The Mysterious Mr Wong ** (1934, Bela Lugosi, Wallace Ford, Arline Judge) – Classic Movie Review 11,991

Director William Nigh’s 1934 tongue-in-cheek black and white Monogram Pictures’ horror mystery movie The Mysterious Mr Wong stars Bela Lugosi, Wallace Ford, and Arline Judge.

A wildly miscast Bela Lugosi, who was Hungarian, plays a Chinatown underworld criminal mastermind villain, Mr Fu Wong, who avariciously collects the famous Twelve Coins of Confucius, the key to power in a Chinese province, Keelat where Wong aims to be supreme ruler. By day Wong is a harmless-seeming shopkeeper in Chinatown but at night he is the bloodthirsty pursuer of the Twelve Coins. Wallace Ford co-stars as a wisecracking ace reporter reporter called Jason Barton and Arline Judge plays his girl Peg, who are on Wong’s trail.

This antique chiller is moved along briskly by director Nigh and offers a fair number of silly, incredibly dated thrills, with the treasurable Lugosi on familiar frightening form in two parts, including the villain’s nice nemesis, Lai See.

The screenplay by Nina Howatt, Lew Levenson and James Herbuveaux is based on the based on the 1928 short story The Strange Adventure of the Twelve Coins of Confucius by Harry Stephen Keeler, one of three stories in his book Sing Sing Nights.

Mr Wong does not appear in the original story and the film has no relation to Monogram Pictures’ later Mr Wong film series.

The cast are Bela Lugosi as Mr Fu Wong / Lai See, Wallace Ford as Jason H Barton, Arline Judge as Peg, E. Alyn Warren as Philip Tsang, Lotus Long as Moonflower, Robert Emmett O’Connor as Officer McGillicuddy, Chester Gan as Tung aka Hi Strung, Edward Peil Sr as Wong henchman Jen Yu, Luke Chan as Professor Chan Fu, Lee Shumway as Editor Steve Brandon, Etta Lee as Lu San, and Ernest F. Young as Reporter Chuck Roberts.

Monogram Pictures’ later Mr Wong film series: Mr Wong, Detective (1938), The Mystery of Mr Wong (1939), Mr Wong in Chinatown (1939), The Fatal Hour (1940), Doomed to Die (1940), all with Boris Karloff, and Phantom of Chinatown (1940).

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 11,991

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com