This is Boris Karloff's last stint as Mr. Wong. Once again, we do not see his house and butler, which sets were obviously recycled and no longer in existence by now. Grant Withers once again is the irritating and shouting Detective Inspector. Marjorie Reynolds appears once again as the young woman newspaper reporter who gets in the way but saves people without intending to. An original story was written for this film by Ralph Bettison (who was to write the next one as well.) The film opens dramatically with aerial footage of a large ocean liner on fire in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (A helpful reviewer points out that this real footage is of a ship called 'Morro Castle' which caught fire at sea in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey on September 9, 1934.) It turns out in the film that this fire is sabotage, and the 300 people who died are mostly Chinese heading for America, hence Mr. Wong becomes involved because the San Francisco police need someone who can go and speak privately with the Chinese 'elders' who run Chinatown and get the lowdown on what is really going on. The shipping magnate in San Francisco who owned the doomed ship is murdered. There is obviously something very fishy going on. In fact, the plot thickens and thickens and thickens, as if flour were slowly being added while being stirred. It turns out that on the ship was a huge amount of financial bonds for the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang) Government, so international intrigue is clearly at work here. As usual, there are lots of villains, and the film is passable viewing.
Review of Doomed to Die
