I wonder if anybody has ever truly enjoyed playing charades.  For a dinner party they’re throwing, wealthy couple Morgan Wallace and Dorothy Tree have arranged an unusual twist on it called “Indications”.  These will be rather elaborate set-ups, each of which are meant to to represent the title of a book, movie or song.  The first round we see has four tuxedo-clad men seated, each with a different long-handled item and pretending to row.  At some interval, the men will hiccup in unison.  This is the hint for The Vulgar Boatmen.  The sketch is a drama where Wallace plays the secret lover of Tree, only to be shot dead by her husband, played by Craig Reynolds.  Wallace does a stellar of job of playing dead, because a shot from a gun other than the one Reynolds was holding kills him.  I can’t remember what Karloff correctly guesses the skit was about, but I think he should have guessed it is 1939’s The Mystery of Mr. Wong, because this is where that happens.

This is the second of five pictures where Karloff plays the titular detective.  Once again, he is in makeup to make his eyes more “Asian”.  That said, I have seen so many offensive portrayals of Asians in other films of this era as to make this portrayal seem like flattery in comparison.  At least he does not attempt an accent, and there’s no transposing of l’s and r’s.

Wallace had expressed fears for his life to Karloff earlier that same day.  He has received a death threat he believes is related to him taking possession of a jewel stolen from a museum in Nanking during the “looting” of Nanking.  If I’m thinking of the same horrific event which happened, there is good reason that is often referred to as the “rape of Nanking”.

The jewel looks like a golf-ball-sized sphere of jade and is poetically named “The Eye of the Daughter of the Moon”.  It is supposedly a cursed object, bringing death to those who possess it.  Wallace puts in his safe after showing it to Karloff.  Also stored there is an sealed envelope which Wallace says contains a piece of paper upon which he has written the name of the person he believes responsible for this threat.  Karloff’s detective may be a genius, but he is polite to a fault, as he doesn’t tell Wallace to just stop bullshitting and just tell him who he thinks has been threatening him.

Once Wallace is dead, both the jewel and the letter conveniently go missing.  Assisting Karloff on the case is fellow detective Holmes Herbert, who says of the jewel: “It is worth a fabulous sum of money”.  Wow, just think what that extremely vaguely defined value would be today once adjusted for unspecified inflation.

There is no shortage of suspects.  Tree had been openly carrying on with Reynolds just that afternoon.  Pining for her is Ivan Lebedeff, a character whose last name is Strogonoff, so he naturally had a beef with her husband and her lover.  There’s duplicitous maid Lotus Long, who is Lebedeff’s girl and who we saw pocket the letter from the safe.  There is Chester Gan as an equally untrustworthy butler and one of two male characters here to ensure there are stereotypical Chinese caricatures, if only to balance out Karloff’s more tasteful performance.  There is also the return of Grant Withers as a police detective my wife has dubbed Shouty McShoutsalot.  He’s not a suspect, but just there to make Karloff’s detective look even more brilliant in comparison.

This installment of the series is a step down from its predecessors.  It is the kind of film where somebody overturns a room looking for something yet fails to notice the fragments of an incriminating letter in a trash can.  And I was baffled why Karloff felt compelled to glue down the all of eight fragments of that letter to assemble it.  It felt like watching a Mensa member fail to solve one of those “sliding tile” puzzles but which has only three tiles.

One thing about The Mystery of Mr. Wong I especially like is how Karloff’s detective continues to freely admit when he doesn’t know a particular thing.  I think it is a testament to a person’s character when they admit that, instead of pretending they possess knowledge they don’t have.  Alas, the film itself has less confidence in its abilities, and it suppresses knowledge gained by his character so as to make it impossible to otherwise correctly guess the killer.    

Dir: William Nigh

Starring Boris Karloff, Grant Withers, Dorothy Tree

Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray set Mr. Wong Collection