Horror Classic 15 of 50: THE FATAL HOUR

The Fatal Hour is a 1940 film directed by William Nigh. It's on side A of disc 4 of the Horror Classics DVD set, but it should have come with a disclaimer... for you see, my friends, The Fatal Hour is NOT a horror movie!

Though it has a number of things in common with other movies in this set (see tags below), it just doesn't qualify as horror. So what is it? Read on to find out.

Synopsis
The character right at the center of all the action is Mr. Wong, an Asian police detective affectionately known as "the Chinese copper." So who better to play him than a British guy? It's none other than Frankenstein (and The Terror) star Boris Karloff, which probably explains the presence of this movie in this DVD set.

Anyway, the plot. So, our other characters include police captain Bill Street and spunky girl reporter Bobbie Logan. As the story begins, the body of Street's fellow officer and buddy Dan Grady is found floating in the San Francisco bay... and he's been shot, which just adds insult to injury. Mr. Wong comes in to help with the case, and soon finds a valuable jade stone in Grady's desk. Hmm...

Grady was last seen alive at the Neptune Club, a shady nightclub owned by the even shadier Hardway Harry Locket. The club is a favorite spot of Tanya Sorova and her boyfriend Frank Belden, Jr. These two crazy kids want to get married, but Frank's father, Frank Belden, Sr. disapproves vehemently. I'm not sure why... maybe Sorova came over for dinner and ate all the mashed potatoes, then never offered to help with the dishes.

Mr. Wong is pretty sure the jade found in Grady's desk is significant, as Grady was in the middle of a jewel smuggling case when he was killed, so Wong investigates Poppa Belden's jewelry store late at night. That's when he discovers Belden, Sr. dead in the back room. Apparently somebody was pretty unhappy with his return policy! Also, it turns out the store has oodles of jade just like the thingy Grady had.

Have I told you about the character of Mr. Forbes yet? No? Dang, there's a lot of characters in this thing. Well, Forbes owns a radio station, and he has some connection to everyone else, though I've already forgotten what that connection was. Mr. Wong and Street go to his hotel room to tell him about Belden's murder, but their conversation is rudely interrupted by the murder of Tanya Sorova in the room directly overhead. And get this -- the maid saw Sorova's boyfriend Frank Belden, Jr. leaving the scene via the back stairway!

Is Frankie the killer? Will Mr. Wong be able to crack the case before someone else gets offed? Is the GIANT GILA MONSTER involved in any way? Two of those questions will be answered definitively by the end of the movie's 68 minutes.

Is It Scary?
No, which goes back to that whole "It's not a horror movie" thing. What we have here is a straight-up mystery story... not moody or stylish enough to be a noir, but rather a pretty straightforward whodunnit.

Lessons I Learned

• Remote control radios existed in 1940! I had no idea that kind of technology was around so early, but it plays a pretty important part in the solution to the mystery. What's next -- Bela Lugosi carrying a Palm Pilot? ZING!

• It's possible to answer a phone from one story up.

• It's a shame people don't wear hats anymore.

My Favorite Line
Captain Street, on discovering that a murder has occurred upstairs while he's been talking to Forbes: "How do you like that? A murder right over my own head!"

Body Count
Four.

Comments
•Dubious casting choices aside, this wasn't such a bad movie. It was a bit of a challenge keeping track of all the characters (I didn't even tell you about Griswold, who performs a one-man radio show in which he plays all of the roles, including females), but the pacing was pretty good -- every scene moved things along in some way. Boris Karloff was all right, and seemed quite spry compared to the tired, aging Karloff seen in The Terror. The solution to the murder case wasn't really anything that we, the viewers, could have figured out for ourselves, but it pretty clever.

•Captain Bill Street was played by Grant Withers. He seemed to think that shouting is the same thing as acting, as he did a lot of it.

•I liked Bobbie Logan (played by Marjorie Reynolds), the only chick in the movie. She even had snappy, 40s newspaper reporter dialogue like you always see in movies, which leads me to believe that all journalists of that era actually talked that way. Bobbie actually got a moment to shine in the final scene, saving Wong and Street's lives from the killer... then she faints. So it's almost progressive.

•Internet research tells me this movie was one of a series of Mr. Wong films. Karloff played the role in all but the last one, at which point the part was handed over to Keye Luke, an actual Chinese actor. Keye Luke, as you all know, played the old man who ran the curio shop in the Gremlins movies.

•You know what would have been really mind-blowing? If it had turned out that Mr. Wong had been the killer. Just once I'd like to see that happen in a mystery, especially one with a pre-established sleuth character.

Letter grade for The Fatal Hour: B-

Next movie in the 50-DVD set: Dead Men Walk. Oh no... This isn't going to be another zombie movie, is it?