DAUGHTER OF THE TONG (1939)

After an off-screen narrator tells us about the important and sometimes deadly work of the FBI, we see an old Chinese man watching some crates being unloaded. He also watches an FBI agent getting nosy and discovering that the crates contain Chinese people being smuggled in to the United States. In an awkwardly staged scene, the agent is shot and killed, and when word gets back to Washington, FBI agent Dickson (Grant Withers) is asked to impersonate a captured thug named Gallagher and infiltrate the gang; Dickson happens to be a dead ringer for Gallagher and all that's needed is a fake scar on his face. His main job is to find Carney, the ringleader of the gang, though no one knows what he looks like. But Dickson takes on a secondary job when he meets perky young Marion (Dorothy Short) who asks him to help her brother Jerry (Dave O'Brien) get out of the Carney gang. We rather anti-climactically discover that Carney is actually a lovely but sinister-looking Chinese woman known as The Illustrious One (Evelyn Brent). After some captures and escapes and poorly-staged fisticuffs, the FBI wins the day.

This B-thriller has very few thrills and little else to recommend it. I generally like Grant Withers as a B-movie tough guy but he's hemmed in by a rote script and lazy direction. Evelyn Brent (pictured) is sexy but doesn't appear to have a drop of Chinese blood in her—I suppose one might argue that it's a positive thing that she's not made up in yellowface like so many actors were in the classic era to play Asian characters, but it's a little distracting to see her looking so very Anglo—she is much more effective with a similar sinister look in Val Lewton's THE SEVENTH VICTIM. The use of the Tong in the title is misleading; virtually no one else in the gang is Chinese except for a hotel clerk, played by Chinese actor Richard Loo, who spends most of his time standing at the front desk and warning Carney when someone suspicious crops up. I always enjoy seeing Dave O'Brien (best known now as the cackling pot smoker in REEFER MADNESS) and he's fine here in a thankless role. His real-life wife, Dorothy Short, is OK but unmemorable as Withers' love interest. The fight scenes really are awful—in a fight near the end, they don't even bother to dub in the sounds of a fist hitting a chin, so what you get is men throwing these wild punches that are clearly not connecting with flesh. It's fairly laughable. A climactic car chase with Withers and O'Brien being chased along twisty roads shows promise put peters out. This one can be skipped unless you're a fan of Withers or O'Brien. [YouTube]