Condenado à Morte

As far as mystery B-movies go, you cant go "Wong" with this one. Karloff returns once again as the famous Chinese detective James Lee Wong to solve the murder of a shipping tycoon. What seems like an open and shut case to Capt. Street (Grant Withers) quickly becomes a web of deceit, lies and murder! I've only seen two Wong films, this and "The Fatal Hour", but I really enjoyed them both, largely due to Capt. Street and his "sidekick" reporter Bobbie Logan. The banter between them is cliché, but often pretty funny anyway. They have great chemistry together on screen. Karloff is, of course, great as Wong. I loved his entrances from the most unlikely places, such as windows or fire escapes. The plot was pretty straight forward, though it was full of red-herrings and false suspects that made the conclusion a bit hard to guess. Not that that's a bad thing mind you, I quite enjoyed the ending. To sum up, I recommend this as well as the slightly better "Fatal Hour" as two of the best mystery B-movies you'll find out there.

8/10

Mr Wong returns in another murder mystery! This time, a wealthy shipping magnate is trying to cope with the burning of one of his ships which has caused the deaths of hundreds of people, when he's shot and killed in his office. Mr Wong's got his work cut out for him this time, as Detective Street thinks he's already got the culprit – the son of the businessman's rival who was in the office about ten seconds before the guy got shot. We all know that's too easy, right? You've got all manner of suspects here, from the shady business partner, the lawyer, the rival or even the weird guy who keeps handing around on the fire escape. With plucky female journalist on hand, Wong sets out to get his man.

While not as good as the other Wong film I've seen (The Fatal Hour), Doomed to Die still holds its own. It takes a while to get going, but once Wong starts doing his investigations, things pick up a bit. He visits the local Tong, gets shot at, discover secret passageways and a corpse, and generally runs rings around everyone else in the film. I wouldn't like to say too much without giving away the plot, mind you. It's just what it is, a solid mystery film that won't take up too much of your time. I quite like the way that Karloff, although playing a Chinese guy, doesn't overdo it and carries Wong with a certain quiet dignity.

For the fifth and last time, the great Boris Karloff portrays the oriental super-detective James Lee Wong who effortlessly solves the murder cases for which his police colleague Capt. Street (Grant Withers) always manages to arrest the wrong guy. Cyrus Wentworth, the magnate of a giant shipping company has been shot in his office and the obvious suspect is the young Dick Fleming, who's both the son of Cyrus' biggest business rival AND the forbidden lover of his daughter. The always-meddling reporter Miss Logan asks Wong to investigate the case and he naturally discovers that Wentworth had a lot more enemies who wanted him death, like relatives of victims who were recently killed in a shipping accident or former employees who attempted to blackmail him. The story opens downright terrific, with a great characterization of Cyrus Wentworth and his possible assassins. After about 15 minutes, Boris Karloff walks in and from that moment on he monopolizes all the attention! Of course Wong foresees the killer's every possible move and of course he always is several steps ahead of Capt. Street's investigation. Normally this exaggerated amount of 'cleverness' would annoy me tremendously; but Karloff's performance is so good and the script is so light-headed that you easily forgive all the illogicalness. The dialogues are wit and often humorous (the constant arguments of reporter Logan and police Capt. Street) and the sequences set in Chinatown are atmospheric, as usual. "Doomed to Die" is a very cheap but worthwhile thriller, especially recommended to fans of well-structured detective films and admirers of the almighty Boris Karloff. One more Wong-movie got released after this, made by a different director and not starring Karloff.

Doomed to Die (1940)

Oh boy, poor Boris Karloff. He's the star, and the one great presence, in this cobbled together movie, the last of Karloff's Mr. Wong movies. Someone edited the heck out of this one, and the complex plot gets hard to follow (and hard to believe!) in the hour it takes from start to finish.

That's not to say it's a bad movie. It's kind of fun, actually, and because so much is going on, you really have to pay attention, as the scenes keep changing and changing, and more and more characters appear and reappear. The plot itself is forced on things, with red herrings that are absurd and a huge disaster in the opening scenes that ultimately means little to the rest of it, or so it seems to me. There is deliberate comedy which is sometimes funny, and gives the movie an airiness that works pretty well.

Karloff, amazingly, plays a Chinese detective, and they do something to his eyes to make him more Asian, but otherwise he's very Karloff, which is good. There are some brief scenes in a so-called Chinatown, but nothing so colorful as, say, the end of "Lady from Shanghai." No, this is from a thoroughly B-movie series of six Mr. Wong films, all but one, with Karloff as Wong. There are at least two other series of films with Asian detectives, an interesting sub-genre, for sure. There are eight Mr. Moto films (with Peter Lorre) around the same time (late 1930s), and there are the almost countless Charlie Chan films (first in the earlier 30s with Warner Oland, and then the late 30s into the 40s starring Sidney Toler). All of these stars were not Asian, but that's the way Hollywood compromised its bigotry with its sense of what the mainstream American audiences wanted.

The thing that makes these Karloff films still watchable is their gritty urban settings, and the whodunnit quality that can hold even a mediocre movie together on a Sunday afternoon. "Doomed to Die" has some very dark night scenes (a third of the movie) and if they did that to save money on set design, that's fine with me because it makes them moody and inky. Nice.

Check out this rather nice Mr. Wong site:

cheddarbay.com/0000celebrityfiles/films/wong/wong.html

Take them for what they are and you might end up watching all of them!

The routine plot unfolds in so obvious a manner that one loses interest in the outcome. The production values are on the same level as they were in the other Wong pictures in the...series, and the performances are on a par with the material. Most of the comedy is provoked by the bickering between a detective and a young girl who tires to outwit him.. Boris Karloff saves this picture and makes it into another great classic series.