Movie review - Moto #5 - "The Mysterious Mr Moto" (1938) ***

If people had paid more attention to Mr Moto films they mightn't have been so surprised by the Japanese in WW1. Here Moto infiltrates a gang of assassins - he gets himself imprisoned in Devil's Island and escapes with one of their member (Leon Ames), which is going to an awful lot of trouble, though not for the movies (eg Nevada Smith). Then the action moves to London where, to be honest, it bogs down every now and then, despite a fair bit of acting - a brawl in a London pub especially feels to be like padding. And I wish this had been set in a French colony or somewhere more exotic rather than boring old London.

But it remains entertaining, the head baddie is the one you least suspect, and politically its fascinating: Moto gets some very rough racist treatment when he visits a pub, and also the head of Scotland Yard is suspicious of him because he's Japanese.

The cast is strong as are production values - Fox didn't stint on the Motos even though they were Bs (or else they had a particularly good production manager). Henry Wilcoxon - only a few years after starring in The Crusades - adds class as the object of the assassin's target, a Pacifist industrialist who won't sell to a totalitarian government. His character is a bit of a dick, being stupidly oblivious to assassination threats - I kept thinking "no loss, really") but Wilcoxon does what he can.

Aussie actor Mary Maguire (from Heritage) is very sweet and lovely as his secretary (she has the odd Aussie twang in her speaking voice; she went to LA after making The Flying Doctor and made some B movies, then going over to London). It's not much of a part - I was hoping she'd turn traitor or turn out to be an agent, but no she's just dull and loving. Erik Rhodes is Wilocxon's silly ass assistant who turns out to be the head baddie - Moto holds his hand and arranges for a chandelier to fall on his head. and kills him, which is full on - especially as at that stage of the movie we don't know he's bad.

Harold Hubert, who was Moto's detective friend in Mr Moto's Gamble, is a baddie here. Lorre and Ames' characters have a fantastic brawl with Moto's jiujitsu really coming to the fore. And there's a kind of quasi romance going on for Moto with that Chinese agent who seems to have a crush on him - I kept expecting her to die tragically but she doesn't.