El imperio maldito

I love serials. Republic had the best action scenes, too. Watching G-Men Vs. The Black Dragon I saw virtually every possible cliffhanger setting: buzz saws, bombs, falling building, plane crashes, cars going over cliffs... all the things that made serials fun. Taking the context of the time period seriously, Japan was a serious threat. Making use of the stereotypical mysterious Asian character and the dedicated American law enforcement agent was a good set up at the time. The plot itself was minor, but the action in G-Men Vs. The Black Dragon was there to compensate for it.

I try to watch movies thinking in the same way that people would have at the time the movies were made. One thing that irritated me was Nino Pipitone's portrayal of the villain, Haruchi. Pipitone sounded more like a European count than a Japanese saboteur. His European ancestry could not be hidden under the eye makeup that made him Haruchi. I never really accepted the character as being Japanese. Perhaps the fact that Haruchi was almost always well dressed in a suit lessened the effect. When I saw Henry Brandon in The Drums Of Fu Manchu I knew he was not Chinese, but his character was so great that I did not care. In G-Men Vs. The Black Dragon the character Haruchi is really just a middle-man working for the Japanese government. He is a representative of the threatening evil rather than being the evil party. Haruchi commands henchmen Ranga and Lugo, who do the majority of the dirty work.

I liked Rod Cameron as Rex Bennett. He could get in a fight, an explosion, or jump from a plane and still make a suit look good. Roland Got as Chang and Constance Worth as Vivian Marsh were also good as Bennett's fellow agents. Vivian Marsh was a woman ready to face the bad guys at any time. I've seen more heroic women in serials than in westerns, so this was a nice change.