Two Wongs

Our bad boys of Halloween, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, have much in common, including, - well-duh-ishly - their status as icons of the early days of horror. While their most famous early roles are at Universal, they also made films for poverty row studio Monogram, and both played characters named Mr. Wong. The similarity in the two characters ends in the name, as Lugosi's Wong is kind of a small scale Fu Manchu, an Asian mastermind, while Karloff's Wong is a heroic detective in the mold of Charlie Chan, albeit more genteel, not as judgemental and less full of syntactically-challenged aphorisms.

Many reasons are given for Lugosi's loss of career momentum after his early Universal roles, but I would say one is that he never really got to play heroes. He seemed to always play unsympathetic villains, even alienating viewers in potentially sympathetic roles such as the mad scientist in the later film he made wth Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster. He delivers the famous "Hunted...despised..." soliliquy with such a palpable disdain for humanity that it is fascinating to watch but also genuinely frightening. Karloff, delivering a similar speech, would have evoked compassion. Partly this would be due to our own learned reception of a soft English accent versus a harsh Hungarian delivery. But only partly. It might be just in how they elected to play their characters. Karloff's Frankenstein monster, even when killing, seemed without guile. His habitual expressions are confusion and desperation. But for me the most lasting image of Lugosi's one foray into that role, in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, is his face slowly turning to the camera with an expression of pure malevolence. Delightful Lugosi malevolance, but it is a chilling leer. Some would argue that's what a horror movie should contain and I can't argue against that. But it's that horror aptitude that made a transfer into other genres and other types of characters less feasible for Bela than it was for Boris. That being said, as demonstrated in One Body Too Many, Lugosi could play comedy. What would have been difficult is for Bela to present a mad scientist as sympathetic as Karloff's in The Ape, as one example.

As for the two movies in question, both directed by the gifted William Nigh, both are very entertaining and much of that value is due to other players as well as Nigh's ability to create palpable comic strip atmosphere on the thread of a shoe string.

In The Mysterious Mr. Wong, Lugosi is seemingly mild mannered shopkeeper by day, but by early evening to night, depending when he gets off work, he is avidly pursuing relics known as the Coins of Confucious. This of course reminds us of our own lives as collectors with day jobs, though presumably none of us murder for it. Wallace Ford is the hardnosed, nosy, nasal-voiced reporter in pursuit of the story he smells as bodies start to pile up in Chinatown. He gets a lot of the best lines, and plays it with flair as he also purses the affections of office girl Arline Judge. One very clever shot is of the two of them in a tight frame with a third wheel, another suitor that Ford schemes to get rid of. We are looking at the three full on as they sit at a lunch counter. It's a simple shot but just think how impossible telling a story that way would have been just ten years earlier in the silent era, never mind before film. Eventually Ford and Judge come upon a secret passageway in the back of Wong's shop, natch, leading to cobwebs, one-liners, and the thrilling conclusion. This recalls to me how, as a youngster, I felt it was inevitable that I would end up in a similar adventure with various girls I had crushes on. No doubt I was at least in part under the influence of the climactic cave scenes in Tom Sawyer. And suddenly now I'm recalling a M*A*S*H episode where Hawkeye is looking into the back of a patient's throat and says he can still still see Becky and Tom wandering around back there. In many ways, that patient's throat is my mind.

Be that as it may, and it may, we then come to Karloff's Mr. Wong movies, and this one in particular. This series mixed together the Asian sleuth genre with the girl reporter genre, ie Torchy Blane, to what I think is great effect. In this particular one, the blonde girl reporter's intrepidness is able to save Wong's life, as he is embroiled in the mysterious murder (of course it's mysterious, wouldn't be much of a movie without that), of a Chinese princess, leading to much skulking around in beautiful fog. Ah, fog, nature's secret passageway. Well, um, except for caves.

Karloff is charming as Wong, but it is really Marjorie Reynolds, and Grant Withers as her hardnosed cop antagonist/love interest that puts this one over.