Too many suspects spoil the soup in this enjoyable, if convoluted, Universal programmer. Lyle Talbot is a smart aleck investigator interfering in police investigation of the murder of a man carrying around a valuable Chinese ring as well as $70,000 in cash. His girlfriend (British leading lady Valarie Hobson) gets involved in it with him, leading to more intrigue when she is held hostage by the head of a Tong like Chinese crime ring. Many familiar faces appear in supporting roles, including Andy Devine who tones down the comedy just a bit here, and Bradley Page, typecast once again as a seemingly smarmy crooked business man. There's little time for boredom here as the action keeps everything moving, and the dialog is tough and often subtly funny. One scene that will stand out has Talbot describing to a few of the murder suspects what happens when someone is placed in the electric chair.

Ninety-Five per cent of everything is crud. That's Sturgeon's Law, named for its proponent, the great writer Ted Sturgeon. Dedicate yourself to studying any branch of the arts and you recognize its truth. Most of what people produce in any field is what they know will sell. Fine art sells through snobbery and novelty; popular art sells through people knowing what they're getting.That's why every popular movie these days is a sequel or a series or part of a Cinematic Universe. Doing something new is risky. Even when it's well done, it may not be recognized. It probably won't be. With luck, its strong points will be recognized while the creator is alive. H.P. Lovecraft lived and worked in increasing poverty. Now he's considered a major component of the great American literary landscape. Philip K. Dick never earned more than $10,000 a year from his writing, and frequently less. Now movies based on his works get made every year. BLADE RUNNER came out the year he died, and the IMDb currently shows 29 movies based on his writing, produced or in some stage of production.It's not that people are blind and need critics to tell them what's good. Critics rarely know, since they're mired in their own personal aesthetics, thinking it's something that's objective; or they have their own narrative to support.After a while, you stop hoping that the next movie you see and review for these pages is a great movie. You hope for some individual component you can praise, and then you hope for competence, with maybe something to add to your narrative about the evolution of the art. Then you hope for something early in the evolution of a great artist, before he knew what he was doing, looking for the roots of greatness, Finally, you look for another title to check off your list. Been there, done that.CHINATOWN SQUAD is a been-there-done-that. Oh, I had hopes for a while. The screenplay is credited to Dore Schary, but it's a competent whodunnit with everything hanging off the fact that no one can get a straight story from Valerie Hobson. It has several elements that made me hope I was seeing something in the evolution of Film Noir, with its San Francisco setting, its fog and shadows and occasional Dutch Angle shot. It isn't though. It's another potboiler with some snappy patter and a couple of minutes' worth of location shooting in San Francisco to keep the audience amused.Director Murray Roth would die a couple of years later, about the time Dore Schary would hit it big with BOYS' TOWN; Lyle Talbot's career would continue to slide, Valerie Hobson would return to England, where she would distinguish herself; everyone would cash their pay checks and, with luck, go on to the next job. The movie would play the circuits for a year or two, then go back into the vaults for eighty years. Because there's nothing very wrong with this movie, but nothing to distinguish it among several hundred feature films released in 1935.Well, on to the next one. Here's hoping for better.

1935's "Chinatown Squad" was one of the handful of non genre titles included in Universal's popular SHOCK! package issued to television in the late 50s. I never encountered it on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater, but it probably rates as one of the better ones, all 'B' programmers of little distinction, most of which dealt with spies or sabotage. This is a welcome whodunit with Lyle Talbot, still in the leading man phase of his career, getting most of the humorous lines, at the expense of Hugh O'Connell's bumbling police sergeant. The murder victim is conniving embezzler Earl Raybold (Clay Clement), who gets stabbed to death by fork (!) in a Chinatown cafe where all the suspects have conveniently shown up. The busy Valerie Hobson, fresh from "WereWolf of London" and "Bride of Frankenstein," is the main asset, playing a mysterious woman in black, trying to retrieve some incriminating letters from the dead man, while others search for a valuable ring which has disappeared. While monster loving urchins like myself would have turned up their noses at viewing this picture on local 'Creature Features,' this now adult movie buff found it most agreeable.

This minor entry in the Universal Studios canon has mystery, comedy and romance in the Thin Man vein. After a murder in a Chinatown cafe, ex-policeman and Chinatown tour guide Ted Lacey decides to investigate in spite of the objections of his former sergeant. The mysterious Woman in Black, Chinese communists and a missing $70,000 is not going to deter our hero from discovering the real killer. A pity that there aren't more unknown gems like this one around.