When Monogram started its "Mr. Wong" series, it was obviously done in the hope of achieving a similar success as 20th Century-Fox had been enjoying for more than 15 years already with its hugely popular "Charlie Chan" movies - especially since they'd hired such a big star as Boris Karloff for the title role. Well, only that Mr. Karloff - the Chinese Detective from San Francisco who spoke with a British accent - neither looks nor talks nor behaves like a Chinese; except for the scene where he bows to his parrot for 'showing' him the murder method... And besides that, he completely lacks the gentle, lovable humor of Charlie Chan (which both Warner Oland and Sidney Toler conveyed perfectly) - a feature which is missing in the whole film in general: NOBODY seems to have ANY sense of humor. Murder is an earnest business. Here we've got at least an 'innovative' way of killing - only that, for such a famous sleuth, Mr. Wong really seems incredibly slow in his deductions; it seems almost as if the scriptwriters wanted to make the average mystery fan happy that he found the solution even before the detective did! Certainly not one of Monogram's best crime movies...

In the acclaimed footsteps of Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto, Hugh Wiley has created Mr. James Lee Wong, a Chinese-born San Francisco sleuth. Simon Dayton(John Hamilton), President of the Dayton Chemical Company is in fear of his life. Even his two partners are urging him to sign papers giving them his share of the company upon his death. Mr. Dayton has made an appointment for Mr. Wong(Boris Karloff) to come to his office; but when Wong arrives, Mr. Dayton has mysteriously been murdered. Wong will now contend with foreign agents that are after a formula for a deadly poison gas being produced by Dayton's company. Suspects are cunning, but not so allusive. This 70 minute low budget mystery seems to have a less than original story line. Other players: Grant Williams, Maxine Jennings, William Gould, George Lloyd and Evelyn Brent.

This is the first of the series of Mr. Wong films based upon the series of stories entitled 'James Lee Wong' written by Hugh Wiley (1884-1968), which appeared in Colliers Magazine. Colliers was a very prominent illustrated national magazine in America which paid good money for popular fiction. It did not pay as much as the Saturday Evening Post, which contained higher quality fiction and provided F. Scott Fitzgerald with most of his income, but it was lucrative. It was not uncommon for Colliers pulp fiction to be sold on to Hollywood to provide the stories for B films. Six of these Mr. Wong stories were filmed between 1938 and 1940. The first five of these starred Boris Karloff as the Chinese detective Mr. James Lee Wong, who lives in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the sixth and final one (PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN, 1940) starred the much younger Keye Luke as Mr. Wong. However, before this series began, Bela Lugosi had starred in a film entitled THE MYSTERIOUS MR. WONG (1934) which was directed by William Nigh, the same man who later directed the entire Karloff series. (He did not direct the final film in the series starring Keye Luke in 1940.) But the Lugosi film had no connection whatever with the Karloff series, since the Mr. Wong in that story is not a detective but an evil schemer who wishes to achieve world domination by collecting 'the twelve coins of Confucius'. (That was based on a short story by someone else about Confucius giving twelve coins to twelve disciples just before his death and predicting that when they all came back into one ownership again in the future, the possessor of all 12 coins would be a powerful ruler.) Earlier still, Edward G. Robinson had played another Mr. Wong in THE HONOURABLE MR. WONG (1932), based upon a play written by David Belasco and Achmed Abdullah, which was the pen name of Alexander Romanoff, son of the Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff of Russia. The Chinese surname Wong is spelled Wang in Mandarin but Wong in Cantonese. It means 'King'. It is one of the commonest surnames in China, hence it is not surprising that various Wongs have appeared in Hollywood films, as there are tens of millions of people called Mr. Wong or Mr. Wang in China itself. This first Karloff film has an ingenious plot. People are murdered by poison glass contained in thin glass spheres, but no one can figure out how the spheres are broken. The first murder takes place between the time of the arrival of the police outside a chemical factory and the entrance of the police into the murdered man's office, a very brief space of time. How did he die in that short period? Mr. Wong finally figures it out, but I shall not reveal the ingenious secret. Karloff plays Wong in a very genteel way as a kind of English gentleman who just happens to be Chinese. In fact, in the story it is mentioned that he has even studied at Oxford. Karloff utters assorted Confucian-style proverbs from time to time, such as: 'A request from a friend is virtually a command.' It is all very mannered and stylized. The film is ruined by the oafish performance of one of the worst actors in the history of the cinema, Grant Withers, as Sam the police detective. He is so ludicrous and offensive, and shouts so much and is so rude to everyone including his fiancée, that the film's impact is gutted by it and made to appear wholly ridiculous. That is a pity, because the film otherwise had an eerie B picture air of mystery about it which Karloff's quiet detective greatly enhanced. What the Chinese would think of these films today can easily be imagined, since Karloff, especially in profile, is very much what the Chinese call 'a big nose', and could only elicit a laugh (especially as there are no Confucian gentlemen left today anyway). Certainly there was a great improvement in Hollywood when the highly engaging young Keye Luke was allowed to play Chinese characters, as he was genuinely Chinese, however Americanized he may have been in his manners and speech. But Hollywood always fell back on Hollywood stars to play Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Turks, American Indians, Greek peasants (Anthony Quinn as Zorba), and all manner of Europeans, without even a blush. The tradition of Westerners pretending to be Orientals continued with a British actor portraying Mahatma Gandhi in GANDHI (1982). But one must presumably not look for authenticity in a world of mass illusion.

As a fan of, and having seen all of the available Charlie Chan films, I was curious to sample another take on the genre, with "Mr. Wong, Detective" as my first sampling of the Wong series. I found the movie to have both similarities and differences to the Chan mysteries.As far as similarities go, the first and most obvious is the casting of a non Oriental in the lead role; Boris Karloff does a credible job as Detective James Lee Wong, even though one must stretch belief to accept the characterization.The story itself involves the inventor of a poison gas formula seeking revenge on three partners of the Dayton Chemical Company who conspire to cut him out of the profits from his invention. As with the Chan films, red herrings galore are introduced to cast suspicion in different directions. Only the exacting patience and precision of the title detective it seems, will uncover the real killer. Patience indeed is needed, as Police Captain Sam Street (Grant Withers) constantly jumps to conclusions based on clues that unfold with the investigation. His portrayal is almost over the top as he belts out commands and virtually harasses everyone he questions, including girlfriend Myra Ross (Maxine Jennings), who's secretary to Simon Dayton, President of the Dayton Chemical Company and the film's first victim.Probably the major difference to the Charlie Chan films is the lack of comic relief, as provided by Number #1,2 and 3 Sons, and in the case of the Monogram Chan films beginning in 1944, that of chauffeur Birmingham Brown as portrayed by Mantan Moreland. This being a Monogram, the film does move more slowly than the better Chan's, and the Monogram Chan films in turn are considered inferior to the Twentieth Century Fox series.Monogram would eventually go on to retread the secret gas formula plot in two subsequent Charlie Chan movies, 1945's "The Jade Mask" starring Sidney Toler, and 1948's "Docks of New Orleans" with Roland Winters, both films rated in the lower third of the Chan canon. Both "Mr. Wong, Detective" and "Docks of New Orleans" at least come up with clever ways that the murderer finds to administer the poison gas that claims its' victims.Which brings me to the most glaring plot hole in "Mr. Wong, Detective". Early in the film, inventor Carl Roemer (John St. Polis) barges into Simon Dayton's office brandishing a handgun and demanding that Dayton return to him the poison gas formula, as if he would not have kept notes on such an important invention. Yet Roemer uses the very same poison gas to exact his revenge - someone wasn't paying attention!