code B movie.

The other interesting thing I would note is that it could have inspired bits in two much more famous movies-- the whole opening, in which news of a bandit's rampage is conveyed by telegraph until the moment that the bandit's men chop down the telegraph pole, plays like a dry run for the much more famous and accomplished opening of Stagecoach-- and it's hard to think that's an accident when you know that co-writer, and RKO producer during this time, Merian C. Cooper (of King Kong fame) would soon work with John Ford on The Lost Patrol (as well as on most of his immediate postwar work). The connection with Howard Hawks is less obvious, but when you consider the situation (tough guy Dix surrounded in compound with a bunch of people whose ability to defend themselves is doubtful), and then hear him refer to Arline Judge by a nickname-- the town she was from ("Bridgeport")-- and hear her answer in a deep, insolent Betty Bacall-Angie Dickinson drawl, there's a definite whiff of the much later Rio Bravo, in which John Wayne is holed up with a bunch of questionable help and a girl called Feathers.

The characters are not only stereotypes, but familiar stereotypes at that. Despite its faults, however, this mini epic holds the attention throughout. The action, somewhat gruesome and blood- curdling, tells how a determined (if constantly inebriated) ship's captain saves the lives of some of his passengers when the Chinese town at which they are docked for repairs is besieged by hordes of stirred-up bandits. Richard Dix plays the hero with his usual flair, whilst the exotic Gwili Andre most successfully enacts the tantalizing "heroine". The passengers emerge as much the usual bunch of Jacks and Jills, though no doubt their characterizations seemed fresher back in 1932. Dudley Digges tends to over-state the blustering holder-of-the-purse-strings, while ZaSu Pitts rapidly becomes a real pain as the "complaining woman", but the other players, particularly Edward Everett Horton as the resourceful Busby and Arline Judge as the helpful Bridgeport, impress as real but interesting flesh-and-blood human beings. C. Henry Gordon skilfully paints a nightmarish figure as the ruthless chief of the insurgents.

At this stage of his career, director Wesley Ruggles was a master of his craft. Despite the efforts of Digges and Pitts to slow proceedings down, Ruggles never lets up the pressure and the pace. Not only does he keeps suspense at a high level from first to last, but creates just the right atmosphere, aided by Cronjager's picturesque photography, Clark's extensive but brooding sets and Steiner's cleverly contrasted music score. This movie is available on an excellent Warner Archive DVD coupled with "Men of America".

This film might remind you of "Shanghai Express" (1932) and "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" (1933), as all were set in China during their prolonged civil war--in which various warlords carved out their own private fiefdoms from the troubled early days of the Republic (about 1916-1928). Chaos typified this era and it made a decent backdrop for stories of adventure--though in Hollywood style MANY of the 'Chinese' extras looked about as Chinese as Mickey Mouse! And, like these other films, the story is about a group of westerners caught up in the middle of this fighting. In fact, all three films are virtually the same when it comes to major plot points.

Richard Dix plays the captain of a boat that is at port. When the group (including the likes of Dudley Digges, Edward Everett Horton, Zasu Pitts and Gwili Andre) is trapped in a small fortress, the hard-drinking Captain takes charge...but can he really do anything to stop the evil Russian bandit, Voronsky (C. Henry Gordon)? And will the westerners rise to the occasion or behave like a bunch of rats on a sinking ship?

So are there any surprises that set "Roar of the Dragon" apart from these other films? Well, Gwili Andre is certainly a unique figure. She was a pretty Danish lady who looked a lot like Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy put together. It's almost certain you have not heard of her but she was one of several attempts to find the new Garbo or Dietrich--a European beauty with a mysterious air about her. She never caught on with audiences and only made a few films. What's REALLY stood out for me was seeing the usually effeminate and effete Horton playing somewhat of an action hero in the film! REALLY! Watching him manning the machine gun and mowing down the rebels was quite a treat! My feeling about "Roar of the Dragon" is that it's an interesting curio but the other two films I already mentioned are just a bit better. So, unless you want to see all three, I recommend you try the others instead--the really aren't all that different from each other.

It seems that Hollywood's initial view of Asian culture was not a very pretty one, with Tong Wars, evil war lords, and such characters as Fu Manchu to express the dark side of humanity. Getting away from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu here, the writers turn a Russian bandit (C. Henry Gordon in one of his many villain roles) as the bad guy, a bandit so vile that he even has forced an exotic beauty (Gwili Andre) to become his unwilling mistress. As the film opens, Gordon is spouting venom towards Richard Dix, a drunken hero, who apparently in combat bit his ear off. Gordon is obviously a tough guy because he can have the ear literally soldered back on with a hot iron (ouch!) without so much as a drop of whiskey or a pencil to bite on. Andre, looking very much like a combination of Dietrich, Garbo and Tallulah, is an exotic beauty, a shady lady of ill repute, and her presence is immediately unforgettable. She makes a determination to end this vile captivity as Gordon and his gang of various Asian races descend on Manchuria and the inn where she is being held against her will, even to the point of planning her own suicide should he arrive before she can escape.

There's all sorts of other characters there, a sort of "Petrified Forest" gang awaiting their fate, and here, cowards become heroes, the greedy become noble, and some loose their lives as they become imprisoned in the inn where two of the bandit's men report every activity to Gordon and scheme to starve them out as rations and water literally evaporate. Edward Everett Horton is very good as the coward who ends up a hero, exploding in delight as he takes over a machine gun, while Zasu Pitts (the female version of Horton with her constant cry of "Oh, dear!") simply rings her hands and expresses her own fears. Stage veteran Dudley Digges (the villain of the original "Maltese Falcon") is notably self-serving as a pompous fool so convinced of his own importance that he doesn't mind seeing children thrown into the river if it means he'll be able to add more food to his already fat belly. But don't rule his character out from learning a lesson, and while it's never revealed as to why he changes, it's a nice surprise when he comes around to becoming a human being. The effeminate Horton even gets a slight romance with the sweet Arline Judge who becomes den mother to the many Chinese children trapped inside.

Filled with lots of action, slight touches of comedy and more than its share of pre-code innuendo, this fascinating drama may not be the most politically correct (oh, that phrase...) of early Hollywood movies, and like many Asian set movies of the 1930's and 40's, some of the stereotypes are eye-raising and head-shaking. But as entertainment, it never fails to keep audience interest, beautifully photographed and never lacking in action and movement. It's even better than some of the most remembered Asian set films ("Shanghai Express" and "The Bitter Tea of General Yen") simply because the pace never slows to allow the audience to be bored. It's a good old fashioned nail biter, popcorn chewer and arm grabber of a movie, wonderfully directed by Wesley Ruggles and filled with moments you won't soon forget.

Robert Dix plays a hard-drinking, paddle-wheel, riverboat skipper in "See Here, Private Hargrove" director Wesley Ruggles' atmospheric adventure yarn "Roar of the Dragon," co-starring Edward Everett Horton, Garbo lookalike Gwili Andre, Arline Judge, and C. Henry Gordon. For the record, "Cimarron" scenarist Howard Estabrook derived his screenplay from George Kibbe Turner's novella "Passage to Hong Kong." Apparently, "King Kong" producer Merian C. Cooper and Jane Bigelow penned the story; I couldn't find anything more in depth about the historical background about this David O. Selznick producer, and IMDb states that there is no copyright for Turner's material. Nevertheless, this exciting 1932 melodrama occurs in Manchuria with a murderous Russian renegade on the rampage, Voronsky (C. Henry Gordon of "Mata Hari"), with his army of Tartar bandits. The ruthless Voronsky aims to exact vengeance on Captain Chauncey Carson (Richard Dix of "Cimarron") because our hero shot off most of the villain's left ear. Apparently, before the film unfolds, Voronsky had had an encounter with our gallant hero and damaged the paddle-wheel on Carson's steamboat. The heroic Carson and his passengers are holed up for the time being in a small town, while labors repair the paddle-wheel. Naturally, the commercial riverboat owner Johnson (Dudley Digges of "Son of Fury") isn't pleased with the way that things are happening when he receives the news that Voronsky has sworn to kill Carson and take the passengers hostage. While Voronsky allows his injured ear to heal, he dispatches a platoon of riflemen to attack the hotel where everybody is holed up. "Roar of the Dragon" takes place principally in the hotel where our heroes and heroines have fortified themselves against Voronsky's depredations. As it turns out, Carson has a small arsenal of weapons at his disposal, and they repulse the initial wave of horsemen with a tripod-mounted machine gun. When Voronsky' second in command returns with news that they haven't killed Carson and taken hostages, he shoots the man on the spot. Edward Everett Horton, who made a name of himself as the narrator of "The Bullwinkle Show," shows a different side of himself. He takes over as the man behind the machine gun and mows down his share of Voronsky's minions. This was a surprise to me since he usually plays more reserved characters in civilized movies. Most everybody escapes from the besieged hotel, but there are a few casualties. "Roar of the Dragon" unspools at a snappy pace and nobody gives a bad performance. Truly, it is tragic that Dix's leading lady, Gwili Andre, had such a brief career as an actress. She had been compared with Greta Garbo in appearance. Ruggles doesn't let the action slow down too often in this 67-minute actioneer.

"Roar of the Dragon" (1932) and "Barricade" (1939) have essentially the same plots (as well as length). In China in the 1930s, Mongol raiders corner westerners in a building. It is in a hotel in the former; it is in the US embassy in the latter. They are refugees from a riverboat in the former; they are refugees from a train in the latter. The leading man in the former is an alcoholic riverboat captain; the leading man in the latter is an alcoholic reporter.

The IMDb rating for the former is 6.5; the rating for the latter is 5.7. Those ratings, in my opinion, should be reversed. The "Roar of the Dragon" lacks memorable scenes, while, despite its many production problems, "Barricade" has several (such as Baxter and Faye fleeing across a wheat field while the raiders try to burn them out).

Additionally, the "Roar of the Dragon" suffers from numerous problems. And it is hard not to have them detract from one's enjoyment. There are plot problems. No one suggests boarding-up the hotel's windows and doors, and, as a result, one person is killed and another kidnapped. The raiders make no attempt to destroy the refugee's only means of escape, the riverboat, even though it is docked nearby and virtually undefended. There are stupidity problems. The hero makes no attempt to ferret out the spies he has been informed lurk within the hotel, or even to exercise caution by having guards protect his limited water supplies. There are coincidence problems. A main character is killed when the hero's machine gun jams just as the other is being attacked. On the other hand, other than the question of "who put the rug over the trap door?" when the embassy refugees retreat into the cellar, the actions in "Barricade" proceed quite logically, given the situation cast members are said to be in.

So my advice, therefore, is to skip "Roar of the Dragon" and watch "Barricade" instead

The most interesting thing about this movie is the collection of could have, should have moments that under the right direction and with the right script would have resulted in a much better adventure. A bit reminiscent of "The Sand Pebbles", the story has much potential which the dialog fails to deliver. Character development is all but nonexistent for a group of interesting individuals. And don't get me started on the pitiful editing. But what makes it worth a look is the collection of actors chosen for this turkey. Gwili Andre, the tragic Dane who chose fame by immolation, Arlene Judge, famous for her eight marriages, Edward Everett Horton in his most woefully miscast role. His wild-eyed intensity just doesn't translate well into heroic action. He just looks ridiculous. As for Andre, she had the looks but not the talent. The veterans, Richard Dix, Zazu Pitts, and C. Henry Gordon acquit themselves well as the true professionals they were despite the poor material they were given to work with. So there you have it. A pretty bad movie that's nonetheless worth a look.