Black Dragons

Black Dragons is a 1942 American war thriller set on the eve of the Second World War. A secret Japanese society conspires with the Nazis to undermine the United States by abducting prominent Americans and replacing them with doubles. The surgeon Dr. Melcher is brought to Japan to perform the operations that make six conspirators look like the men they are meant to impersonate, and the real figures are then killed. What follows plays out as a mystery, with the FBI drawn into the case as the substituted men begin to act against their country's interests. Bela Lugosi appears as Dr. Melcher, the scientist at the centre of the scheme, alongside Clayton Moore as an FBI agent, Joan Barclay, George Pembroke, Robert Frazer and Robert Fiske.

The film was directed by William Nigh, working from a screenplay by Harvey Gates, and produced by Sam Katzman and Jack Dietz for Monogram Pictures and Banner Productions. Nigh had been directing features since the early 1920s; among the films credited to him before this one are Marriage Morals (1923) and Across to Singapore (1928), so Black Dragons belongs to a long-established career rather than an early stage of it. Running just over an hour, it reflects the modest scale of its production.

Audience response has been limited. On IMDb it holds a rating of 4.3/10 from around 1,400 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 4.6/10 from roughly 28 votes, a much smaller sample. Both point to a film that is watched mainly by admirers of Lugosi and of wartime thrillers of the period.