TeenzTen
An action-packed slog
Catangro
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Donald Seymour
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Michael_Elliott
Phantom of Chinatown (1940) * 1/2 (out of 4)An archaeologist returns from an expedition in China and is giving a lecture on a scroll that he discovered. Just as he starts to talk about the curse surrounding it he falls to the ground. At first people think he's just tired but it turns out that he was poisoned and now he's dead. Mr. Wong (Keye Luke) is put on the case and tries to determine what happened with the aide of Captain Street (Grant Withers).PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN would be the sixth and final film in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. The first two films with Boris Karloff were better-than-average "B" movies but his three follow-ups were fair at best. This sixth film had Karloff being replaced by Luke who was well-known for his appearances in the Charlie Chan movies but sadly this is the worst in the series.Yes, it's nice seeing an Asian actor in the lead role and many of the supporting parts are played by Asians as well. The problem is that Luke just wasn't very good here. In fact, he just wasn't the greatest actor out there and I had a major problem believing that he was the character. A smart and brilliant detective is not what I saw from Luke and this damaged the film. The screenplay didn't do the character much justice and the same is true for Withers who turns in his worst performance in the series.The biggest problem with the movie is the fact that the story and mystery are just way too bland for their own good. The film really gets off to a good start but after the man dies everything just falls apart. There's no drama, no tension and just nothing here that holds your attention. Even the 61-minute running time drags by.
tedg
I maintain that some very important conventions were worked out in 30s mysteries. The Charlie Chan series was instrumental in some of these, and this is the last of them. It incidentally has Charlie's son as the detective, the first Asian playing the character. The sensitivity to Chinese culture is no better than in the earlier movies, but that is a side issue for me. The wanted item here is a map to a vast oil deposit, discovered and stolen in the style of mummy movies.The interesting device is the use of a movie within the movie. The expedition had a filmmaker along whose filming gets mixed with conspiracy. The ancient scroll gets destroyed and converted to photographs.
utgard14
The beginning of this movie has an archaeologist unearthing an ancient tomb and subsequently murdered for it. No, it isn't a mummy movie. It's a Mr. Wong murder mystery. The last Mr. Wong movie, actually. This is today what we would call a reboot. They replace Boris Karloff with the younger Keye Luke, thereby restarting the series with a young Mr. Wong. It's interesting to see an actual Asian playing the lead role in one of these Asian detective movies, where a white man always played the part because it was believed at the time audiences wouldn't go to see movies with a non-white leading man.Keye Luke was an amazingly personable actor but this movie does not give him a chance to shine, forcing him to play Wong as a rather stuffy bore. Luke receives assistance from the lovely Lotus Long. They could have used this opportunity of a reboot to breathe some life into the Wong series, which was pretty stale. But instead this is quite possibly the dullest of the lot. Perhaps if given this shot at a better studio, it would have led to a long-lasting series with Keye Luke as the lead. But this is Monogram, king of the cheapies, so it's not surprising it didn't work out. Grant Withers was the only constant in all of the Wong films. While his character was a walking cliché, Withers played the part well.On the whole, the series was watchable but forgettable, even with Boris Karloff as the star. If you haven't seen many (better) B detective series, you might enjoy the Wong films more. But I've seen pretty much all of the them, certainly all of the major ones, and Mr. Wong does not stand up well.
goblinhairedguy
Poverty Row programmers like this may now seem incredibly hokey, but at the same time they're fascinating time capsules of American mores of those bygone (and maybe not so bygone) days. This one is routinely scripted and handled with little inspiration (though lots of pace), yet it's quite idiosyncratic for its time. Most obviously, a real Asian (Keye Luke, better known as Charlie Chan's Number One Son) is finally given the opportunity to play an Asian detective. The screenwriters certainly take advantage of the unique casting, turning a lot of the expected racially-insensitive material on end -- Luke gets in a real zinger when he brashly compares the looting of a Mongolian sarcophagus to having a Chinese adventurer dig up and purloin George Washington's corpse from its tomb. Also relevant to the 21st century is the fact that the tomb raiders are not so much seeking the legendary Eternal Flame for cultural or historic reasons, but due to the conjecture that it is produced by a hidden treasure trove of priceless oil. Quite refreshing attitudes for a 40s B-movie, with some vivid scenes of Chinatown life and interesting travelogue footage of a seemingly authentic excursion to Northern China.
