Solid B police procedural that doesn't waste
a minute in its 66 minute running time. This is a by the book procedural
with an off-screen voice narrating throughout - giving the audience details
like the time and the location and in one instance mentioning that the building
was one of the few in the area to survive the San Francisco earthquake. Yes,
San Francisco. To be more specific Chinatown. Long identified with mystery
and superstition. A tourist mecca with undercurrents of intrigue and violence.
So the narrator tells us. Where the price of a jade vase is murder.
A female antique dealer (Jacqueline deWit) asks her easily influenced friend/lover
Clifford (Hurd Hatfield) to go get a vase that she just saw in a curio shop
in Chinatown. He does. At the point of a gun. And shoots the clerk and then
the clerk's girlfriend and walks away. A sociopath. With good taste. The
girl had tried calling the police but only got through to the Chinatown phone
operators before he shot her. Clifford finished the call saying a robbery
has taken place. In Cantonese. The phone operator is Hazel Fong. The clerk
was played by Benson Fong and Hazel by Maylia - married in real life for
over 40 years. They had just both been in Boston Blackie's last film, Chinese
Venture, in which Benson also played a clerk in a curio store - likely the
same curio set. Maylia got the bigger role in both films but it was Benson
who went on to a long career as she took care of their five children. Victor
Sen-yung who was also in the Boston Blackie film shows up as a hotel clerk.
I guess they were the extent of Columbia's Asian players. Both films were
directed by Seymour Friedman.
The police just follow the clues - slowly, arduously - foot killing police
work - one clue leads to another but they assume that the killer is a Chinese
man and start frisking every man in Chinatown - and then bringing them to
the station where they have to speak and Hazel listens in to see if she can
recognize the voice. Eventually, they find his apartment and he has a recorded
voice of himself practicing Cantonese - Hazel identifies the voice and in
a rather intriguing effort to catch him they have thousands of this record
made and handed out to bus drivers, waitresses etc asking them to remember
that voice. He makes one more call and wouldn't you know it - Hazel is on
the other end and the cops close in on him - with machine guns. There are
a few things that make no sense here - like why did he finish the call -
just being polite? - can you really frisk every Chinese male that walks by
- I guess we know the answer to that - but I like the way it is solved by
old-fashioned police work. Up on YouTube.
