Lyle
Talbot worked with Ed Wood, the Three Stooges, and Ozzie & Harriett. He was
also the first actor to play Lex Luthor and Commissioner Gordon in the Superman and Batman serials. Rather embarrassingly, he only has one significant
scene with an Asian cast-member in this highly-dated crime yarn, but his
appearance with Japanese-American actress Toshia Mori is the best thing about
Murray Roth’s Chinatown Squad, which
screens during MoMA’s current film series, Son of Universal: More Rediscovered Gems from the Laemmle Years.
Earl
Raybold went into a private booth at the Peking Café upright, a high-class chop
suey joint in painfully 1930s Chinatown, but he left feet first. As luck would
have it, Ted Lacey, a former beat cop-turned tour guide had a group at the
restaurant that night. He takes charge of the scene until his former colleagues
arrive, but he lets the mysterious Janet Baker slip away, for reasons that are
easy to guess.
Raybold’s
death throws a spanner into the works for all his various business colleagues. Their
business was supplying armaments to the Chinese Communists in Manchuria. That’s
right, the Reds, not the Nationalists. In many ways, arch-HUAC-critic Doroe
Schary & Ben Ryan’s screenplay is both racist and pinko, which is not
nearly as unusual a combination as the latter would like us to believe.
Of
course, John Yee, the owner of the Peking Café and chief fund-raiser for the
Communist forces is played by E. Alyn Warren, a pasty white character actor who
was frequently cast in Asian roles. The uncredited Mori only appears briefly as
Wanda, a telephone operator with a hot tip for Lacey, but her charisma just
pops off the screen. As Lacey, Talbot is a poor man’s leading man, but at least
Valerie Hobson (Elizabeth Frankenstein in Bride
of Frankenstein and the future Mrs. John Profumo) holds up her flirty femme
fatale end of the bargain as Baker. Yet, probably the most memorable
performance comes from Andy Devine, playing Raybold’s sarcastic flunky George
Mason, in his signature Andy Devine voice.
