Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff) attends a party whose host (Morgan Wallace) is slain in the midst of a charades-type game. The victim had feared for his life after arranging for a rare gem to be smuggled out of China. The slain collector’s wife (Dorothy Tree) and private secretary (Craig Reynolds) are suspected, as they were …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>The Mystery of Mr. Wong</em> (1939)”
Before the Charlie Chan series moved to Monogram in the 1940s, that little studio had its own series about a Chinese detective, James Lee Wong, who had starred in short stories in the magazine Collier’s. The first five of the six movies star Boris Karloff as the sleuth, an expert on many things, including Chinese …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>Mr. Wong, Detective</em> (1938)”
Trapper Paul Lautrec (Edward Norris) is shot and framed for a string of fur robberies and killings, and it’s up to Mountie Rod Webb (Kirby Grant), aided by his faithful dog Chinook, to untangle the scheme. This is another entertaining programmer in the Monogram series starring Grant and Chinook. Recommended. Otto finds this one pleasing …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>The Wolf Hunters</em> (1949)”
Wilkie Collins’ famed novel was brought to the screen as a fairly standard low-budget mystery movie by Monogram in 1934. The film is competent but nothing more, though it is enlivened a bit by Elspeth Dudgeon as a housekeeper and Gustav von Seyffertitz as a moneylender. Mildly recommended. Otto judiciously thinks this movie is OK.
Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, and Raymond Hatton, old hands at movie-making whose audience appeal dated back to the silents, made an appealing western trio for Monogram as the Rough Riders. In this series entry, U.S. Marshals Buck Roberts (Jones), Tim McCall (McCoy), and Sandy Hopkins (Hatton) investigate a gang that has murdered a local sheriff …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>Below the Border</em> (1942)”
Former silent film star George O’Brien made the transition to sound chiefly performing in westerns, and he appeared in a well-regarded string of westerns at RKO at the end of the 1930s. Lawless Valley was one of these: an efficient little B picture with a helping of humor. The plot is based on a story …
Charles Starrett, best known for his long-running series as the Durango Kid, essays an early role in this rather soapy picture. A shipwreck strands a young woman (top-billed Anita Page), her fiancé (Kenneth Thomson), the man (Starrett) she believes guilty of a murder for which her brother was imprisoned, and that man’s sidekick (Eddie Borden) …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>Jungle Bride</em> (1933)”
This early entry in the Bowery Boys series offers another example of the blend of crime and comedy so often found in the films. This time, thanks to a photographer friend, Sach (Huntz Hall) ends up suspected of involvement in a bank robbery, one in fact committed by a gang led by Ace Deuce (Sheldon …
Read the full post →“Monogram Monday: <em>Bowery Bombshell</em> (1946)”
A-Haunting We Will Go opens with our heroes, Laurel and Hardy, being warned to leave town after a night in jail. To accomplish that, the boys, who are down on their luck, take a job escorting a coffin to Dayton, Ohio. Yet unbeknownst to them, the coffin contains not a cadaver, but a notorious criminal, …
“Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff in…” says the title card of this movie, easily one of the strongest entries in the long-running Charlie Chan mystery series, thanks to setting, cast, and resolution. Karloff plays an amnesiac opera singer who escapes from a lunatic asylum after recovering his memory that someone — presumably his then-wife — …
Read the full post →“<em>Charlie Chan at the Opera</em> (Twentieth Century Fox, 1936)”
