Mr. Moto's Last Warning (20th Century-Fox, filmed 1938 ,released 1939)

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

Last night (February 15) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I screened two movies from the Mill Creek Entertainment “Crime Wave” 50-film DVD box, Mr. Moto’s Last Warning and Detour. I’d already seen Detour fairly recently (December 26, 2020) on the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” Saturday night time slot hosted by Eddie Muller – though Charles hadn’t because he’d had to work that night – and I have little to add to what I wrote back then on a moviemagg blog post, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/12/detour-prc-1946.html. According to the Wikipedia page on Mr. Moto, the character was created by John P. Marquand in 1935 after the death of Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan, led the Saturday Evening Post to solicit other writers to come up with Asian detective characters. His full name is Kentaro Moto and starting in 1937 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights and used Moto in a series of eight movies starring Peter Lorre as Moto. (So Fox, which had previously given us Swedish actor Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, now gave us a Hungarian actor who’d first achieved stardom in Germany to play a Japanese detective.) Fortunately they didn’t do much to make Peter Lorre’s eyes look Asian – the results probably would have looked ghastly if they had. Lorre also didn’t affect any attempt at a Japanese accent; the familiar Peter Lorre whine worked well enough to make the character believable.

Five of the eight Mr. Moto films for Fox were helmed by actor-turned-director Norman Foster – who was aloso assigned to the Chan series after 20th Century-Fox resumed it with Sidney Toler following Warner Oland’s death in 1938. In the meantime a script originally intended for Oland as Chan was rewritten as Mr. Moto’s Gamble, a.k.a. Mr. Moto’s Diary, third film in the series. Mr. Moto’s Last Warning was the sixth film in the series and the fourth directed by Norman Foster, who also co-write the script with Philip MacDonald, and int contains an unexpectedly gruesome scene that was the one piece of the film I’d actually remembered. The film takes place in Port Said, Egypt, a location which because of its proximity to the Suez Canal has attracted a gang of no-goodniks led by Fabian (Ricardo Cortez). It takes a while for MacDonald and Foster to tell us just what they’re up to, but we know from the get-go that it involves naval maneuvers being conducted jointly by the British and French governments. This film was shot in late 1938 and released January 20, 1939, before the official start of World War II but while what Winston Churchill later called “the gathering storm” was already visible, and one of the ironies of this film is that it posits an alliance between Britain and France that will ensure the world’s peace as long as it is never broken. That’s a pretty dramatic departure from the way the actual war went – the Nazis swiftly conquered France and occupied much of it, while Britain continued to resist the Nazis alone until the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese naval and air arms gave Churchill the boost he’d long begged for: the U.S.’s entry into the war on his side.

The film centers around a vaudeville theatre called the Sultana in Port Said and the antiques shop of “Mr. Kuroki” across the street from it. Kuroki is, of cou9rse, Moto in disguise. The baddest of the bad guys, Fabian, holds forth as a ventriloquist and, like so many movie ventriloquist both before (The Great Gabbo) and since (Magic), he relates to his dummy as if it were a fellow human being in whom he could confide. Of course this irritates his girlfriend Connie (a marvelous hard-bitten performance by Virginia Field), especially when he uses the dummy to make wisecracks about her, but she stays loyal to him until the very end of the movie. It turns out the plot is to mine the Suez Canal just before the big joint British-French naval exercise, sinking the French flagship and creating an international incident that will break the alliance and lead to war. One of the conspirators is a French naval official named Eric Norvel (George Sanders, visually recognizable but handicapped by a ridiculous attempt at a French accent that comes and goes – in one scene he spoke with his normal voice and I thought the payoff was he was going to be an impostor posing as a French officer, but later he reverted to his phony “French” voice even inn the company of his fellow crooks). We never learn much about this character, including the all-important motive for his treachery.

Also part of the gang os a man named Danforth (John Carradine, who much to my husband Charles’s surprise was actually billed ahead of Sanders), who’s really an undercover British agent named Blake who has infiltrated the gang to find out what they’re up to. Only Blake a.k.a. Danforth makes a mistake: scared by Fabian’s announcement that he has a little book with names and photos of all the international police officers that might be after them, he spots his own picture (he’s grown a beard to effect his imposture but the picture in Fabian’s book is a clean-shaven portrait that was probably Caarradine’s official head shot)( and he starts to tear the page out of Fabian’s notebook before Moto warns him not to give himself away by doing that. Only Fabian spots the tears in the page, draws a beard on the photo to confirm that “Danforth” is really Blake, and [spoiler alert!] hatches a truly diabolical plot to get rid of him. He invites him to visit the Vulcan, the tramp steamer they’re using to lay the mones along the Canal, and locks Blake in a diving bell and sends it to the bottom without oxygen. So we get some truly horrifying shots of Carradine frantically pawing for air in a scene that’s a lot scarier than the supposed “fright” footage in Carradine’s intentional horror films.

The climax takes place along the Port Said waterfront, when Connie confronts Fabian – earlier he’s told her that he’s really a smuggler, which she was O.K. with, but when she learns that his real plan is to blow up the French fleet and precipitate a world war, she gets angry and ultimately shoots him dead. Mr. Moto’s Last Warning – by far the most frequently shown of the Motos because it slipped into the public domain ≠ has a fair amount to offer, including the casting of former Sam Spade Ricardo Cortez in a movie with future Joel Cairo Peter Lorre – with Lorre as the good guy and Cortez as the bad guy, no less! Despite the annoying complexity of the plot and the fact that Virginia Field’s character is the only one with any depth – the others are either all good or all bad – it’s still a capable and entertaining film.