"Mr. Wong, Detective" by William Nigh (1938)

Back on vacation and pampering myself: one of the things that truly make me happy is to curl with some ancient black & white movie, older the better and preferably with absolute minimum of any technical wizardry: its not only that current cinematography bores me with saturation of special effects but honestly I always loved old black & white movies that used good acting, strong story (or sometimes neither of these) to play with our imagination. Just as a kid, when I preferred to use anything but store bought toys to play with, later in life I found greatest comfort and pleasure in old, simple movies that used every stereotype and cliché under the sun, sometimes even using same scenery from some previous movie.

Today is less known that wonderful Boris Karloff - who became immortal thanks to his monster roles in Universal movies, also made a pretty good career out of playing character of mysterious Chinese detective Mr.Wong in a series of several highly successful movies. Well, successful back than - today they are hardly remembered and this obscurity just make them more interesting to me. The trend actually started a decade earlier with very famous character of another Asian detective Charlie Chan who was refreshing change from previously evil Asian characters - Charlie Chan and later Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto were immensely popular fictional heroes so this is how Mr.Wong came along, not coincidentally all three were actually portrayed by Caucasian actors, not only because there were none really big Asian cinema stars in Hollywood but also because big companies wanted to play safe and to bet on already popular actors - of course, it could be argued that for this kind of role it could have been just perfect to promote real Asian and to simply nurture new, authentic star with the right background but tell this to Hollywood producers of 1930s. (By the way, when Hollywood finally relented and replaced Karloff with real Asian actor, the series ended as people were simply not interested.) As Mr.Wong, our dear old friend Boris Karloff does not really change make up drastically, he just smooths his hear and attempts some incredible meek, servile posturing but on the other hand he is far more clever than anybody around him and comes to conclusions better than police agents who are portrayed as incredibly brash, naive and comically inept. So the message is almost subversive, since here we have genius Asian detective who is usually pushed around but is the cleverest person in the movie.

This was the first in the series of movies about Mr.Wong - apparently it was made with shoe-string budget, because everything on the set looks incredibly should we say inexpensive and Boris Karloff had obviously enjoyed completely different treatment while working for Universal but even here, with less powerful Monogram Pictures company he brings lots of dignity to his work. I don't think that Karloff in any way lost it or that he was reduced to act  in small-budgeted movies - I don't think any less of him for playing Mr.Wong and in fact this brings even more admiration for him because just like Bela Lugosi, he was a strange looking foreigner in Hollywood who simply needed work and this was paid work that his family lived from. By all accounts sensitive and soft spoken Englishman who probably had much more talent in him that he was given credit for, Karloff was typecast as either a monster or outsider so the role of Asian detective was perhaps just perfect for him. By the way, Lugosi played exactly the same character also but his Mr.Wong was evil. 

The most obvious thing about  "Mr. Wong, Detective" is that is deliciously low-budgeted little bite of crime novelty - everything happens very fast, people are very plain looking, everything seems almost cartoonish and some scenes are really just a minute long. People scream, come and go, there is absolutely no deep psychological analysis or reasons why some of these characters are here as we never see them again (the office cleaning lady basically have one minute and off she goes, never to be seen again). There is a murder plot  hidden somewhere inside but so ludicrous and full of pointless red herrings that at the end we only focus on Mr.Wong who seems the only reasonable person around. There are businessmen who drop dead, screaming & shouting policemen who behave like retarded and several mysterious, dangerous characters who are supposed to be bad guys but we don't really understand why are they bad in the first place since their part of the story concerns some ship and Monogram Pictures could not really afford scenes filmed outside of what is clearly a small studio. So the final result looks very much like some primary school production and its absolutely delicious because of it. What a threat!