Chandu the Magician

Chandu the Magician may easily be the best film of 1932. Since this is 2025, that may not mean a whole hell of a lot, but it’s still a thrilling ride. It stars Bela Lugosi, Edmund Lowe, and Irene Ware, and is based on the popular 1931-32 radio drama, which was a strong contender against such hits as The Shadow and The Witch's Tale.

The film features thrills, chills, and spills worthy of the era's deadliest and most hang-on-the-edge-of-your-seat cliffhangers, but it outpaces the clunky, primitive effects of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, utilizing the cinematic mastery exhibited by famed director William Cameron Menzies. Here we have illusion after illusion: snakes that turn into guns, Egyptian statuary coming to life, and actors hanging perilously over death-defying drops from huge stone doorways concealed in the side of forbidden tombs that were old when the Pharaohs were born (as old H.P. Lovecraft might have said in one of his contemporaneous tales of ancient, cosmic fear).

With Chandu (Edmund Lowe) casting illusions, astral projecting, whipping up doubles of his drunken English underling Miggles (Herbert Mundin), who provides comic relief, and just generally mesmerizing and mystifying, the film must have seemed astounding to those fighting their way through the Depression era, choking up a dustbowl and selling apples on the street corner, singing "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" It was sixty-nine minutes of pure fantasy escape, preceded by a cartoon and a newsreel. Ah! The "Good Ol' Days!"

Chandu has been away in the East, India, becoming a Yogi, and returns to his family blessed with all the Yogic powers. He's a sort of smug, unappealing Englishman, but I guess they couldn't get Buster Crabbe, so we got Edmund Lowe.

Now that the White Man has mastered the "Ancient Mysteries of the East," he's ready to throw down with King Bela, just one year past his iconic role in Dracula, which had cemented his place in the collective unconscious of the human cultural animal. (At least in people over forty, maybe. Those damn kids I played Vampire the Masquerade with twenty-five years ago, who were all in their teens, had no f-ing clue who Bela Lugosi was. I had to school them, dawg. That was at the Wizard's Keep on the Ball State Campus, and the place is long gone now.)

Getting back to it, Chandu's brother-in-law, Professor Regent (Henry B. Walthall), is inventing an impressive Death Ray device made out of recycled Tesla Coils and electrical gear used the year before in Frankenstein. Roxor (Lugosi, naturally) decides he wants it. He has this thing with world domination, or destroying the world, and yells things like, "I shall be greater than any Pharaoh! With my death ray, I can destroy Paris, London, Tokyo!" (Actually, none of that is a direct or exact quote, but it’s close enough. What? Do you think I'm some sort of mentalist that I can remember movie dialogue exactly?)

So the evil Roxor kidnaps the Regent family, and Chandu goes to Egypt to rescue Regent, his family, and Princess Nadji, who is his Egyptian sweetheart that is not Egyptian (it was a whole different era, dawg).

Along the way, the film moves with the quick and frenetic pace of any really short flick that has to cram a lot of action into such a short space of time. I'm not sure if you need a play-by-play synopsis, but if you do, go ask the AI, because I'm just not wired that way. I just sit back and let the experience wash over me, feeling right at home in this old-fashioned pulp fiction fantasy of death rays, magic, mystery, danger, and derring-do.

Bela is, of course, the real star here, in all his spooky, menacing, megalomaniacal glory. (At one point, he proclaims, "This lever is my scepter!" referring to the Death Ray.) Still decades away from his descent into drug addiction and the sordid cinematic sleaze of shit autere Ed Wood's films, he's tall, handsome, and an obvious contender for leading man. But he's also on the long, hard road of being typecast in third-rung Poverty Row pictures as a perennial horror heavy. So sad.

I don’t have to tell you this would make an awesome tabletop RPG, and to that end, I'm going to whip one up proper here soon enough. Until then, sit back and take a gander at what films could be long before computer graphics, graphic violence, violent sex, and sexy costumes. All the women here have conservative, short, blonde, Helen Chandler 1932 haircuts. (They all speak in hoity-toity 1932 movie actress accents, dahling!)

You could scarcely do anything to make this picture better than it already is. It's perfect for what it is. And I can’t improve on perfect, my man. I mean, what am I? A magician?

Chandu the Magician (1932): Classic Adventure of Magic and Mystery l Bela Lugosi Classic!

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