Phantom of Chinatown (Monogram, 1940)

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

Phantom of Chinatown, which my husband Charles and I screened on a YouTube post February 9, was the sixth and last of the series of movies Monogram Pictures made between 1938 and 1940. For the first five films in the series Chinese detective James Lee Wong was played by Boris Karloff, who had signed with Monogram after Universal dropped him in 1937 because Charles R. Rogers, the new production chief at Universal who’d been installed by the studio’s new owners after Carl Laemmle, Sr. and Jr., were forced out, had decided the horror cycle launched by Universal in 1931 with Dracula and Frankenstein had run its course and from then on the studio would produce mostly comedies and musicals aimed at teenagers. So, in order to keep working, Karloff signed with Monogram and made the first five films in the “Mr. Wong” cycle. In the meantime, a Los Angeles theatre owner obtained prints of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1938 and double-billed them under the inevitable slogan, “We Dare You to See Them Together!” The run was so successful Universal reissued the two films nationwide as a double bill and they made more money than they had in their initial releases. Nate Blumberg, newly installed Universal production chief after Charles Rogers had been fired after just a year, decided horror films were back and green-lighted Son of Frankenstein, a freshly minted third film in the cycle and one in which both Karloff and Lugosi would star. Karloff had also signed with Columbia to make mad-scientist movies and with Warner Bros. to make costume melodramas, including oen called West of Shanghjai in which he played a Chinese warlord in a polt ripped off from an old Western, The Bad Man. That may have been the inspiration for Monogram casting Karloff as a Chinese detective – though Karloff had already played a Chinese villain in MGM’s 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu. (Warner Oland,the best-known of the screen’s Charlie Chans, had also played Fu Manchu, so when Oland and Karloff appeared together in Charlie Chan at the Opera it was a “doubles” movie.)

Precisely because horror films had come back in vogue, for their sixth and last film with Karloff as a contract player the “suits” at Monogram decided to take him out of the Wong role and instead cast him in The Ape, based on an old play by Adam Hull Shirk but actually copied the formula of Karloff’s Columbia films in casting him as a basically sympathetic scientist who kills people while dressed in an ape suit to extract their spinal fluid for a serum to cure his paralyzed daughter. Since Monogram still owed exhibitors one last film with the Wong character, they cast Keye Luke in the role and made him a younger version of the character – though Lee Tong Foo carried over from the Karloff Wongs as Wong’s manservant, Foo. (There are the inevitable jokes about his last name being “Foo” but sounding like “Phooey.”) In this version the character is called “Jimmy Wong” and he’s a college student and amateur researcher (of what, we’re not told by writers Ralph Bettison and “Joseph West,” who under his usual name of George Waggner was about to produce and direct The Wolf-Man at Universal in 1941) who attends a lecture at “Southern University” featuring Professor John Benton (Charles Miller). Professor Benton has just returned from an expedition to China during which he had discovered the previously unknown tomb of one of the Ming emperors along with a scroll containing the location of the so-called “Eternal Flre.” The lecture is actually one of those then-popular travelogue movies in which a live narrator apple over silent footage of a foreign country, and no doubt Monogram licensed the footage from a real-life explorer who’d done a trek through China.

Unfortunately, in the middle of his lecture Prof. Dayton pauses for a glass of water, nand the water turns out to have been spiked with poison. Dayton collapses and dies in the middle of his lecture, and much to the disgust of Captain Bill Street (Grant Withers, also a carry-over from the Karloff Wongs and a regrettable one, since of all the boorish cops that weighed down otherwise entertaining “B” movies he and Barton MacLane’s character inthe Torchy Blane movies are by far the most obnoxious and one can readily understand why Loretta Young had their real-life marriage annulled, since she was too good a Roman Catholic to divorce him) pf the San Francisco Police Department’s homicide unit, the organizers of the lecture move Benton’s body so the police can’t do proper forensics. To solve the case,Wong teams up with Dayton’s secretary, Win Len (the personable and quite attractive Lotus Long, who like Anna May Wong would probably have had much more of a career if she hadn’t been hamstrung by anti-Asian racism). Wini Len turns out to be a secret agent of the Chinese government out to get the scroll back because the so-called “Eternal Fire” it mentions is actually a plume of flame from a huge underground oil reserve, and both the Chinese government and its adversaries (at the time this film was made China was being invaded and partly occupied by Japan, and was also in the middle of a three-way civil war between the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, the Communists and the warlords, one of whom Boris Karloff had played in West of Shanghai) covet the oil.

Before he croaked from the fatally spiked water, Benton had paid tribute to his daughter Louise (Virginia Carpenter) and also to Tommy Dean (Roger Kellard), the expedition’s pilot, who didn’t go along with the rest of the party but was assigned to receive radio message and make periodic deliveries of food and supplies, and also evacuate anyone who got injured or sick. Benton also says Dean had a co-pilot, Mason, who wandered off in the middle of the expedition and presumably died. Only Mason (John Holland) is still alive, having been found by residents of a small Chinese village who nursed him back to health, and he and Benton’s butler Jones (Willy Castello) had hatched a plot to steal the artif=acts found by the expedition. Later Jones is found dead, and it turns out the killer of both Benton and Jones is [spoiler alert!] Charlie Fraser, the expedition’s cameraman, who was originally a co-conspirator of Mason and Jones until he decided to double-cross them and, he p keep the treasures, including the scroll containing the oil secret, for himself. Though Fraser destroyed the original scroll, he photographed it, ahd after Fraser and Mason are both arrested the duplicate of the scroll is returned to Win Len to forward to the Chinese government, white the writers drop a big hint that she’s going to stay in San Francisco and she and Wong will become a couple. (Lotus Long’s usual function in movies was to provide a racially suitable love interest for young Asian men in romantic leading roles.)

Phantom of Chinatown isn’t much of a movie, and I suspect the script was originally written with Boris Karloff in mind and tweaked at the last moment to be suitable for a younger man, but it’s nice to see a 1940 movie in which a Chinese detective is actually played by a Chinese actor (and a quite good one, too!). The revelation of the killer isn’t a big surprise – the writers dropped an enormous hint in the early scenes showing the lecture by not including the action of Benton actually discovering the scroll in the film-within-the-film, Instead there’s an abrupt cut-in flashback showing this action happening in real time, and later it turns out that Fraser deliberately edited the footage of Benton finding the scroll out of the film to conceal the scroll’s existence from the public. Phantom of Chinatown was directed by Phil Rosen, who for all his own faults had at lest two genuinely great films on his résumé, The Phantom Broadcast (Monogram in its first iteration, 1933) and Dangerous Corner (RKO, 1934), which is two more than William Nigh, soporific director of the Karloff Wongs, had. Though Monogram lacked the flair of fellow small-tier studio Republic in staging fight scenes, there’s still some genuine excitement in the action scenes of Phantom of Chinatown, and not only is it nice to see Keye Luke in a role that stretched his acting chops (albeit by not very much), he even got billed above the title, a rare honor for a non-white actor in classic-era Hollywood.