Rainey Dawn 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

robert-temple-1 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.

MartinHafer Throughout the 1930s, Fox Studios made a ton of very successful Charlie Chan films. It isn't surprising that this led to knock-off characters like Mr. Moto (also from Fox) and Mr. Wong (from poverty row giant, Monogram Studios). Frankly, while the Moto and Wong films are pleasant enough B-movies, they are too similar to the Chan films but lack their charm and wit. In the case of Wong and Chan the similarity was even greater as both were of Chinese descent, traveled the world and were "do-gooders" who often helped the helpless when conventional police work failed.In the early 1940s after Monogram completed six not particularly distinguished films AND Fox decided to discontinue the Chan series, an opportunity arose for Monogram to bring Sidney Toler to the studio and make their own Chan films. As a result, Wong was expendable and since four years had passed since the last film in this series, the studio heads decided they wanted no more Wongs. Besides, if they had Chan AND Wong, the resulting films would be like having two Wongs--and that's just not right.MR. WONG, DETECTIVE is the first Wong film and there's nothing particularly wong, I mean WRONG about the film. It was entertaining and had a nice mystery. However, it's also an awful lot like several other Monogram films--and is most like their next Wong film, THE MYSTERY OF MR. WONG. It's also a lot like the Chan films, MURDER OVER NEW YORK, THE JADE MASK and DOCKS OF NEW ORLEANS. In other words, many plot elements were repeated and after a while the films started to be indistinguishable from each other--something that was NOT a problem with the Fox films.Overall, it's worth seeing and is possibly the best film of the series--though this isn't saying a lot.

JoeKarlosi This was the first of a modest series of Monogram films to star horror heavyweight Boris Karloff as an Asian sleuth, most likely to try and capitalize off the highly successful Charlie Chan saga from Fox. As a Karloff fan myself, he was my sole reason to take the plunge with this series and this film is pretty much an average affair. The British Boris doesn't seem authentic at playing a Chinese detective, and I had a difficult time buying into him as such with his blackened, slicked-back hair-comb. The plot itself is intriguing enough, with Mr. Wong trying to find out how a poison gas is killing people, and who's the mastermind behind it. I've read that MR. WONG, DETECTIVE is the "best" of this bunch, which leaves me concerned as to what may lie ahead. ** out of ****