Phantom of Chinatown (1940)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes of runtime, rated 6.2 by 449 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Odd Coupling
At Southern University up north learned professor John or Cyrus Benton (the props department could not make up its mind about his first name) back from a harrowing expedition to the Gobi Desert in the interior of Mongolia gives a lecture — the fraternity bothers fell asleep instantly at this point — on his discoveries, which include…[gasp] a map to the Ming emperor’s legendary temple of Eternal Shopping Mall. With the lights dimmed for PowerPoint he talks while the film of the expedition runs behind him.
Dimmed lights, steady drone, cool night air, no wonder the fraternity boys dropped off.
As Prof’s lugubrious presentation nears the punch line…he keels over and a mêlée ensues as everyone tries to take a selfie with the corpse, because corpse he is. Plod arrives and declares it a natural death due to PowerPoint overexposure, but Mr James Lee Wong soon undermines that conclusion.
Casting notes: Grant Withers plays Plod as only he can: a perfect fit. This Plod is loud, impatient, stupid, patronising, inept, ranting, incoherent, slow-witted, pompous, inconsistent. and a fool. In short, he is presidential material. Withers played this stereotype repeatedly, and he must have brought his own felt hat because he always has it on.
Boris Karloff played Mr James Lee Wong in five previous film with quiet dignity, a respectful authority, and a certain dry wit. Karloff’s contract ended and with a contempt for the viewing public now equaled everyday by the News Corporation, the studio cast the diminutive Keye Luke as Wong. Not even as the nephew of Wong but Wong himself. Still it is the first, and for years the last time, a Chinese actor was cast to play a Chinese lead. Progress of a sort. But in this rendition Number One Son does not have the gravity or grace of Karloff. He does, nonetheless, hold his own against the village idiot Plod, but that is not a high bar.
The ethereal Lotus Long is cast as Benton’s loyal assistant Win Len, and endures some of Plod’s groping efforts at humour. For that alone she deserves a round of applause. He is clumsy, vulgar, and oafish as he dismisses Chinese as savages, and she is glacial and reserved as he tweets out garbled non-sequiturs. Now who does he remind me of….
There is another point when Plod is yucking it up about taking anything Chinese seriously apart from Chop Suey when one of the villains no less points out to him that Genghis Khan ruled the world long before Europeans were using soap. [Was this a personal hygiene hint?] It is all way beyond the fourth grade level Plod attained by cheating. Presidential indeed.
Going for gold, Plod makes a meal of the absurdity of burying any Chink in a tomb and then digging it up. Mr Wong replies that a Chinese expedition is scheduled to dig up George Washington soon. That comparison passes way over Plod’s head.
These are pretty pointed remarks though they are passed off as throw-away lines. Let’s credit George Waggner who wrote the screenplay and director Phil Rosen for retaining and staging these lines.
As between Plod and Wong, the race goes to Wong, but he lets Plod think he figured it out. It may have been a step forward to cast a Chinese to play a Chinese lead, but Luke is not convincing, scowl though he might.
Lotus Long was half-Japanese but from the latter 1930s she pretended to be Chinese to avoid the opprobrium increasingly directed at Japan. Thus, when most Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned, she was not. Though in 1946 she played Tokyo Rose in a film of that name. She married a cameraman because he made her look so good, she said, and they stayed married for fifty-six years until his death. She played Eskimos, red Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and other stereotypes in a mere twenty credits. She quit the business in the 1940s and devoted herself to philanthropy. Cinematizens loss.
Grant Withers played this painful fool so routinely the fraternity brothers have come to think that it is the real man. Maybe he watched too many of his own 202 films. They certainly sap my will to watch.