Doomed to Die, a.k.a. The Mystery of the "Wentworth Castle" (Monogram, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In fact, the Mr. Wong series at Monogram is that rare example of a “B” series that actually got better over its duration. The fifth in the series (and the last starring Boris Karloff), Doomed to Die, is a much better movie in every way than The Mystery of Mr. Wong. For one thing, instead of being trapped in one house for most of its running time, Doomed to Die (called The Mystery of the Wentworth Castle in Britain) features not only multiple locations but two relatively exciting car chases at night that are well staged for as overhead newsreel shots of an ocean liner at sea burning – I presume this is stock footage from a real-life ocean disaster, but I have no idea which one it was – and the action cuts to the board room of the Wentworth Steamship Company. This enterprise owned the Wentworth Castle, the liner which burned at sea and took the lives of 400 people. Ever since then, Cyrus Wentworth (Melvn Lang), CEO of the Wentworth line, has been gripped by pathological fear and depression during which he claims he can hear in his mind the screams of all 400 victims. Cyrus Wentworth is bitterly opposed to the efforts of Paul Fleming (Guy Usher), owner of a rival steamship company, to take over Wentworth in a forced merger, and he’s equally against the efforts of Fleming’s son Dick (William Sterling) to marry Wentworth’s daughter Cynthia (Catherine Craig), threatening to blacklist Dick and ensure he can’t find any sort of job if he insists in marrying Cynthia despite his objections.

There’s also a sinister-looking chauffeur named Ludlow (Kenneth Martin) with a habit of spying on the other characters from fire escapes; Wentworth’s attorney, Matthews (Wilbur Mack), and Victor Martin (Henry Brandon), who once Cyrus Wentworth is killed in his office with both Paul and Dick Fleming present, blackmails Paul for money and a partnership in the combined steamship line (with her dad dead, Cynthia has accepted Paul’s merger offer) because he saw Paul dispose of the gun used to kill Cyrus Wentworth. As if that weren’t complicated enough, there’s also a subplot involving a tong with branches in both China and the U.S., and Mr. Wong contacts their leadership and learns that man from the tong was sailing on board the Wentworth Castle with $1.5 million in negotiable bonds (which I take to mean they were just like cash, easily redeemable with no questions asked) which the tong was using to move its treasury from China, which was in the middle of a four-way war between the ruling Kuomintang, the Communists, warlords and the Japanese, to the more stable U.S. It turns out that this man didn’t die aboard the Wentworth Castle but survived and, under a different name, took a job as Cyrus Wentworth’s manservant.

It helios that instead of W. Scott Darling, this movie had a different pair of writers – Ralph Gilbert Bettinson,original story; and William Jacoby, script – and thought hey weren’t much better at tying up loose ends than Darling was (we never find out for sure just what happened to the $1.5 million in bonds), they were much more creative and generally better at building exciting situations and keeping this film from being dull. One other change that helped make the Mr. Wong series movies better is that beginning in the third episode, Mr. Wong in Chinatown, they added a running character: hard-nosed woman reporter Roberta “Bobbie” Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), who became a foil and nemesis to Captain Bill Street much the way Torchy Blane was to her homicide-detective boyfriend, Steve McBride, in the contemporaneous Torchy Blane series at Warner Bros. (though Monogram’s writers weren’t as explicit as Warners’ writers were in making it clear that Bobbie and Street were having an on-again, off-again affair).

Reynolds’ career is one of the great enigmas of a business that’s had more than its fair share of them: in 1942 she was plucked out of “B”-movie obscurity as a last-minute replacement for Mary Martin in the big Paramount musical Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and a score by Irving Berlin (Martin had had to drop out because she was pregnant with Larry Hagman). Two years later she co-starred with Ray Milland in Fritz Lang’s 1944 espionage thriller Ministry of Fear, based on a novel by Graham Greene (if you see this film you’ll probably write it off as an Alfred Hitchcock knockoff without realizing that Lang was doing these sorts of thrillers before Hitchcock was),but after those two high points and good roles in other movies like James Cagney’s The Time of Their Lives and Bob Hope’s Monsieur Beaucaire, within 10 years of Holiday In she was back at Monogram, or “Allied Artists” as it was called then, for a Bowery Boys movie called No Holds Barred, and later she did TV sitcoms; her last imdb.com credit listing was from 1977 even though she lived two decades longer.

Reynolds plays the hard-boiled dame reporter almost as well as Glenda Farrell did in the Blane movies, though in this one, while rightly rejecting Street’s insistence that Dick Fleming killed Cyrus Wentworth, she’s equally insistent – and equally wrong – in saying that Wentworth committed suiicde out of despondency over the loss of the Wentworth Castle and the 400 people aboard. In the end [spoiler alert!] the killer turns out to be a young attorney working for the Wentworths and Ludlow, and though their motives remain tantalizingly obscure at least this time Monogram didn’t make the killer a stocky middle-aged man with a thin moustache! Doomed to Die is actually a quite good, entertaining thriller, with more imagination than usual in Nigh’s direction (including a convincingly Gothic atmosphere in the scene in which Wong and Street discover the corpse of the Chinese tong guy in his waterfront apartment) and a worthy finale to Karloff’s brief career as a Chinese detective, even though one problem with the Wong films in general is he’s just not that interesting a character. He doesn’t have Charlie Chan’s knack for aphorisms, and he doesn’t have a family either – at least not one that we see on screen. He just walks on, makes a few deductions that prove to be correct, and leaves. Karloff’s Wong performances have a disinterested air about them, as if he were just biding his time and collecting a few paychecks while waiting for horror films to come back and give him the parts he really loved and served him well.