The Mystery of Mr. Wong Reviews

With Twentieth Century Fox successfully mounting  an A-mystery series featuring Charlie Chan and a B-mystery series with Mr. Moto in the 1930s, it seemed as if Fox had a lock on Oriental movie detectives. Not to be outdone, however, poverty row studio Monogram decided in 1938 to initiate its own detective series with Mr. Wong, Detective based on the magazine mystery series “James Lee Wong” by Hugh Wiley. The Mr. Wong films were small scale and definitely programmers (barely running over an hour), but in their own inconspicuous way, they told  fairly good mysteries and featured a true star at the head of the films: Boris Karloff. The Mystery of Mr. Wong is the second film in the series, and it’s very typical of all six of the films: an unfussy mystery with a small number of suspects who do their best to deflect the investigation until one is unmasked as the instigator. It’s a mystery formula that’s been working for over a century in one kind of media or another.

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