Truly Dreadful Film

the audience applauded

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

****SPOILERS*** International crime fighter Mister Moto, Peter Lorre goes under cover as an escaped murderer from Devil's Island with his cell-mate Paul Brissac, Leon Ames, to infiltrate Brissac league of Assassins. It's the Assassins who are targeting Czech industrialist Anton Darvak, Henry Wilcoxon, for death in him not playing ball with them. Darvak had developed this super steel formula that he's keeping it to himself not wanting it to fall into the wrong hands in case a war breaks out somewhere on the globe. Threatened with death if he doesn't give the league the formula Darvak fluffs the threats off until his good friend Lord Gilford, Sam Harris,, is killed in a truck, that crushed him, accident. That as a warning to him to give up the steel formula to those war mongering international gangsters that the League is working for.Mr. Moto who's now Brissac's manservant got all the information in what's planned for Darvak and all by himself tries to prevent it from happening. As it turns out Darvak is to be set up for elimination at the London Art Gallary by the head of the League of Assassins,????, who's in fact a close friend of his. This has Mr. Moto, who by then found out what's going down, try to prevent that from happening by going undercover as a German art critic. And by doing that have the man planning to do Darvak in get done in, with a 500 pound chandelier landing on his head, instead.***SPOILERS*** With his cover as an escaped murderer as well as manservant blown Mister Moto's life is now in danger of being snuffed out by the league of Assassins that has him use his acrobatic and martial skills to put them out of business. Even after the big man,???, was put out of action with a super splitting, caused by the 500 pound chandelier, headache Mister Moto had his hands full with Brissac who just had to finish the job that he at first started; To kill Anton Darvak on the orders of his now deceased boss the had man of the Assassion League. It was a futile effort on his part in that Mister Moto put Brissac away, with his martial art fighting skills, without as much as breaking out in a sweat in the knock down and drag out free for all he had with him at the end of the film.

Of all the yellowface performances I've ever seen from classic Hollywood, Peter Lorre's Mr. Moto strikes me as the least offensive. The only times the character comes off as too stereotypical are when Mr. Moto is trying to trick dumb white people into thinking he's an ignorant heathen. Most of the time he's exceedingly intelligent, a Japanese Sherlock Holmes. He even has a couple of action sequences (apparently the audiences at the time ate up the Judo stuff). Lorre's just great in the role. The rest of the cast here is fine, too (the most recognizable actors are Henry Wilcoxon and Erik Rhodes). The Asian detective character was extremely popular at the time, the most famous of them being Charlie Chan (there's also Boris Karloff's Mr. Wong). I'm planning to take in a Charlie Chan and Mr. Wong film (n.b. I did end up watching Mr. Wong, Detective afterward, and it was pretty good, too) just for comparison. I also plan on watching all the other Mr. Moto films available to me. I love Lorre and very much enjoyed this film.

A well-conceived story in the Moto series with Lorre escaping from Devil's Island with a British gangster and then parading as his houseboy/servant. Lorre never gets enough credit for his skill as an actor as he gives us two performances as a Japanese, one as Mr. Moto and one as the houseboy as played by Mr. Moto. Both portrayals are markedly different and his Ito performance does suggest a lot of racism that was going on at the time to the Japanese. Watch the film for the mystery involved, Lorre's great performance, and bear in mind the context of the times when the film was made. The scene with Lorre and some pub roughs is a gem as is the finale scene in an art museum. For all the press that goes out about the inherent racism in these films, few ever talk about the fact that Mr. Moto is a cultured, intelligent man who always bests his adversaries in whatever endeavor they partake of.

One of the weakest gimmicks in the Sol Wurtzel-Peter Lorre Moto series was Moto's occasional attempts to lurk about in disguise a la Sherlock Holmes. It's surprising therefore that one of the most successful (and dramatically strongest) films in the series featured Moto doing an extended undercover operation as "Ito," the pidgen-English-speaking Japanese houseboy of a British gangster. The scenes in which Ito/Moto is treated with condescending contempt by his employer and roughed up by Cockney barflies are clearly intended to stimulate the audiences' outrage against their stupidly bigoted treatment of "his kind"--racism here being portrayed as a specifically British tendency, in stark contrast to the friendly respect with which Mr. Moto is treated by American characters. Considering that the Moto series itself has been labeled racist--the assumption being that casting the "ugly" Jew Lorre as a Japanese was an insult to Asians, never mind the way the character was actually treated in the films--it may be time to take a more objective second look.