sddavis63 I confess to not being familiar with the character of James Lee Wong, and since there had apparently been several Wong movies made prior to this one, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage. The character is what seems to have been a fairly standard cliché of the era - the brilliant Chinese (or at least Oriental, in the language of the day) detective. There's Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and apparently James Lee Wong, whom I had never heard of. He was played by Boris Karloff, who really didn't look Chinese, but there don't seem to have been a lot of high profile Asian actors available back in the 30's.Mr. Wong in this movie is hired to find out who killed shipping magnate Cyrus Wentworth (Melvin Lang.) There's an obvious suspect - the son of one of Wentworth's bitterest rivals who also wants to marry Wentworth's daughter, and who was alone with Wentworth just before the shot was fired, but we know that would have been too easy and that there must have been another killer. That's the mystery to be unravelled. There are a lot of possible killers, and it's a bit hard to keep track of at times. There's some humour rolled into this, portrayed in the relationship between police captain Street (Grant Withers) and intrepid reporter Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds.)There's nothing really wrong with this. It confronts the viewer with a pretty good guessing game, but as someone who has never before been exposed to the exploits of James Lee Wong, there was also nothing here that would make me desperate to see any of the other films in the series. (5/10)

secondtake Doomed to Die (1940)Oh boy, poor Boris Karloff. He's the star, and the one great presence, in this cobbled together movie, the last of Karloff's Mr. Wong movies. Someone edited the heck out of this one, and the complex plot gets hard to follow (and hard to believe!) in the hour it takes from start to finish. That's not to say it's a bad movie. It's kind of fun, actually, and because so much is going on, you really have to pay attention, as the scenes keep changing and changing, and more and more characters appear and reappear. The plot itself is forced on things, with red herrings that are absurd and a huge disaster in the opening scenes that ultimately means little to the rest of it, or so it seems to me. There is deliberate comedy which is sometimes funny, and gives the movie an airiness that works pretty well. Karloff, amazingly, plays a Chinese detective, and they do something to his eyes to make him more Asian, but otherwise he's very Karloff, which is good. There are some brief scenes in a so-called Chinatown, but nothing so colorful as, say, the end of "Lady from Shanghai." No, this is from a thoroughly B-movie series of six Mr. Wong films, all but one, with Karloff as Wong. There are at least two other series of films with Asian detectives, an interesting sub-genre, for sure. There are eight Mr. Moto films (with Peter Lorre) around the same time (late 1930s), and there are the almost countless Charlie Chan films (first in the earlier 30s with Warner Oland, and then the late 30s into the 40s starring Sidney Toler). All of these stars were not Asian, but that's the way Hollywood compromised its bigotry with its sense of what the mainstream American audiences wanted.The thing that makes these Karloff films still watchable is their gritty urban settings, and the whodunnit quality that can hold even a mediocre movie together on a Sunday afternoon. "Doomed to Die" has some very dark night scenes (a third of the movie) and if they did that to save money on set design, that's fine with me because it makes them moody and inky. Nice.Check out this rather nice Mr. Wong site:cheddarbay.com/0000celebrityfiles/films/wong/wong.htmlTake them for what they are and you might end up watching all of them!

wes-connors "When 'The Wentworth Castle' (a ship) catches ablaze, killing numerous people, shipping tycoon Cyrus Wentworth is distraught over the loss, and is found shot dead in his office. Dick Fleming is the prime suspect in the mind of the none-to-bright (sic) police captain Bill Street. Dick is a business rival, and happens to be in love with Wentworth's daughter Cynthia. When cub reporter Bobbie Logan puts Mr. Wong on the case, the result is a foregone conclusion," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.Boris Karloff politely bows out of the lackluster "Mr. Wong" series, after this entry.This time, as always, Wong uses his wiser "oriental mind" to unravel a mystery that nobody else can see (don't bother trying to solve it at home; there really isn't a solvable mystery to be found). Cute and bubbly Marjorie Reynolds (as Bobbie Logan) does appear. So does Grant Withers (as Bill Street), who, as Ms. Logan notes, "always arrests the wrong man." The film makes good use of stock footage. The uncredited cast is good; for example, catch Angelo Rossitto as a newsboy in the opening, and Gibson Gowland as the doctor who treats Karloff's "flesh wound".** Doomed to Die (1940) William Nigh ~ Boris Karloff, Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers

sol **SPOILERS** Last of Monograms James Lee Wong detective series with the great Boris Karloff playing the witty and preceptive Chinese sleuth. Wong gets involved in the mass murder of some 400 passengers of a cruise ship to cover up an illegal bond smuggling operation. Nowhere as good as the much better Charlie Chan detectives movies that James Lee Wong was an obvious spin off from but Karloff, as James Lee Wong, gives the series that class that it needs to make it at least watchable.As the president of the shipping company that owns the cruise ship Wentworth Castle Paul Wentworth realizes that he's been unknowingly involved in illegal bond smuggling and that his flagship, the Wentworth Castle, was sabotaged in order to cover that fact up, from the Maritime Commission and FBI. Wentworth is suddenly confronted by his rival in the shipping business Paul Fleming, who came over to Wentworth's office to offer his sympathies. This leads to a violent argument over Wenthworths son Dick's involvement with Fleming's daughter Cynthia.It turns out that Dick Fleming is in love with Wentworth's daughter Cynthia and wants her hand in marriage which the mad as hell Paul Wentworth, who feels that Fleming is trying to take over his shipping company, is totally against. In no time at all with young Dick showing, as his father left, up to talk some sense into the crazy old Wentworth's head there's a shot heard, off camera, and before you know it Wentworth is dead as a door nail! Dick is seen fleeing from his office and suspected by the police for Wentworth's murder.Seeing enough of these kind of films you just know that Dick is innocent but the cop on the scene, a captain no less, Bill Street in convinced that Dick is the killer For the rest of the movie Street makes a complete jerk of himself trying to prove it with all the evidence to Paul Wentworth's murder showing that it was someone else. Capt. Street is also hampered by this nosy and pesky reporter Bobbie Logan who, unlike him, feels that Dick didn't do it and in the end has the by them embarrassed cop, after being shown how completely wrong he was, forced to eat his hat with a little salt and pepper sprinkled on it to give it some taste.Wong who comes on the scene late in the film is convinced that, like everyone in the audience, Dick is innocent which leads the real killer to take aim on him wounding Wong when he's out on the street looking for evidence in the case. It turns out that a passenger on the cruise ship, Kia Ling who survived, which the unlucky 400 others didn't, was involved in this smuggling operating of illegal bonds. Kia after being discovered by Wong and Capt. Street in his dockside home murdered it's also discovered that he isn't Kia Ling who we and Det. Wong were lead to believe but Mr. Wentworth's Chinese houseboy and all around handyman Lem Hou!Hou had been working with someone very close to the late Mr. Wentworth in the smuggling operation and was himself knocked off when the real Mr. Big got a bit paranoid and wanted no one to be around to be able to finger him for one of the largest mass murder in US crime history. He didn't at all expect that Chinese/American super-sleuth James Lee Wong was to be put on the case by the Flemings. When Wong finally went to work to get Paul Fleming's son Dick off it was just a matter of time before the real killer of Paul Wentworth was apprehended. That is if the killer didn't get, or murder, James Lee Wong first.