Condannato a morte

Once you get past the notion of Boris Karloff as a Chinese detective, "Doomed to Die" offers a fair amount of fun. The famed James Lee Wong (Karloff) is hot on the trail of whoever pulled the trigger on shipping magnate Cyrus P. Wentworth (Melvin Lang). What initially looks like an open-and-shut case soon proves much more complex as Wong endures bullets, dead bodies and a constant questioning of his competence to get to the elusive (and completely unpredictable) truth.

Adding some welcome comic relief are hard-nosed policeman Bill Street (Grant Withers) and the ultimate thorn in his side, eager reporter Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds). Though they've been copied a hundred times in the more than 65 years since this picture was released, their antics are enjoyable and occasionally quite funny due to the duo's strong chemistry.

Overall, it's a little clichéd, confusing and at times slow, but "Doomed to Die" is perfect for a rainy night. It has a certain old movie/Scooby Doo charm even viewers who don't go for black-and-whiters can appreciate.

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.

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

The threesome of Mr. Wong, Det. Street and reporter Barbara Logan all return in this installment of the Mr. Wong series. All are wonderful and work well in this murder mystery. A shooting murder of a father by the unwanted son-in-law because the father has rejected him as his daughter's choice as husband. Both were heard shouting in the same room by two witnesses. Det. Street believes it is an open and shut case but Mr. Wong disagrees as well as reporter Logan. Many suspects with a score to settle make this whodunit a mystery to the end.

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!