Michael_Elliott The Fatal Hour (1940) ** (out of 4)Captain Street (Grant Withers) gets word that his best friend's body has been pulled from a river. Soon Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) offers to help with the case and the two uncover a smuggling ring that the friend was trying to bust. The fourth film in Monogram's Mr. Wong series is a bit different than the previous three but it never rises above its "B" movie production. What makes this fourth film so different is the fact that it's Captain Street and his girlfriend/reporter who gets the spotlight while Wong is basically made to be a supporting character.I actually thought this aspect of the film made it worth a bit better than the previous film, MR. WONG IN CHINATOWN. I actually thought Withers was quite good in the lead and his character was written well enough to where you could be entertained by him and I also thought Marjorie Reynolds was good as the girlfriend. Some of their back-and-forth fighting got a bit old but I thought both actors were good. Karloff was also good in his role but once again he made no attempt to even appear Asian.The biggest problem with this film is that the story itself just isn't all that interesting. It's decent enough for a "B" movie but it's just not good enough to where you could build any real interest in it. There's certainly no tension and the mystery aspect just isn't as strong as it needed to be to make the film more successful.

kai ringler didn't know what to make of this one,, Boris Karloff seems way out of place in this one, one thing i didn't get at all was the name of the movie, why is it called the fatal hour,, there are no references in the movie to any particular hour, i found this movie to be rather boring, didn't really have any excitement at all, don't know why it's classified as a horror pic,, it should be under crime drama or something,, i think that Boris Karloff should stick to monster movies,, that's what's he is the best at,, other than that i'm running out of things to say about this movie, other than it was boring, had no action whatsoever.

blanche-2 And God forbid they hire an actual Chinese actor for this - or for any lead Chinese character.Boris Karloff starred in a few films as Mr. Wong, a Chinese detective who is brought in by Captain Street (Grant Withers) when an undercover police officer is murdered.There are a few more murders as Mr. Wong, having found a valuable piece of jade in the policeman's pocket, tries to crack a smuggling ring in San Francisco.The acting is good, even though the characters are stock: the irascible police captain and the ambitious, omnipresent reporter (Marjorie Reynolds). Boris Karloff does a very good job, but he does not come off as Chinese. In a documentary about Chinese actors, one actress said that Luise Rainer in the Good Earth was perfection playing a Chinese character. I doubt they'd say that about Boris Karloff. I'm sure he had no time to prepare.I found this film hard to get into for some reason. It just didn't hold my attention. The plot is actually quite good and there are plenty of suspects. It's worth a look.

MartinHafer Before Charlie Chan switched from Fox to low-budget Monogram Studios, Monogram created its own Chan knockoff in the form of the Mr. Wong movies. Like the Chan films, the lead character is some white guy in cheesy makeup--in this case, Boris Karloff. Unlike the Chan movies, Wong speaks without any particularly noticeable accent and he works without the assistance of his kids or Birmingham Brown. Instead, while not exactly his sidekick, the same nosy female reporter follows him and the police inspector during all the Wong films. Unfortunately, while the two series were awfully similar, the Chan series just seemed a lot more fun. A sense of whimsy was definitely missing from this film. Now as for the plot, it isn't bad at all but it also isn't enough to lift this from the category of a "time passer" and I can certainly see why Monogram soon dropped the Wong series in favor of their own line of Chan films. An interesting but ultimately ordinary film from start to finish. I wish I could say more about the film, but even after just watching it, nothing whatsoever stands out in my mind--and that says a lot about the film.