The Mystery of Mr. Wong (Monogram, 1939)

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

Last night at 9 I started screening the two Mr. Wong films in the Crime Wave 50-movie boxed set, though I screwed up on the latter, Doomed to Die, and watched it on a YouTube post because the disc containing Doomed to Die in the Crime Wave box was seven, not two. The two movies were the second in the series, The Mystery of Mr. Wong, and the fifth, Doomed to Die, the last with Boris Karloff as the title character. James Lee Wong began life in a series of short stories in Collier’s Magazine by author Hugh Wiley, and he was clearly a knock-off of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan. Monogram Pictures bought the movie rights to Wiley’s character in the late 1930’s and cast Boris Karloff in the role. Karloff was available because once the Laemmle family lost control of Universal in 1936 the new studio head, Charles Rogers, decided that horror films were no logner profitable and he turned the studio’s production to musicals, including the big films with Deanna Durbin. At the time of the takeover Universal still had Karloff under contract for one more movie, so they gave him a rather charming vehicle called Night Key (an underrated tale of industrial exploitation with Karloff playing a dotty old engineer who got screwed out of the royanties he deserved for his burglar-alarm system) and then turned him loose. Monogram snatched him up to play Chinese detective James Lee Wong, though their only concessions to “Asianicity” were rice-flour face makeup, lacquering his hair with something that looked like shoe polish, and a few tweaks on his eyes but nowhere near enough to make him look convincingly Chinese.

Then a movie theatre owner in Los Angeles in 1938 decided to show the 1931 Frankenstein and Dracula together as a double bill, and it was soi sensationally successful that Universal’s new management – including Nate Blumberg, who replaced Rogers after just one year – not only reissued the Frankenstein/Dracula double bill nationwide but decided to green-light more horror films, including Son of Frankenstein with parts for both Karloff (playing the Monster for the third and last time) and Lugosi (as Ygor). In 1939, a time when most major stars were under contract to just one studio, Karloff had deals with four: Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros. and Monogram. The “suits” at Monogram, including studio president W. Ray Johnston, were mindful of the fact that horror films were back, so while they’d given the first three Karloff Wong films straightforward mystery titles – Mr. Wong, Detective; The Mystery of Mr. Wong; Mr. Wong in Chinatown – they gave the last two “horrific” titles The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die. For Karloff’s last film under Monogram contract, they decided to take him out of the Wong series and cast him in a straightforward horror vehicle, The Ape (based on an old barnstorming play by Adam Hull Shirk that was already in the public domain), while for the last Wong movie, Phantom of Chinatown, they cast Keye Luke as Wong. (What a concept: a Chinese detective actually played by a Chinese actor!) Donald F. Glut’s published Karloff filmography claimed that Luke’s character was the son of Karloff’s Wong, but that’s not at all clear in the film itself.

The Mystery of Mr. Wong was the second film in Karloff’s Wong series, and one of the dullest so-called “thrillers’ ever made. Scripted by W., Scutt Darling (though his credit omits the “W.”) and directed soporifically by William Nigh, The Mystery of Mr. Wong concerns Brandon Edwards (Morgan Wallace), well-to-do Occidental who collects Chinese art; his wife Valerie (Dorothy Tree.in a performance that brought fr more depth to the role than Darling's script had called for); and the two men he accuses her of having affairs with, aspiring Russian singer Michael Stroganoff (Ivan Lebedeff) and Peter Harrison (Craig Reynolds). Just what Peter’s role in Edwards’ household is remains mysterious, but W. Scott Darling wasn’t exactly the most conscientious of screenwriters when it came to tying up loose ends. After a surprisingly exciting opening in the middle of San Francisco Bay in which smugglers hand over a mysterious cargo in mid-bay from one watercraft to another – which leads us to the false belief that the film is going to be about Mr. Wong tracking down and ultimately arresting a gang of smugglers – The Mystery of Mr. Wong cuts to Brnadon Edwards’ home and stays there for the rest of its seemingly interminable 68-minute running time. Edwards is hosting a dinner party and has fortuitously invited Wong as one of the guests. He shows Wong the latest addition to his collection of Chinese artifacts, a priceless sapphire called “The Eye of the Daughter of the Moon.” He shows it to Wong in private and Wong agrees with Edwards’ assessment that the jewel is “the most beautiful thing in the world” – which it decidedly isn’t. It looks like a worthless chunk of glass someone fron the Monogram props department picked up in a dime store; my husband Charles comaried it to a marble.

Valerie is hosting a game of charades in which her husband is supposed to play her adulterous lover, white Peter – whom Brandon suspects of actually being her lover – plays her husband, who walks in on them and ultimately shoots him. Only Brandon gets shot and killed for real when he’s supposed to “die” in the play. The police, in the person of San Francisco homicide inspector Bill Street (Grant Withers, Loretta Young’s first husband – since as a hard-core Roman Catholic she could not divorce, she had their marriage annulled, and after seeing Withers’ boorish overacing here and in most of his other films, I can see why), immediately assume that Peter is the murderer, since after all he did fire the shot that killed Brandon. Only it turns out he didn’t; after the police ballistics department checks the shell casings and realize the shot that killed Brandon came from a different gun (Peter’s was loaded with blanks, as it should have been), Wong deduces that Brandon was actually killed by a silencer-equipped pistol from another location in the house. I’m not going to red-flag a spoiler alert here because it’s all too obvious from the get-go that the killer is Wong’s old friend, criminologist Professor Ed Janney (Holmes Herbert).

Though we don’t learn his motive until the end, it’s easy to pick him out of the suspect pool, not only because he’s the one character who doesn’t seem to have any other reason to be there (though he and Wong mention having worked together on a previous case, Wong never asks Janney to help with this one and Janney never volunteers, either) and partl;y because he’s a homely middle-aged man with a thin moustache and Monogram’s casting department was big on hiring portly middle-aged actors with thni moustaches to play their villains. Darling doesn’t explain his motive until the last reel, but it’s a doozy: it seems that Brandon Edwardsh so methodically and systematically abused his first wife psychologically and eventually drove her to suicide, and since Edwards’s first wife was Janney’s sister and he drove her to death with the same kind of abuse to which he’s now subjecting Valerie. Charles thought that The Mystery of Mr. Wong could have at least approached film noir with more careful plotting and better direction, but to my mind later episodes in the series – particularly the fourth one, The Fatal Hour (called Mr. Wong at Headquarters in Britain) – strike me as closer to noir and The Fatal Hour also benefited from giving Grant Withers’ character actual depth; he’s a cop whose original partner and mentor in the force has just been murdered, and this gives him a personal as well as professional interest in this case.