TheLittleSongbird The Mr Wong series with Boris Karloff are not exactly great films(none are bad though) but they still make for decent entertainment, and Doomed to Die is no exception to that. In personal opinion it is one of the weaker entries in the series, the weakest being Mr Wong in Chinatown and the best being The Mystery of Mr Wong, but that is not knocking it really. It does get convoluted in places and plods a little towards the end, while the editing could have been smoother and Grant Withers seems to think that shouting equals good acting, in my book it's overkill and it's distracting. However, the sets and lighting do provide some good atmosphere, and as ever the music is eerie and jaunty. The story is routine and has convoluted moments in the second half around when Wong narrowly escapes being shot(the most suspenseful Doomed to Die gets), but on the most part it goes along at a snappy pace and you are kept guessing, the final reveal is unexpected and the perpetrator is fairly calculating, one you don't want to mess with. I also found much pleasure in the script, the banter between Marjorie Reynolds and Withers is deliciously witty and the police interrogations here are just as funny. The acting is fairly good, the support cast are more than competent but never really rise above being solid support. Marjorie Reynolds delights once again as the sassy reporter, her rapport with Withers does manage to gel. But the film belongs to Boris Karloff(the best make-up also of the series is in Doomed to Die), even if he doesn't exactly convince as a Chinese and Mr Wong is not one of his best roles admittedly he is still enigmatic and seems to be enjoying himself. Mr Wong has a fair sprinkle of fun moments that despite his late entrance ensures that his presence is a long way from a waste. All in all, unexceptional but still entertaining. 6/10 Bethany Cox

blanche-2 Boris Karloff is Mr. Wong (for the last time) in "Doomed to Die," a 1940 B movie. I find these films much less successful than Charlie Chan or his Japanese counterpart, Mr. Moto.Taping someone's eyes to give them a slight Oriental slant does not a Chinese make, and Boris Karloff is decidedly not Chinese. He's as English as Big Ben. If the makeup were better, his British accent would have worked well, as Chan's speech especially was always stereotypical Of course, the best thing would have been to hire someone Chinese for the role, which they did later on when Keye Luke was cast in "Phantom of Chinatown." Karloff's Wong has a nice laugh and a good sense of humor. He's called in by reporter Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds) to help out when her friend Catherine Wentworth's fiancé is accused of murdering his future father-in-law, shipping magnate Cyrus Wentworth. One of Wentworth's ships has just suffered a fire, killing many people. Also distressing Wentworth is his daughter's romance with the son of a rival.While Catherine's fiancé, Dick Fleming, is arguing with Wentworth in his office, a shot rings out. When people respond, they find Fleming is gone and Wentworth is dead. Ultimately, Fleming is accused of the crime, and it's up to Mr. Wong and Captain Street (Dick Withers) to figure out what happened."Doomed to Die" was made during the Chinese-Japanese war, pre-World War II. It turns out that Kuomintang bonds had been smuggled out of China on the doomed ship to keep them safe. This suggests arson on the ship. With the murder of a Tong leader later on, there is more to this case than an unhappy fiancé.Pretty good story with Captain Street and Bobbie Logan continuing their hatred for one another, which really peps up this film as it did "The Fatal Hour." They are really funny and the best thing about these films. Karloff is very good and gives an intelligent performance.Entertaining, if not the greatest.

secondtake Doomed to Die (1940)Oh boy, poor Boris Karloff. He's the star, and the one great presence, in this cobbled together movie, the last of Karloff's Mr. Wong movies. Someone edited the heck out of this one, and the complex plot gets hard to follow (and hard to believe!) in the hour it takes from start to finish. That's not to say it's a bad movie. It's kind of fun, actually, and because so much is going on, you really have to pay attention, as the scenes keep changing and changing, and more and more characters appear and reappear. The plot itself is forced on things, with red herrings that are absurd and a huge disaster in the opening scenes that ultimately means little to the rest of it, or so it seems to me. There is deliberate comedy which is sometimes funny, and gives the movie an airiness that works pretty well. Karloff, amazingly, plays a Chinese detective, and they do something to his eyes to make him more Asian, but otherwise he's very Karloff, which is good. There are some brief scenes in a so-called Chinatown, but nothing so colorful as, say, the end of "Lady from Shanghai." No, this is from a thoroughly B-movie series of six Mr. Wong films, all but one, with Karloff as Wong. There are at least two other series of films with Asian detectives, an interesting sub-genre, for sure. There are eight Mr. Moto films (with Peter Lorre) around the same time (late 1930s), and there are the almost countless Charlie Chan films (first in the earlier 30s with Warner Oland, and then the late 30s into the 40s starring Sidney Toler). All of these stars were not Asian, but that's the way Hollywood compromised its bigotry with its sense of what the mainstream American audiences wanted.The thing that makes these Karloff films still watchable is their gritty urban settings, and the whodunnit quality that can hold even a mediocre movie together on a Sunday afternoon. "Doomed to Die" has some very dark night scenes (a third of the movie) and if they did that to save money on set design, that's fine with me because it makes them moody and inky. Nice.Check out this rather nice Mr. Wong site:cheddarbay.com/0000celebrityfiles/films/wong/wong.htmlTake them for what they are and you might end up watching all of them!

sol **SPOILERS** Last of Monograms James Lee Wong detective series with the great Boris Karloff playing the witty and preceptive Chinese sleuth. Wong gets involved in the mass murder of some 400 passengers of a cruise ship to cover up an illegal bond smuggling operation. Nowhere as good as the much better Charlie Chan detectives movies that James Lee Wong was an obvious spin off from but Karloff, as James Lee Wong, gives the series that class that it needs to make it at least watchable.As the president of the shipping company that owns the cruise ship Wentworth Castle Paul Wentworth realizes that he's been unknowingly involved in illegal bond smuggling and that his flagship, the Wentworth Castle, was sabotaged in order to cover that fact up, from the Maritime Commission and FBI. Wentworth is suddenly confronted by his rival in the shipping business Paul Fleming, who came over to Wentworth's office to offer his sympathies. This leads to a violent argument over Wenthworths son Dick's involvement with Fleming's daughter Cynthia.It turns out that Dick Fleming is in love with Wentworth's daughter Cynthia and wants her hand in marriage which the mad as hell Paul Wentworth, who feels that Fleming is trying to take over his shipping company, is totally against. In no time at all with young Dick showing, as his father left, up to talk some sense into the crazy old Wentworth's head there's a shot heard, off camera, and before you know it Wentworth is dead as a door nail! Dick is seen fleeing from his office and suspected by the police for Wentworth's murder.Seeing enough of these kind of films you just know that Dick is innocent but the cop on the scene, a captain no less, Bill Street in convinced that Dick is the killer For the rest of the movie Street makes a complete jerk of himself trying to prove it with all the evidence to Paul Wentworth's murder showing that it was someone else. Capt. Street is also hampered by this nosy and pesky reporter Bobbie Logan who, unlike him, feels that Dick didn't do it and in the end has the by them embarrassed cop, after being shown how completely wrong he was, forced to eat his hat with a little salt and pepper sprinkled on it to give it some taste.Wong who comes on the scene late in the film is convinced that, like everyone in the audience, Dick is innocent which leads the real killer to take aim on him wounding Wong when he's out on the street looking for evidence in the case. It turns out that a passenger on the cruise ship, Kia Ling who survived, which the unlucky 400 others didn't, was involved in this smuggling operating of illegal bonds. Kia after being discovered by Wong and Capt. Street in his dockside home murdered it's also discovered that he isn't Kia Ling who we and Det. Wong were lead to believe but Mr. Wentworth's Chinese houseboy and all around handyman Lem Hou!Hou had been working with someone very close to the late Mr. Wentworth in the smuggling operation and was himself knocked off when the real Mr. Big got a bit paranoid and wanted no one to be around to be able to finger him for one of the largest mass murder in US crime history. He didn't at all expect that Chinese/American super-sleuth James Lee Wong was to be put on the case by the Flemings. When Wong finally went to work to get Paul Fleming's son Dick off it was just a matter of time before the real killer of Paul Wentworth was apprehended. That is if the killer didn't get, or murder, James Lee Wong first.