From today’s perspective, it is baffling to consider how many Caucasian actors, especially some of the best of their time, were cast at least once as an Asian. Just off the top of my head, there’s Peter Sellers, Christopher Lee, Katherine Hepburn and Yul Brynner. The less said about Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s the better. I didn’t know until recently that Boris Karloff played a Chinese detective named Mr. Wong in a series of five pictures made between 1938 an 1940.
I believe it is as unacceptable to perform in yellowface as it is to do so in blackface. At the same time, I can cognitively distance myself enough from a work to try, for the most part, to perceive it in regards to the standards of the era in which it was made, to the best of my knowledge of that time.
It is with that approach I watched the first installment of the Karloff series, 1938’s Mr. Wong, Detective. First, some positive attributes of Karloff’s title character I want to point out. He is always the smartest person in the room, but not obnoxiously so. Thankfully, he never speaks in riddles, especially ones that begin with something like “Confucius say…” No butchered grammar. Most importantly, he doesn’t talk in that horrific “Engrish” which so many actors of the time were reduced to doing, that transposing of l’s and r’s. Alas, other Chinese characters around him don’t fare as well, the sole such person in this first film being Karloff’s man about the house, as played by Lee Tong Foo.
The situation didn’t look promising as the opening credits rolled. Text was in that horrible font which is intended to apply the writing style of Chinese characters to the alphabet of the Western world. Similarly, the music is intended to covey a certain feeling of “orientalism” without committing to any particular nationality or culture.
The plot is a rather standard whodunit, though with an usual means of delivering death. At the crime scene where John Hamilton is found dead, Karloff is intrigued by delicately thin shards of broken glass. It will turn out these had once been a sphere which contained a deadly gas.
There are some moments of forensic lab work, an anomaly for such films of that time. I thought it was interesting a high amount of manganese suggests the glass is of Bavarian manufacture. The curvature of the pieces suggests a perfect sphere and, with the help of a glass blower (a forensic glass blower, I assume), the dimensions of the original orb can be extrapolated.
There are many people who might have killed Hamilton, who was the head of a chemical company. The chief suspects are his two partners, Hooper Atchley and William Gould, especially after they pressed him to sign a document turning over his share of the company to them should he die.
Another likely suspect is John St. Polis, the last person Hamilton saw in his office. Polis claims Hamilton never paid him for a formula he sold him. Hamilton says he never received it. Polis had charges into the man’s office with a gun. This elderly man is too pathetic to seriously consider as the killer, with him sitting in a chair and petulantly whining, “I want my formula” as if he is an overgrown toddler.
Not that this will stop Grant Withers from arresting him. The gauntlet of questions to determine if Polis is mentally competent is interesting, as they include such things as knowing the capital of Minnesota. Guess I’m doomed if I ever find myself in similar circumstances.
In strong contrast to Withers is Maxine Jennings as the dead man’s secretary, who also conveniently happened to be an item with the detective even before these recent developments. One bit I found amusing is her sitting as stoic as a statue, yet her boyfriend yells at her to pull herself together. If she pulled herself together any further, she would collapse into herself and form a gravitational singularity. I also liked a bit where the guy inundates with her questions, as if she is being interrogated, and she responds to each with the same kind of emphatic “NO!” that Lilo yells in response to every question her sister asks in one scene from the original Lilo & Stitch.
Fortunately, Karloff is on the case. Despite this film being a product of Monogram, the studio that put the poverty in poverty row, he gives it his all. There are some minor subtleties he brings to what would be a one-dimensional character in many other hands. One can imagine his mildly amused delivery of such lines as “Please excuse my parrot. He delights at the sound of his own voice but, like so many people, the words don’t matter.”
Yet, make no mistake, Mr. Wong, Detective is a trifle. Still, it is a breezy, effortless and enjoyable 70 minutes of your life that you won’t feel you wasted. Karloff is a joy to watch, as always, though the other performers are varying degrees of being too stagy, which is only exacerbated by the long static shots which belie this as a production on a very tight budget. But the biggest compliment I can give concerns the ending, which I will confess I did not see coming.
Dir: William Nigh
Starring Boris Karloff, Grant Withers, Maxine Jennings
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray set Mr. Wong Collection