Familiar with "Roar of the Dragon?"

[Phillyrich]

Is anyone familiar with, or a fan of "Roar of the Dragon" circa 1932 on RKO?

It's the film with the unlikely-- Edward Everett Horton, behind a machine gun.

I love to rediscover little, off-the-radar 1930's--40's films that have unusual locations
and stories. How about you?

[boblipton]

I’ve seen it, although my records don’t say where. I’ll guess at TCM.

Given my rating, I thought it very good.


Bob

[Rick Lanham]

Yes, it's been shown at least three times on TCM; 2003, 2011, and 2016.
I don't seem to have a recording, however.

"Roar Of The Dragon (1932)
 
Bandits menace Americans on a Chinese riverboat. Cast: Richard Dix, Gwili Andre, Edward Everett Horton. Dir: Wesley Ruggles. BW-69 mins, TV-PG"

Rick

[CoffeeDan]

It's available on a Warner Archive DVD as an RKO double feature with MEN OF AMERICA (starring William Boyd and Charles "Chic" Sale).

[Mike Gebert]

Here's what I wrote at the IMDB long ago:

...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.

Of course Rio Bravo owes it to To Have and Have Not and Only Angels Have Wings, but who knows... not the only time Hawks saw something and stole it to improve on it.