Mr. Wong, Detective (Monogram, 1938)

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

At 8 p.m. on February 8 I cued up a video on YouTube of the first “Mr. Wong” movie, Mr. Wong, Detective, which William K. Everson liked the best of the five Wong films with Boris Karnoff in the lead. It’s one of the few times I disagree with the late Everson’s critical judgments; to my mind the Wong films got better as the series progressed, and the last two with Karloff – The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die (Monogram, the producing studio, signed Karloff during a lull in the popularity of horror films and then, when horror came back with a doub-e-bill reissue of Frankenstein and Dracula in 1938 that grossed more than either film had in its initial release; they gave “doomier” titles to the last two Karloff Wongs) – are actually quite good melodramas. Mr. Wong, Detective is a considerably duller film, directed by William Nigh at his usual lumbering, soporific pace (or lack thereof), and the only even remotely creative visual is a shot featuring the shadows cast by Venetian blinds,Nigh’s one trick for creating visual atmosphere. Written by Houston Branch based on a character created by Hugh Wiley for Collier’s magazine, Mr. Wong, Detective is a tale of a chemical company co-owned by three partners, Simon Dayton (John Hamilton), Theodore Meisle (William Gould) and Christian Wilk (Hooper Atchley). Dayton is convinced that someone is out to kill him, and among his suspects is Carl Roemer (John St. Polis), who accuses the partners of stealing a chemical formula for making poison gas.

Three sinister baddies – Olga Petroff (Evelyn Brent, who made two superb late silence for Josef von Sternberg before sound came in and he discovered Marlene Dietrich), Anton Mohl (Lucien P:rival) and Devlin (Gordon Lloyd) – have ordered a shipload of the gas for one side in a civil war somewhere in the world, we’re not told where (Alfred Hitchcock could get away with that kind of ambiguity about his MacGuffins, but Houston Branch was no Hitchcock and neither, needless to say, was William Nigh.) Dayton visits Wong one night and tells him about the mysterious delays that have plagued the shipment, and arranges to have Wong come to his office at 10 the next morning – only by the time Wong arrives Dayton is dead, victim of a poison gas that produces the same effects as a heart attack. Wong deduces that Dayton was killed by an ultra-thin globule of hand-blown gauss containing the poison gas, triggered by a sound with the right vibrations – in this case, a police siren sounded by the series’ typically dumb representative of official law enforcement, Captain Bill Street (Grant Withers), so in effect the police are actually killing the victims even though that’s not their intention.

Later Wilk is also killed by the poison globules after receiving a note from Roemer (or at leas from someone claiming to be Roemer and imitating his handwriting) telling him he’s in danger and should call the police. The police arrest Roemer and try to browbeat a confession out of him, and we’re led to believe he’s just an innocent victim and the real culprit os someone else – but in the end Roemer turns out to be the guilty party even though he was in jail, and therefore couldn’t have planted the fatal globule in Wilk’s home. In the end Wong tricks Roemer into confessing by making up a fake globule and shattering it. There are a couple of good actors in this film besides Karloff: Evelyn Brent (though she doesn’t get to do much) and Myra Ross (Maxine Jennings), who’s Dayton’s secretary and also Captain Street’s girlfriend, only he’s continually breaking dates wit her to chase after one suspect or clue or another. Other than that and the cool professionalism of Karloff’s performance even in an uninteresting role (unlike Charlie Chan, his obvious inspiration, Wong jdidn’t have an on-screen family and he didn;t speak in bons mots; he’s just a rather distant, stand-offisn character who strolls through the intrigues and issues forth deductions that prove correct), Mr. Wong, Detective has surprisingly little to offer.