The Preacher's Mistress, a.k.a. A Woman Betrayed (Reel One Entertainment, Triple Cross Productions. Urban Cowgirl Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

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

After Starving for Salvation Lifetime showed first a half-hour “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary on the real Gwen Shamblin (though it did not include any footage of her actually preaching; maybe the Remnant Fellowship still owns that footage and probably refused to license it to Lifetime. especially since HBO already did a five-part docu-series on Remnant in 2021 – though it’s unclear whether this aired before or after the plane crash – that the church considered such a hatchet job their official response to it is still on the Remnant Fellowship Web site, https://www.remnantfellowship.org/official-response-from-gwen-shamblin-church-to-hbo-documentary/). Then they showed another TV-movie about a minister with dubious morals, The Preacher’s Mistress a.k.a. A Woman Betrayed. This film starts out with single mother Gwen Griffith (Sarah Lancaster), who’s being threatened with foreclosure on the house she shares with her six-year-old son Alec (Logan Lindhiom). She begs her mother Ellen (Eleese Lester) for the $3,000 she needs to keep the house, and Ellen instead tells her daughter to sell it and move in with her instead.

Gwen is in financial trouble because she lives in Houston, Texas and she recently had to pay $2,000 to have the air conditioner in her home fixed (and I’ve known people who lived in Houston who have told me it’s not a place you’d want to live in during summer without air conditioning). Gwen is also working for an insurance office owned by Dwight Tomkins (David Born), and she’s taking an expensive course to become a licensed insurance agent so she can make some real money in the business. She also lost the transmission in her car, and just as she’s leaving work to go home she notices her left front tire is flat. Along comes the man who at first seems like a white knight but turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, Ed Baker (Drew Waters), who offers to put on her spare tire (one of those really tiny things that’s only for emergency use) and also invites her to a dinner date. She protests that she’ll need a baby sitter for Alec, Ed says she can bring him along, but in the end she gets her best friend from work, Sidney Marshall (Natalia Cigliuti), to be Alec’s baby sitter. Our first suspicions about Sidney (aside from the fact that she’s a woman with a man’s first name) get aroused when she takes out her phone and takes photos of a carving knife in Gwen’s kitchen and the soles of Gwen’s white tennis shoes.

Within half an hour of this unusually short (90 minutes less commercials, which Lifetime obviously picked to show right after Starving for Salvation to fit in the half-hour “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary first) movie we learn [spoiler alert!] that Sidney is herself having an affair with Ed Baker; that he’s not a pharmaceutical salesman but a minister; and that he has a rich wife, Kelly Baker (Julia Barnett). She essentially bought him his ownn church, called “Faith Neighborhood,” and Ed is getting restive living under his wife’s purse strings in more ways than one. Ed and Sidney have worked out a plan to kill Kelly and set Gwen up for the fall, and part of the scheme involves Ed seducing Gwen and making the affair seem public enough that everyone will know about it. Kelly unwittingly helps in her own demise when she hires a hot, hunky private detective named David Wyatt (Bryan Mitchell) to follow Ed around and get photos of him having sex with another woman. Then she goes to Gwen’s workplace and demands that she stop seeing Ed. Gwen tells Ed that their affair is over, but he tries to talk her back into it and says he’s going to leave his wife for Gwen, whereupon Gwen says ominously, “I won’t wait forever.”

Then Sidney actually carries out Kelly’s murder, wearing the same sorts of shoes Gwen has and stabbing her with the same sort of knife Gwen has in her kitchen. The police, represented by detectives Rita Alvarez (Angela Rawna) and Quince (Kevin Dean), immediately leap to the conclusion Ed and Sidney wanted them to and ultimately arrest Gwen for murdering Kelly. Only the scheme unravels when Gwen, bailed out and staying at Sidney’s home because she didn’t want to go back to her own place and have to deal with the media, spies a photo of Sidney with a man she immediately recognizes. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] to be Jake. Gwen’s former boyfriend and Alec’s father, who died in a car crash seven years earlier while Gwen was sitll pregnant with Alec. Apparently Gwen demanded that Jake choose between his wife – that’s right, Alec was conceived via extra-relational activity, something Gwen had acknowledged earlier when she explained, “Alec’s father wasn’t married, at least not to me” – and the night he died he had got drunk over his anxieties about the situation. It turns out Sidney was Jake’s sister and she’s never forgiven Gwen because she holds her responsible for Jake’s death, so she hatched this elaborate plot that involved her seducing Ed, killing his wife, setting u p Gwen for the fall and then presumably eliminating Ed as well.

Only because Gwen discovered the photo of Sidney and Jake together, her plan changes and instead she drugs Gwen’s wine glass, throws her in the trunk of Sidney’s car and drives her to a riverbed, intending to throw Gwen off into the river and making it look like she committed suicide out of guilt. David Wyatt (ya remember David Wyatt?) follows them and interrupts the proceedings before Sidney can throw Gwen into the river. Ed is upset that Sidley has unilaterally changed their plan, and Sidney actually shoots and wounds David before the police, alerted by David, arrive. It’s not clear whether Ed and Sidney are merely arrested or killed, but the final scene shows Gwen and Alec visiting David in the hospital with the clear intimation ghat Davis id going to be Gwen’s next boyfriend and the three of them are somehow going to be able to scrape the money together to visit Walt Disney World. The Preacher’s Mistress is an O.K. Lifetime movie with some familiar plot tropes – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one other Lifetime movie in which a philandering minister posed as a pharmaceutical salesman to carry on an affair – and director Michelle Mower (who also co-wrote the script with Kevin Dean, who played Detective Quince) and the leads all turn in acceptable work, The Preacher’s Mistress is nothing special and certainly doesn’t live up to the salacious promises of its title!

Scarlet Street (Diana Productions, Universal, 1945, released 1946)

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

Last night’s feature was a long-time favorite of mineI Scarlet Street, directed by Fritz Lang for a short-lived production company called Diana, released by Universal, and the second film in a row Lang directed with stars Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, produced by her then-husband, Walter Wanger. Like the first, The Woman in the Window, this wasa film noir which cast Robinson as a helpless nerd – a bank clerk this time instead of a professor, the role he’d played in The Woman in the Window – who as the film opens is getting a watch at a banquet held in his honor to celebrate his 25th anniversary with the same company. That night Robionson’s character, Christopher Cross (whom Bennett’s jokingly referred to as “Criss Cross”) comes upon an altercation between Kitty March (Joan Bennett) and Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea in his third film for Lang, after Ministry of Fear and The Woman in the Window). He thinks Johnny is raping Kitty and intervenes to stop what he thinks is a sex crime in process, though when he returns to the scene Johnny has fled and Kitty is there. Chris is instantly smitten with Kitty, but what he doesn’t know is that Kitty is actually Johnny’s lover. Though screenwriter Dudley Nichols couldn’t spell it out that Kitty is a prostitute and Johnny is her pimp, the true nature of their relationship is obvious to anyone with more experience of the real world than Chris.

Chris is married to Adele (Rosalind Ivan), and between her nagging and the sheer drudgery of his job, his only moments of joy are creaing the paintings he makes as an amateur on Sundays. Christ and Kitty have a lunch date in which both of them lie about who they are and what th ey’re doing; Chris tells Kitty he’s a famous painter whose canvases are sold in Europe, and Kitty tells Chris she’s an actress. ON the basis of Chris’s lies, Kitty and Johnny decide he must have lots of money, and Johnny tells Kitty to keep dating Chris and take him for all she can get. Kitty gets Chris to stake her to an apartment in Greenwich Village with a room suitable for an art studio, and Kitty explains Johnny’s presence in her life by saying he’s the boyfriend of her roommate Molly (Margaret Lindsay, still playing the vilainess’s good but hapless friend the way she did in all those Bette Davis movies at Warner Bros.) Adele keeps a large painting of a dog-faced man who’s her first husband, a police officer until he got killed trying to rescue someone from drowning – or at least so we, she and Chris think. When Adele threatens to take Chris’s paintings to the junkman, Chris takes them to Kitty’s place instead after first leaving two of them on consignment with a street dealer.

The paintings are spotted by art critic Damon Janeway (Jess Barker) and dealer Dellarowe (Arthur Loft), both of whom proclaim the artist as an undiscovered genius. Johnny gets Kitty to pose as the artist herself, and “her” paintings become an instant success. Chris doesn’t mind that Kitty is getting credit and money for his paintings, but things take a turn when Adele’s first husband turns up alive after all. Chris embezzles from the bank he works for to pay him off, and then gots to Kitty’s to tell her the good news that he’s single after all and they can get married. Only he walks in on Kitty and Johnny in the throes of sexual passion – or as close to it as the Production Code would allow – and when Chris tells Kitty they’re free to marry, Kitty tells Chris in no uncertain terms that he’s always repulsed her and her only interest in him was his (supposed) money. Chris withdraws to the nearest bar and then returns and kills Kitty, stabbing her repeatedly with an ice pick and either consciously or unwittingly setting up Johnny to take the fall. Johnny is duly arrested, convicted and executed for Kitty’s murder, but Chris is caught having embezzled and, though his boss doesn’;t have the heart to have him arrested, he naturally fires him. The film ends with Chris a street derelict, repeatedly walking up to police officers offering to confess to Kitty’s murder, and as we see hm oh the street passing by the Dellarowe gallery we see Kitty’s portrait changing hands for $10,000 and the painting looks as if she’s malevolently staring at Chris as it’s carried past himi by its new owner.

Scarlet Street began life as a French novel called La Chenne (literally, “The Bitch”) by Georges de la Fouchardière. who later turned it into a play with the help of co-author André Mouézy-Éon. IN 1931 French director Jean Renoir bought the movie rights and filmed it as La Chienne, and he and his co-writer André Girard were unsurprisingly more sexually frank about the material than Lang and Nichols could be with the Production Code Administration breathing down their necks, Surprisingly, the part of the material that most upset Code enforcer Joseph Breen wasn’t the sexual content but the fact that Chris was not formally punished for Kitty’s murder. In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for The Celluloid Muse in 1969, Lang recalled tell;ing Breen, “Look, we’re both Catholics. By being permitted to live, the Robinson character in Scarlet Street goes through hell. That’s a muchg reater punishment than being imprisoned for homicide. After all,it was not a premeditated murder; it was a crime of passion. Whaat if he does spend the rest of his life in jail – so what? The greater punishment is surely to have him go legally free, his soul burdened by the knowledge of his deed, with the words of the woman he loved proclaiming her love for the man he’d wrongly sent to death in his place.”

Incidentally I’d misremembered the murder scene; I’d thought Chris had actually killed Kitty on the spot instead of leaving the room,having a drink at the local bar, and then returning to kill her. That’s still a more convincing scene than its equivalent in Renor’s film, in which he goes home, sleeps on it and returns the next morning to kill her – which does make it seem premeditated. I don’t know whether Dudley Nichols was thinking of the Production Code when he wrote the version of the scene in Scarlet Street, but it’s arguably stronger in Nichols’ version; we don’t see Chris as the sort of person who’d be capable of a premeditated murder, but he does seem believable as a man who might respond to his betrayal by killing the woman who betrayed him on the spot. It’s also ironic to see Edward G. Robinson playing a man who hungers after the great masterpieces by French painters like Cézanne and Utrillo which he can’t afford to buy,when in real life he used much of his income as a movie star to buy the great works of French art.

And as I noted in my comments on the film The Whole Town’s Talking, a 1935 gangster comedy in which Robinson played a dual role – a milquetoast and a gangster – I noted that in Scarlet Street, though he’s playing just one character, he likewise flips from milquetoast to criminal in the bat of the proverbial eye. I first saw Scarlet Street in the early 1970’s at the Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco – the venue in which I first saw a lot of classic films, including the stunning Busby Berkeley musical The Gang’s All Here (which ran for nearly a year there, mainly because it became a cult item among San Francisco’s Gay community). I’m sure I’d run it before for my husband Charles,but he didn’t recall it – though he remembered the basic plot from the time we’d watched the original Jean Renoir La Chienne, based on the same story. And this wasn’t the only time Lang remade a Renoir film; he did it again in 1954 with Human Desire, a remake of Renoir’s 1938 French film La Bête Humaine (“The Human Beast”) based ono Émile Zola's novel, of which I have only dim memories, mostly of Paul Douglas’s overbearing and wretched performance in the lead.

Law and Order: "Mammon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

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

Last night starting at 8 I watched the usual Thursday night cycle of Law and Order shows, including a quite good episode of the flagship Law and Order series called “Mammon.” It starts witht he murder of an African-American graduate student who’s shot dead in the street outside her home, and the police investigating the case, Detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalan Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), after the usual red herrings, trace the killing to the “prosperity gospel” church of Pastor Mike Butler (Lyriq Bent), who is considerably qu ieter and more soft-spoken than the old “Rev. Ike” but has adopted the same modus operandi: demand huge donations from his mostly poor Black inner-city congregants, live a lavish lifestyle including fancy cars, suits and watches, and present that to his parishioners as an example of what God will do for them if they just keep giving him their money. Along the way Pastor Mike has genuinely helped a lot of people, mostly ex-cons for whom he’s arranged for jobs and also funded their drug rehab. Among the people he’s been most helpful to are Lonnie Ballard (Donald Paul), foster brother of the murder victim – they’re not biologically related but grew up together in the same foster home so they emotionally relate as brother and sister even though they weren’t – and his assistant pastor, Samuel Bryant (Willie C. Carpenter), an ex-con with a long rap sheet who claims to have turned his life around when he found God in prison.

It seems that Lonnie donated $60,000 to Pastor Mike’s church and his foster sister demanded that Pastor Mike return it after Lonnie got laid off from the job Pastor Mike had arranged for him. When Pastor Mike refused to give back the money, the sister threatened to expose him to the police and the media, so Pastor Kike offered $50,000 to Pastor Samuel to kiull her. The murder was duly carried out and the $50,000 deposited in Pastor Samuel’s bank account, but prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) are unable to establish a connection between the payment and the hit. Lonnike refuses to testify against the man who helped him get off heroin and got him his job in the first place, and the only person they can find is his own minister, Reverend Henry Sherman (Colby Lewis). Rev. Sherman actually founded the church and then retired, turning it over to Pastor Mike, but he’s still a minister and after the murder Pastor Mike called Rev. Sherman and confessed to ordering the hit. The prosecutors learn this but Rev. Sherman invokes the legal privilege of a priest-penitent relationship to refuse to testify about it. There follows an elaborate chourt hearing in which Pastor Mike’s lawyer defends the reverend against having to testify, while Price and Maroun argue for what amounts to a crime-fraud exception to the privilege.

In the end the judge orders Rev. Sherman to testify, the reverend says Pastor Mike did indeed order the hit on the grad studeit who was about to expose him, and eventually Pastor Mike pleads the case out and accepts a 20-years-to-life sentence. While I hadn’t heard of the “prosperity gospel” since Rev. Ike faded from the scene decades ago, no doubt this sirt of phony “religious” scam is still going on,and while I was a bit surprised that the set representing Pastor Mike’s church was surprisingly plain – I would have expected someone making as much money as Pastor Mike would have built himself a mega-church with which to further mesmerize his followers – overall it was a quite good episode with a really powerful, if somewhat predictable, ending. Lonnie, who previously complained to the prosecutors that if they ruined Pastor Mike he would literally have nothing left to live for, scores some heroin and is found dying of an overdose in hs apartment. At the fadeout the cops appear to have rescued him in time – though I was a bit surprised that no one responding to a distress call from the home of a known junkie came equipped with a dose of Narcan to revive him and counteract the effects of the heroin – but that still leaves Lonnie’s future very much in doubt even if he survives. It’s an example of the moral complexity that’s one of the things that separates Dick Wolf’s franchise shows from most of the rest of the cop shows on TV today (or ever).

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Intersection" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

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

After the Law and Order “Mannon” episode I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Intersection,” which begins with a romantic nighttime scene . After the concert aI went in front of the Brooklyn Bridge in which a young straight couple, Josh Wagner (Michael Anderson, Jr.) and Poppy Wilson (Sarah Baskin), who appear to be interracial (the man is definitely Black but the woman is racially ambiguous, with relatively dark skin but straight black hair) met in front of the bridge, tell each other how much they love the city that has brought them together, and at the end of the sequence the man gets down in his knees and proposes to her. She accepts, of course, and the two drive off in a car – when suddenly they’re involved in an accident. Only it’s not really an accident: it’s been staged by a mystery man who has rewired one of the gizmos by which licensed drivers of police cars, fiure trucks and ambulances can have the traffic lights all turn green to let them through in case of an emergency. The culprit is George Kalazakis (Daniel Passaro), who used to work as a used-car salesman until his boss started having an affair with Kalazakis’s wife Stephanie (Bax Odorisio).

This led Kalazakis to stage a bizarre revenge plan in which he would steal his boss’s car-dealer’s license,use it to buy a used ambulance, remove all its identifying numbers while keeping the overall paint job, and use a gizmo he had reworked to cause “accidents” by making traffic lights go green in both directions. Then, before the real ambulances coud arrive on the scene, he’d pull the female victim out of the car, take her into the ambulance, and rape her in full view of her husband or partner, who’d be locked outside the ambulance, able to watch but powerless to do anything to stop the assault. The show ends when Kalazakis takes a woman hostage and threatens to kill her unless the cops agree to bring his wife to the scene so he can talk to her and she can apologize to him. She’s at first reluctant because she doesn’t want to tell him what he wants to hear – that she’s sorry for the affair and ready to come back to him if he’ll forgive her and take her back – but the SVU cops persuade her to lie so he’ll let the hostage go and they’ll be able to arrest him.

Interspersed with this is a plot thread involving officer Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), who’s won a multi-million dollar settlement from the New York Police Department for wrongful termination, and whom Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) picked up during her brief sojourn at the Bronx Special Victims Unit helping the FBI clean up the notoriously corrupt Bronx SVU. Bruno reunites with his ex-wife Rose (Raquel Chavez) because she’s a skilled computer hacker and the Manhattan SVU needed her skills to find Kaloazakis. The implication is that Terry Bruno has been inspired by the dysfunctional breakup of the Kalazakis marriage to try to pu9t his own marriage back together.

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a plot strand taken over from the immediately previous episode in which Benson leaks a surreptitious recording made by a fellow officer of Detecthve Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), which Benson puts on a thumb drive and gives to fellow Detective Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett) because she’s falling in love with him. The tape contains a veiled confession to a murder in previous years, which Muncy interprets as a lie Velasco told to get a suspect to “flip,” but Benson isn’t so sure ahd she intends to investigate and report to Internal Affairs if the facts warrant it. This was a pretty good SVU episode but they’ve done better, and it was hardly as powerful as the Law and Order show that preceded it. There’s also an odd plot glitch in this one: George Kalacakis says he’s been married for 25 years but later the cops identify his age at 41, which would mean he married Stephanie at just 16.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Punch Drunk" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

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

Third and last in the cycle was Law and Order: Organized Crine, an episode called “Punch Drunk” whose main intrigue was a staged professional fistfight between representatives of Eamonn Murphy’s (Timothy V. Murphy) gang and the Italian-Americans he’s trying to take over from, led by Michael Amato (Don DiPetta,which frankly sounds like a better name than the milquetoast “Michael Friend” they actually called his character!). Though the bout is referred to as “bare-knuckled fighting,” when it actually takes place both fighters are wearing boxing gloves. This one features Eamonn Murphy feeding Jack, his pet bulldog, a human hand for dinner – though both my husband Charnes and I thought it was one of the3 phoniest-looking props we’d ever seen – and demanding that Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) turn over 80 percent of the profits from the bar he supposedly owns as “protection” money. Stabler manages to talk him down to 50 percent. The most intriguing plot line deals with Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), who’s gone undercover to date Murphy’s second-in-command, Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), and the understandable concern of her superior officer,Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) as to where her loyalties truly are.

Is she genuinely in love with Seamus or just putting on an act? There’s also a subplot involving Bell being the target of a vendetta from her superior officer because she didn’t take the promotion that was offered her in a previous episode. She didn’t want to get entangled in the inner politics of One Police Plaza (the grandiloquent address of the real New York Police Department, but that decision and her desire to continue with the Organized Crime Control Bureau (which her higher-ups wanted to disband) has not set well with the police bosses, and so they’re out to get her. In the end Jet gets “outed” when, thanks to a spectacularly ill-timed call from Sgt. Bell, she’s “outed” by Seamus as a police officer and he overpowers her and locks her in the trunk of his car, then drives off. That’s the cliffhanger ending, and to make it even more annoying we’re going to have to wait two weeks instead of the usual one to learn how it all tu9rns out. I guess Dick Wolf resisted worshiping at the shrone of the Great God SERIAL as long as he could, but even he couldn’t resist the siren call of modern-day audience who actually like these annoying continuous plot lines; I’ll never forget the comment of one of the presenters at a ConDor science-fiction convention Charles and I attended in which he said younger audiences couldn’t relate to the original late-1960’s Star Trek episodes because of the very fact I like about them: each episode was a complete story in itself without any of those infuriating cliffhangers and continuous plot lines!

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.

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.