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Tuesday, October 9, 2018

THE FATAL HOUR (1940)

For a year or two, not long before CHARLIE CHAN got demoted from 20th/Fox to Monogram Pictures, MR. WONG did Poverty Row service as a cut-rate substitute. With little more than a pair of eye-glasses and a dusky shade of Max Factor, Boris Karloff played the ‘Oriental’ crime solver five times, aided by dyspeptic Police Captain Grant Withers and relentlessly perky reporter Marjorie Reynolds. Generally sleepy affairs, this may be best of the lot, a pretty decent murder mystery about a jade smuggling racket, a murdered cop and a neat fake-out with a remote controlled radio to confuse the crime time-line. Hack megger William Nigh (with over 250 credits) and lenser Harry Neumann (with more than 350!) let a lot of scenes play out in tedious ‘master shots,’ but squeeze the budget to add the occasional reverse-angle or camera move. Keeping you awake just enough to see that Karloff forgot the ‘YellowFace’ makeup on an exposed neck in his first scene. No reshoots at Monogram!

DOUBLE-BILL: The sixth and final Wong (PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN/’40, not seen here) starred Keye Luke as a younger Wong. An Asian actor playing one of the iconic Asian Detectives. What an idea! Rarer still, an Asian actor with top-billing. Something not seen in Hollywood since the silent film heyday of Sessue Hayakawa. (Anna May Wong was top-billed in TOLL OF THE SEA/’22, but that one-off was made to demonstrate the new 2-Strip TechniColor process.)

LINK: This youtube link has better picture quality than most Public Domain DVDs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOX2mucY6o And here’s a LINK to Keye Luke’s PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npnj8aBcoyo

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