****SPOILERS**** Bela Lugosi takes center stage in this war propaganda movie about a Japanese attempt to sabotage the US war effort by having infiltrated, some years before their attack on Pearl Harbor, by the secret and powerful Japanese cult "The Order of the Black Dragons" a number of Japanese impostors posing as top US industrial leaders.
Having the Black Dragon members "Americanized" through plastic surgery by the eminent German surgeon Dr. Meicher, Bela Lugosi. This sinister plan was accomplished by having six US industrialists kidnapped and murdered and then having death masks made of their faces. Dr. Meicher used the death masks to make the six Black Dragons look exactly like the the six dead industrialists. After finishing the job for his Japanese "friends" Dr. Meicher was arrested and thrown into a Tokyo dungeon to keep the secret of their plan even from their German allies! Did they-the Black Dragons-also have something like that in store for the Germans? Or was this in some way a ploy by Hollywood back then, in 1942, to split up the Axis?
Sharing a cell with a prisoner who was soon to be released who also had a striking resemblance to himself Dr. Meicher takes out of his coat a surgical kit, that for some reason his Japanese captors forgot to confiscate from him, and then does a plastic surgery job on himself! Which was nothing more then shaving off his beard and mustache. Tricking the Japanese into thinking that he was the other prisoner Dr. Meicher makes good his escape or release from prison.
Now some ten years later in the US with a new face and identity Dr. Meicher, or as he now calls himself Monsieur Colomb, is out to get revenge against those Black Dragons members, masquerading as American industrialists, who tried to do him in. Far-fetched but interesting WWII era movie about betrayal and revenge with Monsieur Colomb, again Bela Lugosi, offing all six Black Dragons who had him jailed and tried to have him executed to keep him silent forever.
Colomb killed four of the impostors and dumped then on the stairs of the Japanese embassy in Washington DC with Japanese daggers planted in their hands which meaning was, this is only my opinion, that they were back-stabbers. Colomb had another of the Black Dragon impostors killed by luring him from his DC office to the home of Dr. William Saunders, George Pembroke. It was Dr. Saunders who was another one of the Black Dragons that betrayed him. Finally Dr.Saunders, who Colomb used to get the other Black Dragons into his trap, was infected with a serum by Colomb that drove him not only insane but made him look like "The Phantom of the Opera". Even though Dr. Meicher-Monsieur Colomb remained loyal to his fatherland throughout the entire movie he did the Allies a great service. By his killing of the Black Dragon members and thus keeping them from destroying America from within he unwittingly made it possible for the fall and defeat of his beloved Fatherland, Germany, in 1945 only proving that revenge, like love, is truly blind.
The future "Lone Ranger" Clayton Moore, as Dick Martin, is also in the movie without his famous mask on playing what seems to be a G-Man. The movie never quite makes clear to the audience just what part of law-enforcement special agent Dick Martin is in: Police, FBI, Secret Service, OSS The Boy Scouts? Moore always introduces himself by flipping open his wallet without saying just who or what he is?
The part of the Grand Dragon, Standford Jolly, was so unintentionally funny that it spoiled the seriousness, yeah sure, of what the film was trying to tell us. Jolly goes around looking and acting as he was either drunk or on drugs and not looking oriental at all looking instead like a 90 year-old, had he lived that long, Leon Trotsky.
