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Mysterious Mr. Moto (Region One USA DVD)

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"You're a strange character Moto, always playing the lone hand." -- Scotland Yard to Mr. Moto

Peter Lorre, already solidly established in film, nonetheless gained many new fans as J.P. Marquand's Japanese detective of the International Police, Mr. Moto. Born Laszlo Lowenstein in what was then Austria-Hungary, he shot to fame when Fritz Lang cast the German speaking actor in the now legendary, M. Born into a Jewish family, he fled Germany in 1933, taking refuge in Paris, and then London. It was there that Ivor Montagu spotted him, and talked Hitchcock into giving him the colorful role of the assassin in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The rest, as they say, is history. While the stunts in this series were not to his liking, Lorre was perfect in the role, and offered moviegoers a jam-packed hour of fun. Fans enjoyed watching Mr. Moto use both his brains and athletic ability to get over on the bad guys. While it didn't have the charm of Fox's other big franchise, Charlie Chan, it often had more action, and always a good cast of supporting players that kept the story interesting.

Mystery writer Philip MacDonald co-wrote this one with director Norman Foster, and Virgil Miller once again was behind the camera. Leon Ames, who classic film fans will remember as the father to Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis, heads a nice array of players. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Mary Maguire, minus any accent, portrays the lovely secretary in love with her boss, and worried for his safety. Henry Wilcoxon, a Cecil B. DeMille discovery, is the boss who won't give into thugs, and puts his life in danger. Wilcoxon perhaps made more of an impact behind the camera, but is solid in support here. He finally got a good lead role in a sterling "B" mystery from 1947, titled Dragnet. Billed here as Karen Sorrell, Lotus Long has a meaty role as Moto's delicious Eurasian informant, Lotus Liu. Part Japanese and part Hawaiin, she was often cast as Chinese, which worked to her advantage when the war broke out. Everyone assumed she was Chinese, and therefore she was able to avoid internment with many other Japanese Americans during WWII.

The Mysterious Mr. Moto takes off quickly with a prison break from Devil's Island. Paul Brissak (Leon Ames) and his pal Ito (Peter Lorre) manage to make it out of the French prison and obtain passage aboard a ship bound for London. Once there, Ito persuades Brissak to keep him on as his cook so he can keep an eye on him. Mr. Moto of the International Police knows he is a member of the League of Assassins and is intent on softly capturing the monkeys. Scotland Yard is for a bolder approach, but Moto won't tell them all he knows, suspecting it will gum up the works if played with a heavy hand. Using pretty Lotus Liu to work information from one of the group's members, Moto sees the friend of Anton Darvak (Henry Wilcoxon) run down by the league as a warning on the way to meet her. A brawl meant to mask another killing has Moto whisking Lotus to safety before she's next. Meanwhile, Darvak's pretty secretary, Ann Richman (Mary Maguire), enlists his pal's help to find out if Moto is actually telling Darvak the truth about the danger he is in for not selling his new steel.

It all leads to an exciting and fun conclusion to this entry. The series itself is quick moving, colorful, and immensely entertaining. The success of this series has to rest squarely on the shoulders of the diminutive Peter Lorre, whose talent was anything but miniscule. The Mr. Moto series is a good way to remember Lorre, because here, he got to play the good guy, and did so with quiet panache. Great fun for fans.

"You're a strange fellow, Moto," says a character in Mysterious Mr. Moto. "Always playing a lone hand."

"The best way to avoid death," says another, quoting Chesterton, "is not to have too much aversion to it."

But my favorite quote is this exchange: "You needing first-class house boy in London," says Ito Masuko to Paul Brissac, a man Ito has just helped escape from Devil's Island. Ito looks suspiciously like Kentaro Moto. "I'll find one there," says Brissac. "Not like Ito," says Mo...I mean, Ito. "Cleaning? Immense! Cooking? Pretentious! Cocktails? Supreme!"

And so Ito is hired, Brissac gets his cocktails, and we find ourselves in the middle of a vicious international conspiracy of murderers for hire...The League of Assassins. Their current assignment: Kill Anton Darvak, "the steel king of Prague," while Darvak is in London, and make it look like an accident. We suddenly realize, five minutes into the movie, that Moto had himself sentenced to Devil's Island in the guise of Ito just so he could engineer Brissac's escape...and then, hired by Brissac, who is a member of the League, save Darvak and capture or kill the assassins. That will also mean finding out just who Number One is, the man behind the League and who no one, not even the members of the League, seem to know. This case is going to call for all of Moto's ingenuity, subtlety, skill in hand-to-hand combat and insouciance in dealing out death to villains.

I'm happy to report that Mysterious Mr. Moto, fourth in the series, has bounced back from the Jungle Jim programmer that Mr. Moto Takes a Chance turned out to be. We've returned to civilization. Twentieth Century Fox's back lot never made London look more substantial. The Moto series may have been low-budget quickies but they look a lot better than they cost. We're taken from posh hotels to swank art galleries, from foggy dark streets to smoky, dangerous pubs, from Trafalgar Square to Soho. All the while we're privy to the careful planning of these assassins to kill Darvak. We're also up to the second button of our well-tailored doubled-breasted suits in the mixture of Ito serving Brissac with smiles and of Moto pulling the threads of his web tighter and tighter. The movie is filled with more awful Cockney accents coming from the mouths of American bit players than anything until the Sherlock Holmes series got underway. Still, we also have the prissy ebullience of Darvak's good friend, David Scott-Frensham as played by Erik Rhodes. He was an actor parents wouldn't worry about if their daughter started dating him. Rhodes specialized in one kind of portrayal, epitomized by his two best-known characters, Rodolfo Tonetti in The Gay Divorcee in 1934 and Alberto Beddini in Top Hat, 1935. By the start of the Forties he had left Hollywood for Broadway and a high social life. You'd never guess he started out as a mid-west kid born in what's now Oklahoma.

We've lost a bit of the happy surprise we felt when we met Mr. Moto for the first time. Still, Mysterious Mr. Moto is well crafted and fast paced (it's only 63 minutes long). Identifying Number One is fun; there's not too much pidgin English; there is skulking danger and a pub fight that would put most Western saloon brawls to shame; Mr. Moto's way with death is not excessive and, of course, there is a first-class performance by Peter Lorre. By now Lorre knew he had become trapped in a typecasting series and was being underpaid to boot. He didn't like it one bit. Lorre was a fine actor and it doesn't show.

Mysterious Mr. Moto is the fourth in the four-movie set, The Mr. Moto Collection - Volume One. This disc seems to be from that set. The DVD transfer looks quite good.

The Mysterious Mr. Moto is the fifth of the nine Mr. Moto movies starring the fantastic Peter Lorre. In 1938, the year the movie was released, Lorre was at the top of his movie career before his problems started settling in and his horrible weight gain. Rather than being in a remote location such as an island, the majority of the movie takes place in London. His job is to infiltrate a London-based secret society whose mission is to assassinate certain persons of high rank.

One of the most underrated, misunderstood and unappreciated actors, he still shined in these "B" movies and his acting prowess was easy to segregate from the somewhat non-brilliant scripts. The other secret of these movies was the fact that they were directed by Norman Foster who also directed several Charlie Chan movies. Were it not for WWII and that Mr. Moto was Japanese, there could have been many more made.

I would recommend you purchase not only this movie but all nine can be purchased in two DVD sets. They are a real treat and are truly watchable over and over again. Why? LORRE is the reason. You will enjoy this and all the others.

This was my first look ever at Peter Lorre's "Mr. Moto" character, and I couldn't help but compare and contrast him to the famous "Charlie Chan" of a similar period. "Mr. Moto" is charming but isn't the comedian or the proverb-quoting Chan. I would have to watch a few more Moto movies before I could really compare the two fairly, but what I saw in this film impressed me.

In this story, Moto pretends to be a fugitive from Devil's Island, one of two escapees who wind up in London. That was the idea all along for Our Man as he hoped his fellow man-of- flight, "Paul Brissac" would lead to him to bigger fish in the criminal world, specifically "The League of Assassins."

Just when I thought this film was starting to get a tiny bit slow, it picked up nicely and had very good last 20-some minutes with a suspenseful ending. The actions were hokey but so what? The film is 70 years old so I don't expect state-of-the-art special-effects. In spots, it was so corny it made it fun. I was shocked how physical little Mr. Moto was, throwing bodies around like a WWF bruiser!

By the way, the restoration job on the DVD transfer makes this a good-looking film. I saw this as part of the recently-released set.