Has anyone else noticed that from time to time during the film Karloff as Fu Manchu utters some mysterious phrases that seem to bear no earthly relationship whatsover to any Chinese dialect? One happens when he is handed the (ultimately false) mask of Genghis Khan by Terence Granville, but several others are scattered throughout the film.
I wonder if Karloff was just ad libbing there or if the screenwriter actually pencilled in anything at that point.
According to the commentary on the DVD, the script changed by the day - or even by the hour - as it was. That he'd get one set of lines in the morning that were a very long elegant speech and then later he'd get new pages all in "pigeon english".
Karloff probably had to come up with something that sounded credible because the writers had just put "speaks Chinese" or something....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last night, I was lying back looking at the stars and I thought...where the *beep* is my ceiling???