1930s detective B-movies are all about the formula. They don’t change one damn thing. They don’t experiment. They don’t get subversive. The directors, writers and producers who made them were too busy knocking out several films a year and didn’t have time for that. This is one of six movies that William Nigh directed in 1938, down from the seven that he put out in 1937. How fast-paced is the storytelling? How much do you like the lead actor? These films tend to stand or fall on how you feel about those questions rather than on memorable style or clever writing.
By those standards, this first film in the Mr. Wong series, based on the pulp stories by Hugh Wiley, is a cut above the usual junk. Its mystery about who’s killing off the executives of a chemical company moves at a steady clip with every twist neat and coherent, not too many plot holes and nothing over-explained. Also, who better to play a Chinese private detective in San Francisco than Boris Karloff?
Yes, in 1930s Hollywood, an actor just needed to be recognizably “foreign” to pass for Asian (see also Swedish actor Warner Oland as Charlie Chan and the Austro-Hungarian Peter Lorre as Japanese Interpol agent Mr. Moto). That hasn’t aged well, but Karloff is still reliably good. He’s one of those actors who, until very late in his career, never phoned in a performance, no matter how low-budget or minor the film. Karloff brings instant mystique and gravity here as a master sleuth whose methodical approach and tasteful reservation stand in sharp contrast to the hot-headed police. As usual in these movies, the cops don’t seem capable of cracking the case of who farted in an elevator.
This is the first of five times that Karloff would play Mr. Wong in movies over the next two years. It’s one of his very few roles in which he was solving murders rather than committing them. See it for him.