Mysterious Mr. Wong, The (1934)

Posted on Sep 16, 2006 under Action-suspense |

Directed by William Nigh
Written by Nina Howatt
Starring
- Bela Lugosi
- Wallace Ford
- Arline Judge
- Fred Warren
- Lotus Long

For the life of me, I’ve never understood the persistent reluctance in Hollywood to simply let Asians play Asians. (Or, to use the then-contemporary terminology, to let Orientals play Orientals.) There’s really been no analogous attitude toward any other ethnic group common in Hollywood films. Blacks have always played blacks, with the sole exception being minstrel shows — and there, it’s part of the comedy that, ha ha, here’s a white guy made up like he’s black in order to ridicule blacks. And Mexicans have pretty much always played Mexicans. True, the ranks of Hollywood Indians have been fairly spare of real Native Americans, though to be fair, there have never really been a great number of real non-latino Native Americans living in Hollywood to respond to casting calls. But there’s never been a shortage of Orientals. California was largely built on the backs of cheap Chinese labor. Heck, the very reason they could make so many crime and suspense movies set in Chinatown was that there was a Chinatown. So why movie studios went to such great lengths to cast Caucasian actors for all of the Oriental speaking parts is beyond me. Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff (now THERE’S a counterintuitive one for you)… And it’s not a phenomenon confined to the ’30s and ’40s, the dark ages of the “Yellow Peril” scare and World War 2. Even as late as the early ’70s, when Bruce Lee had achieved some American success as the Green Hornet’s chauffeur Kato, he proposed a TV series about a Chinese man in the Old West. The studio loved it, but balked at having an actual Chinaman play a Chinaman. thus we got David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu (1972-75), a part Bruce Lee had envisioned for himself.

But you didn’t come here for a lengthy opinion piece on Hollywood’s history of anti-Asian casting. You came here for a review of The Mysterious Mr. Wong, starring Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi as the title character, and I’m only making you sit through the lengthy preamble because the movie was appallingly boring, and I don’t know if I’ve got as much to write about it as you want to read. I will admit that when the B-Masters Cabal came up with this idea of a “false Asians” roundtable, this was the only movie already on my shelf that qualified, and I decided to review it instead of hunting down some other appropriate title for exactly one reason. Well, two; I’m lazy, and that always figures in. But the main reason was so that I could use this line:

“He seems so white, he can’t be Wong!”

There. If you feel the urge, you can go back to browsing Amish pr0n sites and I won’t feel offended. The best part of the review is behind us, and we haven’t even begun.

“I wonder what a complete set would go for on Ebay?”

For those few still left, what we’re dealing with here is a Monogram quickie “feature” which barely limps past the one-hour mark, suggested by the story The Twelve Coins of Confucius by Harry Stephen Keeler. I have not read the story in question; I can only assume that when they say “suggested by,” they mean that the final product is quite markedly different from the source of inspiration. After all, if the short story had been as dull as the resulting movie, the only thing it would have suggested is a nap.

A few encyclopedia pages shown on screen give us some unnecessary background (as all the same facts will be rehearsed for us, including the same shots of the same encyclopedia pages, later on in the story), to wit, that legend has it that Confucius gave twelve gold coins to twelve trusted friends upon his death, and whoever can assemble all twelve together again will have the power to rule Keelat (which is a small area in China, as far as I can discover). We cut immediately to abbreviated scenes in which Chinese men are killed in a variety of mundane ways, a gold coin taken from each of their bodies, and a note left pinned to their corpses. My grasp of Chinese characters is practically nonexistent these days, so I can only surmise that this character —

— is the Mandarin version of “Bwa-ha-hah!” (No significance is ever attached to the notes. I think it was just the moviemakers’ way of establishing, for those who wandered into the theater expecting something else entirely, that there are CHINESE PEOPLE killing CHINESE PEOPLE here.) Also intercut are views of newspaper headlines, expressing some concern about the Chinatown killings. I was a little surprised that the very first killing made the front page; no offense, but would anyone in the white press have cared if a single resident of Chinatown got knifed?

In fact, the only person who wants to pooh-pooh the whole idea of an incipient Tong war is a reporter named Barton (Wallace Ford), who writes a newspaper column to that effect. Naturally, he’s the man that the editor assigns to the case. Remember Robert Wuhl’s character “Knox” in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), the abrasive but self-deprecating reporter who doesn’t get the girl? Same character. Except in this case he’s got a much better shot at getting the girl, specifically Peg (Arline Judge), the newspaper’s switchboard girl. In fact, scenes of Barton’s banter with Peg almost overpower the whole “murders in Chinatown” storyline. Not that I’m complaining. In there’s to be any wit in the dialogue, it’s going to be in scenes with Caucasians interacting with Caucasians. Peg’s a vivacious and confident type, the sort of girl who’s cute without being glamorous but would be offended if you told her that. And Arline Judge is distinctly easy on the eyes. (Which might be part of the reason she was married and divorced eight times.)

“Hey, babe, I can’t help it. Most of the good pick-up lines haven’t been invented yet!”

Let’s see, wasn’t there someone else of importance around here? Oh, yeah — Wong! Bela Lugosi with the Fu Manchu moustache and upswept eyebrows that they pin on most European actors playing Chinese characters. He sits in his Chinatown lair, counting his golden coins as his small cadre of thugs (comprised mostly of Caucasian actors as well) being them in. Nine, ten, eleven… Only one more and he’ll be powerful in Keelat! I dunno, it doesn’t seem like a terribly Confucian scenario, as my limited readings in Confucius show him to be a man more concerned with the proper roles of nobility and the pedantic rules of society than with magical ascendancy granted to any yayhoo who collects a dozen trinkets. Or maybe it’s simply a seat in local government; “Bring in all twelve coins, and you get to be co-chair of the planning commission!” But, as I said, I’m no expert, whereas Mr. Wong obviously is. I mean, how else would he know that all twelve of Confucius’ gold coins are in the hands of different people in Chinatown? The only problem at this point is tha his flunkies return from the premises of their last victim and inform Wong that the last coin wasn’t there. Curses!

Barton’s and Wong’s paths get set to cross when Barton ventures down to Chinatown to see the corpse of the latest victim. He also meets up with Officer McGillicuddy (Robert Emmet O’Connor), a patrolman who appears to be the only law enforcement presence interested the crimes. And Barton is the only reporter from any paper who ever shows up. Yeah, I can see how this got to be front-page material. Because reporters have free rein to nose about in unexamined crime scenes, Barton discovers a note which the deceased wrote right before he was killed. Unfortunately — duh — the note’s in Chinese. Beautiful brushwork, too. Normally I don’t expect great penmanship from dying individuals, but I guess true pride in one’s work continues to the very end.

On McGillicuddy’s recommendation, Barton goes to see the old herbalist down the street, Li See — who is himself none other than Wong. Because everybody needs a secret identity, and being a would-be world conqueror (or Keelat conqueror) doesn’t pay the bills. When playing Li See, Wong is the epitome of the deferential Chinese shopkeeper; he smiles, bows, and peppers his speech with so many “maybe’s” that Barton mocks him mercilessly. But Barton does manage to let Li See/Wong know that he’s got a note which may be a clue to the whereabouts of the last golden coin.

“Boy, if anyone can tell me how to read a map, it’s these guys.”

Now, this movie is not billed as a comedy. Nor are there any scenes in the main plot which appear to have been intended as comedic. (This is apart from the scenes involving Barton sabotaging Peg’s date with another newspaper man. They, despite the result, do seem to have had humorous intent.) Yet there are several scenes which stop short of pure comedy only because they seem to have been staged without any awareness of their humorous potential. Take, for example, Wong’s in-person examination of the laundry shop of the latest victim, looking for the golden coin. He and two other Chinatown locals, none working together, play cat-and-mouse around the two-room shop for minutes on end. Then Wong switches out with Barton, who makes his own surreptitious survey of the surroundings… until yet ANOTHER Chinaman shows up, and Barton hides from him until ready to reveal himself. (At least they’re not all entering the laundry shop after exiting a Volkswagen.) This latest one is Tsang (Fred Warren), another Caucasian decked out with the same facial hair as Bela. Tsang eventually turns out to be from the Secret Service of Keelat. Which leads me to wonder if there actually is anybody left living in the province of Keelat, or if every single resident has relocated to Chinatown.

Another such “Was this meant to be funny?” sequence comes right after Barton and Peg have dinner in a Chinese restaurant. (Peg’s appeal, by the way, is considerably reduced in my eyes by the way she turns up her nose at Chinese food.) The Chinese man who managed to find the hidden gold coin in the laundry shop died of a knife wound in the booth next to Barton’s, and slips him the remaining coin as he expires. Then as Barton and Peg stroll across a darkened Chinatown on their way to get more information from Li See, half the coolies in Chinatown line up to ineptly attempt to rub them out. Knives, ropes, chloroform, dropped flower pots… All miss, and the whitesome twosome only start to realize their predicament halfway through, like roadrunners in some live-action cartoon. And yet there’s never any sort of indication that anyone on the set, cast or crew, realized the scene was supposed to be funny.

“You make fun my accent? You want I should show you — how you Americans say — some ass-whupping?”

At the end of a string of plot machinations, Barton and Peg end up in Wong’s dungeon alongside Tsang, where Wong is prepared to torture from them the location of the last gold coin. (Bizarrely, Barton at first doesn’t even recognize Wong once he’s changed out of his Li See wardrobe. I dunno, how many Chinese men who look exactly like Bela Lugosi do YOU see every day?) Boy, it’s a good thing that Wong has a telephone hidden under a gunnysack in the corner of his dungeon; when Wong’s run off to attend to other things, Barton manages to get a message to his editor. Next thing you know, Wong’s lair is being stormed by a cadre of armed newspapermen (and possibly some police detectives if any are willing to waste their time in Chinatown) through the secret door in the herb shop and shooting Wong dead. The end.

As I mentioned, there are some distinct moments of wit in individual scenes of the script. Given that the “adaptation” was credited to Lew Levinson and the finished screenplay to Nina Howatt (with additional dialogue by James Herbuveaux), I’m going to guess that Howatt was handed a list of the scenes wanted, and could only express her creativity within those scenes, instead of cleaning up and improving upon the de minimis plot. Most of the wit presents itself in the whites-only conversations, largely between Barton and Peg or Barton and McGillicuddy. (Ah, how quickly the Irish forgot the not-long-past day when they were the ethnicity non grata.) Even the conversations between Barton and various Chinese characters are occasionally clever. Racist and offensive in hindsight, but clever.

But to call William Nigh’s direction “pedestrian” is insulting to feet. There’s an utter artlessness to every camera setup, every scene progression. As far as Mr. Nigh is concerned, the camera’s job is merely to record the actors doing and saying what’s written in the script. And “pacing” might as well be a city in Keelat. The fact that a talentless hack like this could work for three decades in Hollywood and helm over a hundred pictures — including three of Boris Karloff’s outings as Detective Wong — says a lot for the arbitrary and random nature of career success in motion pictures. Either that or Nigh had photos of somebody with the wrong person’s wife.

“You’re not really Chinese? Me either!”

So. Notable only for the presence of Bela Lugosi in the title role and as a cultural artifact of the “Yellow Peril” undercurrent in American culture, The Mysterious Mr. Wong is really undeserving of any further attention. Unless you’re looking for pointers on how to gain that cushy seat on the Keelat Planning Commission.