The Fatal Hour (Monogram, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9:40 last night I screened my husband Charles and I a YouTube post of The Fatal Hour, fourth and next-to-last of the five "Mr. Wong" films Boris Karloff made for Monogram from 1938 to 1940. James Lee Wong was a Chinese detective created by Hugh Wiley in a series of short stories that appeared in Collier’s magazine; he was obviously a knock-off of Charlie Chan but lacked either Chan’s aphoristic tendencies or his family. James Lee Wong was decidedly single, and so his films lacked ether the amusing byplay among all (or almost all) Chan’s children over dinner as featured in the Earl Derr Biggers novels and the 1931 film The Black Camel (the only one of the first five Chan movies with Warner Oland that survives) or the use of Chan’s Number One, Two or Three sons as comic-relief foils for him. The last time Charles and I watched The Fatal Hour together I was quite impressed by the sheer depth of raw emotion in the opening reel. I was especially surprised by the performance of Grant Withers (Loretta Young’s first husband until her hyper-Catholic family had it annulled) in his recurring series character.

For the most part he was just a boorish cop, the sort of foil for Wong the way Inspector Lestrade was for Sherlock Holmes, but in this one – aided by W. Scott Darling’s script, which begins with the murder of Street’s best friend on the police force – “The most convincing aspect of the early reels is — surprise! — Grant Withers’ genuine pathos in expressing his character’s grief for the man he started with in the police department. For once Withers actually expresses deep emotion instead of just playing the irascible screamer he was through most of the series — indeed, [writer Scott] Darling’s script and Withers’ performance puts the grief so much front and center that when Boris Karloff enters as Mr. Wong he seems like an extra in his own vehicle. Had the film focused on Bill Street and his determination to avenge the murder of his friend and fellow cop, The Fatal Hour could have been a fine movie and an important proto-noir; instead, after a quite impressive start the usual Monogram formulae take over and the film assumes the stately talkiness of the first two Wongs (relieved a bit in Mr. Wong in Chinatown simply because on that go-round Darling actually got some real action in his script).”

The Fatal Hour was made at a curious juncture in Karloff’s career in which the new management at Universal that had taken over when Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. were driven out of the company in 1936 had decided that audiences were no longer interested in horror films. They still owed Karloff one film under the contract the Laemmles had signed him to after the huge success of Frankenstein in 1931, and they used that commitment to make Night Key, in which Karloff played a dotty old inventor who got cheated of the royalties for a new burglar alarm by a crooked capitalist (Samuel S. Hinds) and gets his revenge by teaming up with a petty crook to hack his own system and leave notes behind saying, “What I can create, I can destroy.” When I showed Charles Night Key he called it the first hacker movie, and I noticed the similarities between it and the 2004 German film The Edukators, also about the inventors of a super-secure alarm system getting their revenge against corrupt capitalists.

But Night Key was a box-office flop and Karloff agreed to Monogram’s offer of a six-film contract to play James Lee Wong – though in a foredoomed attempt to make him look kinda-sorta Asian he got plastered in almost as much makeup as he wore to play the Frankenstein Monster or the Mummy. He also looks like he’s wearing black shoe polish in his hair (the real Karloff was nearing 50 and had already gone grey by then) and he moves stiffly through the part, turning in a solid, professional performance but not offering anything special. Then in 1938 a Los Angeles theatre owner decided to double-bill the original Frankenstein and Dracula together, they did more business than either had when they were first released, and Universal got the message big-time. Not only did they offer the Frankenstein/Dracula double bill to any theatre that wanted it, they decided to make another film in the Frankenstein series, Son of Frankenstein, and put Karloff back under contract.

In fact, at the height of the studio system, when it was customary for each actor to be tied to just one studio, Karloff had contracts with four: Universal for big-budget horror blockbusters like Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London, Columbia for a series of “B”-pictures in which he played kindly old scientists who test their inventions in socially irresponsible ways; Warner Bros., for thrillers and transplanted Westerns (like The Bad Man, which got reworked as West of Shanghai with Karlolff playing a Chinese warlord instead of a Western outlaw), and Monogram for the "Mr. Wong" series. In fact, the producers at Monogram decided to play the Wong films for Karloffps usual audience: while the first three films had featured Wong in their titles – Mr. Wong, Detective, The Mystery of Mr. Wong and Mr. Wong in Chinatown – the last two they made with Karloff got more “horrific” titles like The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die – though in Britain The Fatal Hour was called Mr. Wong at Headquarters and Doomed to Die was called The Mystery of the “Wentworth Castle,” the Wentworth Castle being a ship that’s sunk at the start of the film.

For the last film Karloff owed them, they decided to pull him out of the "Mr. Wong" series altogether and instead put him in The Ape, a 1940 movie based on an old play by Adam Hull Shirk about a kindly doctor who dons an ape suit and commits murder to obtain other people’s spinal fluid so he can cure his paralyzed daughter. (If this sounds a lot like the mad-scientist movies Karloff was making at Columbia, that’s no coincidence.) Meanwhile, since Monogram had promised their distributors a sixth and final "Mr. Wong" movie, they came up with a surprisingly good one called Phantom of Chinatown with Keye Luke as Wong, Lotus Long as his racially appropriate girlfriend and Grant Withers the only actor repeating his role from the earlier films. Karloff biographer Donald F. Glut explained that the script for Phantom of Chinatown explained the dramatic age difference between Karloff and Luke by saying he was the original James Lee Wong’s son – maybe that was a mistake because Luke had earlier played the Number One Son of Charlie Chan in the films with Warner Oland – but there’s no mention of that in the actual script by George Waggner (who would turn up at Universal a year later as director of The Wolf Man) and Ralph Gilbert Bettison, though the film was a good one overall and it was nice to have an Asian detective actually played by an Asian actor!