Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

This is another good Boris Karloff Mr. Wong film. I found the film average paced (not slow nor quick - about right for a film of this nature).This time Mr. Wong is trying to find out who is killing people at the chemical manufacturing plant - the bosses/partners are dying off one by one by a poisonous gas. It is an international spy ring that wants a particular formula and it's up to Mr. Wong & Captain Sam Street to find out who and why they are doing this.Worth watching if you like mysteries, Mr. Wong films and/or Boris Karloff - it's a really fun watch! 8/10

This is the first of the series of Mr. Wong films based upon the series of stories entitled 'James Lee Wong' written by Hugh Wiley (1884-1968), which appeared in Colliers Magazine. Colliers was a very prominent illustrated national magazine in America which paid good money for popular fiction. It did not pay as much as the Saturday Evening Post, which contained higher quality fiction and provided F. Scott Fitzgerald with most of his income, but it was lucrative. It was not uncommon for Colliers pulp fiction to be sold on to Hollywood to provide the stories for B films. Six of these Mr. Wong stories were filmed between 1938 and 1940. The first five of these starred Boris Karloff as the Chinese detective Mr. James Lee Wong, who lives in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the sixth and final one (PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN, 1940) starred the much younger Keye Luke as Mr. Wong. However, before this series began, Bela Lugosi had starred in a film entitled THE MYSTERIOUS MR. WONG (1934) which was directed by William Nigh, the same man who later directed the entire Karloff series. (He did not direct the final film in the series starring Keye Luke in 1940.) But the Lugosi film had no connection whatever with the Karloff series, since the Mr. Wong in that story is not a detective but an evil schemer who wishes to achieve world domination by collecting 'the twelve coins of Confucius'. (That was based on a short story by someone else about Confucius giving twelve coins to twelve disciples just before his death and predicting that when they all came back into one ownership again in the future, the possessor of all 12 coins would be a powerful ruler.) Earlier still, Edward G. Robinson had played another Mr. Wong in THE HONOURABLE MR. WONG (1932), based upon a play written by David Belasco and Achmed Abdullah, which was the pen name of Alexander Romanoff, son of the Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff of Russia. The Chinese surname Wong is spelled Wang in Mandarin but Wong in Cantonese. It means 'King'. It is one of the commonest surnames in China, hence it is not surprising that various Wongs have appeared in Hollywood films, as there are tens of millions of people called Mr. Wong or Mr. Wang in China itself. This first Karloff film has an ingenious plot. People are murdered by poison glass contained in thin glass spheres, but no one can figure out how the spheres are broken. The first murder takes place between the time of the arrival of the police outside a chemical factory and the entrance of the police into the murdered man's office, a very brief space of time. How did he die in that short period? Mr. Wong finally figures it out, but I shall not reveal the ingenious secret. Karloff plays Wong in a very genteel way as a kind of English gentleman who just happens to be Chinese. In fact, in the story it is mentioned that he has even studied at Oxford. Karloff utters assorted Confucian-style proverbs from time to time, such as: 'A request from a friend is virtually a command.' It is all very mannered and stylized. The film is ruined by the oafish performance of one of the worst actors in the history of the cinema, Grant Withers, as Sam the police detective. He is so ludicrous and offensive, and shouts so much and is so rude to everyone including his fiancée, that the film's impact is gutted by it and made to appear wholly ridiculous. That is a pity, because the film otherwise had an eerie B picture air of mystery about it which Karloff's quiet detective greatly enhanced. What the Chinese would think of these films today can easily be imagined, since Karloff, especially in profile, is very much what the Chinese call 'a big nose', and could only elicit a laugh (especially as there are no Confucian gentlemen left today anyway). Certainly there was a great improvement in Hollywood when the highly engaging young Keye Luke was allowed to play Chinese characters, as he was genuinely Chinese, however Americanized he may have been in his manners and speech. But Hollywood always fell back on Hollywood stars to play Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Turks, American Indians, Greek peasants (Anthony Quinn as Zorba), and all manner of Europeans, without even a blush. The tradition of Westerners pretending to be Orientals continued with a British actor portraying Mahatma Gandhi in GANDHI (1982). But one must presumably not look for authenticity in a world of mass illusion.

The first of crime author Hugh Wiley's James Lee Wong detective murder-mysteries that Collier's Magazine published in the 1930s starred horror sensation Boris Karloff as the famous Asian sleuth. "Mysterious Mr. Wong" director William Nigh and "Tiger Shark" author Houston Branch establish San Francisco as the setting immediately with a long shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. This tightly knitted thriller about a thinly disguised group of Hitler's Third Reich agents trying to sabotage the shipment of poison gas to Stalin's Soviet Union qualifies as crack jack entertainment with strong performances and a minimum of buffoonery as well as anti-Chinese ideology that Nigh employed in his earlier "Mr. Wong" epic. Indeed, many complain "Mr. Wong, Detective" (*** out of ****) dawdles, but at 69 minutes, this splendid little melodrama maintains a snappy pace, and the dialogue isn't half bad. Monogram Studios lavished better production values for this B-picture. Consider the detail that the studio went to dress Mr. Wong's residence. Of course, this studio bound yarn confines its action in rooms where either the police question the suspects or Mr. Wong meets with them a social basis. Occasionally, as in the beginning when a thug surveys a dockyard or when a character pulls up to Wong's house in a chauffeur driven car, "Mr. Wong, Detective" ventures outside, but not often.One of the few exteriors (more like a sound stage) occurs in the opening minutes as Lescardi, (Frank Bruno) Mohl's Henchman, hides and surveys the dock yard and spots a crate stamped with Dayton's Chemicals. Later, he warns Anton Mohl (Lucien Prival) at his apartment after climbing down from the higher apartment to avoid detection. "If those chemicals fall into the hands of our enemies, we're though," Mohl snaps. "That ship has got to be stopped." Meanwhile, a flustered Simon Dayton (John Hamilton) visits Mr. Wong at his residence late one foggy night. A friend recommended Wong to Dayton. Dayton explains his life is in danger. "I'm just convinced that somebody's out to get me. I tell you it's driving me crazy. I haven't any case," he tells Wong. Dayton, it seems, has arranged to ship a load of chemicals abroad, but he has experienced setbacks. Factory delivers have been held up; railroad shipments damaged, and ships withdrawn that he'd chartered. He explains his office has been entered, its contents rifled several times. "I can't give you a single clue," he says in frustration. "I must have help or I'll lose my mind," he pleads. Wong agrees to meet him the next morning. No sooner does Dayton leave than he is almost kidnapped when Lescardi pulls up, posing as his chauffeur driver, but Dayton refuses to get into the car. Wong and he find his chauffeur in the bushes nearby with blood on his head.The following day, Dayton summons San Francisco Police Captain Sam Street (Grant Withers) after the disgruntled chemical inventor, Carl Roemer (John St. Polis) storms into his company office and demands to be paid for his formula. Street and his men arrive at Dayton Chemicals and spot Dayton standing at the wind. After they question Roemer, they find Dayton's office door locked and discover Dayton dead on the floor. Roemer was carrying a gun, but it was empty. Moments later Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) shows up and finds glasses shards in Dayton's office. Wong visits a friend with a lab and they construct a replica of the glass globe that contained the poison gas that killed Dayton. Street's initial suspects are Roemer and Dayton's partners, Theodore Meisel, (William Gould) and Christian Wilk (Hooper Atchley), but they are all cleared.Not only is Anton Mohl, aka Baron Von Krantz desperate to stop the ship from leaving San Francisco with the chemical weapons, but he also wants to obtain the formula. Wong learns that only a high pitched noise can destroy the tiny glass globes that contain the poison. He tries a variety of musical instruments, but it is his parrot that cracks it with its sound. Not long afterward, Wilk dies under similar circumstances as Dayton. He was alone in his room, with the door locked, and a group of people were outside. Street is really frustrated and believes that the surviving partner Meisel is the guilty party. Just before Wilk is poisoned, Wong meets the undercover German agents (of course, the studio could not acknowledge their heritage because the Production Code Administration forbade Hollywood filmmakers from portraying foreign nationals in a derogatory light), and Wong spots Olga Petroff's special blend of cigarette that he found in Dayton's stolen car.Mohl plans to kill Wong, but not before Meisel appears to have committed suicide with a glass globe. The police release Roemer and his wife, but Wong wants Street to bring the chemist to his home. No sooner does Wong arrive at his own place than Lescardi, Anton, and Olga corner him and demand the formula. He produces one of the replicas and crushes it and fools the villains into believing that they are dying for poison gas. Street arrives with Roemer and arrests the German agents.Director Nigh and his writer Branch have constructed a clever scenario here and you will probably figure out how the victims die even when people are standing around outside their doors. Reportedly, the same device was used in "Charlie Chan in Egypt." The police are treated like incompetent buffoons, with Street constantly losing his temper at the twists and turns that the case takes, albeit he looks like a precursor to the 1980s TV police superior who constantly shouts at the hero. Red herrings fly like confetti. The last person you expect as the murder is actually the last man you'd expect. Naturally, Karloff is a British citizen miscast as an Asian and Asian are used for comic relief. All in all, "Mr. Wong, Detective," with its industrial espionage plot clearly involving Germans and Soviets, is a lot of fun for a low-budget B-movie.

The basic gimmick to this movie is clever. Mr Wong, on the other hand, either isn't clever or is a sort of passive-aggressive fiend, who delights in murder.Before the second murder has occurred, Wong has the gist of how the first murder was effected. And, as the second murder is about to be committed, Mr Wong is positioned to know what the triggering mechanism is. So I'm shouting "Kick the door! Kick the door! Kick the door!" But Wong is just standing there. Perhaps he's not figured it out.After the second murder, Wong is positioned to know exactly what the trigger is. But Wong allows a third murder to happen.Well, I submit that Mr Wong does know; that, as the third murder is committed, the buzzard is sitting next to Street, giggling inside, as Street unwittingly kills the third fellow.Wong doesn't bother to expose the murderer until the murderer has little cause to kill again. Unfortunately for the killer, Wong figures that he can get one more death out of the situation, by sending the killer to the gallows.Wait! Why was Street sending people to the gallows in 1938? California switched to gas for people convicted after 27 August 1937. (Lethal injection was introduced in the '90s.)