Sunday, July 7, 2013

On DVD: The Fatal Hour (1940)

Boris Karloff returns as Hugh Wiley's inscrutable detective, James Lee Wong, in "The Fatal Hour". This was Karloff's next to last performance as Wong, and it's business as usual.

A close friend of Police Captain William Street (Grant Withers) is murdered, and Street, unofficially, hires Wong to help find the killer. Throw in pesky reporter Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), and it becomes a formulaic whodunit. Karloff's quiet, understated performance as Wong demonstrated he could do more than horror movies, but, sadly, there were few roles outside the genre that could attract Karloff after the Wong series ended.

Cult Cinema Classics uploaded "The Fatal Hour":



Rating: B.

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