BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

masercot I do like the "yellow-face" movies of the thirties and forties. Yellow-face is a white man or woman, playing an Asian. Sometimes it is offensive and sometimes it is done with surprising sensitivity.Thank You, Mr. Moto is one of the latter films. Moto is, on the one hand, capable of cold-blooded murder,if the victim is sufficiently bad. On the other hand, he is capable of giving up a fortune to keep a promise. He can be at once menacing and charming. Very much like the Saint in the first of the Saint series of movies.Peter Lorre is charismatic in this flick. He, like Karloff, played the role of Asian detective without embarrassing accent, just a little makeup to make the eyes narrower and that's about it.This is the best one of the Moto series I've seen so far.

ccthemovieman-1 Treasure maps have always intrigued viewers. I remember seeing a lot of television shows when I was a kid where a hidden treasure was buried somewhere and people fought for the maps to find the treasure. The stories have run the gamut from Superman episodes to the big screen with "Long John Silver" and "Indiana Jones." Usually the stories are fun, and suspenseful.In this second-of-eight "Mr. Moto" movies, the treasure lies in the tomb of Madeline....er, Ghengis Kahn. I won't divulge too much of the story because what happens right at the beginning isn't fully revealed until the end but it ties the whole thing together.This is my second look at this series and one thing I really get a kick out of is the vocabulary of Mr. Moto, played by the great Peter Lorre. He has a great way with the English language and he's fun to hear. He doesn't crack jokes like Charlie Chan, but he's very well-spoken and very polite like his counterpart. He's also very physical when he needs to be. Unlike Charlie, Mr. Moto will stab you to death if need be, as he does several times in this film! Shocking! He also likes to literally jump through the air and attack his adversaries. Cool! This guy would be embraced by the WWF, if that wrestling federation had been around in the 1930s.There are plenty of surprises, so I'll leave it just at that. Fans of the series should enjoy the "Oriental intrigue" in here. I only wish - not for PC reasons but for credibility - they had Asian actors playing the roles. I actually laughed when I saw John Carradine playing an Asian! There is one "real one" in here: Philip Ahn as 'Prince Chung." Actually, he was Korean-American. Speaking of roles, Jayne Regan as "Eleanor Joyce" was a bit intriguing in the female. She had a nice wholesome, pretty look to her and Another interesting real-life story is Pauline Frederick who played "Madame Chung." A proper Bostonian, she looked anything but Asian but the sad story with this actress is that this was her last movie. She died at the young age of 55 the following year, of asthma.These Mr. Moto movies always have a lot of interesting facets to them, and have a good combination of intelligent and sometimes witty dialog (i.e. "Well, there's nothing like a murder to ruin a perfectly good evening,") along with an ample supply of action and intrigue.

classicsoncall I usually find it helpful to keep a scorecard when watching a Charlie Chan film to keep track of all the characters, for this one, you need it just for the action. Yikes! - it took about twenty movies in the Chan franchise to build up to four dead bodies in one outing, but here they pile up fast and furious. Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre) is not above dispatching a few himself, and just as he did in the first film of the series (Think Fast, Mr. Moto), winds up throwing a man over board. There are other similarities as well, the biggest coincidence being the use of the name Marco Polo; here it's the name of a bridge, while in 'Think Fast', it was the name of a cruise ship.By this time, we know Moto to be an importer operating as a detective, but here we learn that he's also an adventurer, explorer, soldier of fortune and one of the Orient's great mysteries. Or so he's described by businessman Tom Nelson (Thomas Beck). In the story, Moto seeks to protect a missing scroll that when joined together with others to form a pattern, indicates the location of the burial place of Genghis Khan and a vast treasure. Of course, a host of others seek to own the desired scroll, as much as Madame Chung (Pauline Frederick) and her son, the Prince (Philip Ahn) are determined to protect it.Oddities abound in the film, as in the opening scene when Moto in disguise dispatches an assassin in the Gobi Desert, and proceeds to bury him - inside the tent! John Carradine makes an appearance in the story as an antiques dealer named Periera, and for some unexplained reason uses the terms 'senor' and 'senorita' when addressing Nelson and Eleanor Joyce (Jayne Regan). And say, could there really have been an American bar in China in 1937 called 'Mike's Place'? But you know what, most of it doesn't matter, because Mr. Moto is a bundle of energy uncovering the bad guys and tracking down the stolen Chung scrolls. He even concocts a romantic link between the main heavy Koerger (Sidney Blackmer) and Miss Joyce to create a jealous rage in Madame Tchernov (Nedda Harrigan), thereby undermining the villain's plot to discover the treasure. But the biggest shock of all is the way it ends, and for that you'll have to see the picture.With just a couple of the Mr. Moto films under my belt for now, it's quite unusual to see how differently he operates compared to the other Oriental Detectives of the era, notably Charlie Chan and Mr. Wong. Whereas the latter two solved their cases much more methodically, Moto combines clever analysis and martial action to achieve his results, and the results are entirely entertaining. Peter Lorre adds a distinctive flair to the Moto persona, and gets one excited about catching the next film in the series - Oh, so!

Anne_Sharp It's too bad this Moto entry strayed so far from its source material, as the arrogant Chinese prince and bandits in the original John P. Marquand novel were ever so much more interesting than the generic Eurogangsters and Philip Ahn's creepily Oedipal Prince Cheung in this one. Though the portrayal of Moto in the Peter Lorre-Sol Wurtzel series was never more than sketchy, he's even more fragmented motivationally in this lively but logistically incoherent adventure. Peter seems to have given up all hope of establishing a dramatic through-line and just plays it scene by scene according to whatever mood he was in, which makes it all the more dizzying to try and follow.