wetcircuit

Props to Evelyn Brent for playing this role as George Raft -- in fact many choices seem to deliberately ignore the out-dated 'yellow peril' tropes implied by the title.

Despite a wig and some eye makeup Brent is no dragon lady. She delivers every line in a gangster monotone with a gun in her hand -- decidedly un-feminine and tough. She never seduces or simps, and there's no 'caught between worlds' diatribe. She's too busy plotting how she'll murder her next business partner.... Even her kimono has shoulder pads!

Her ONE Asian henchman, played by Richard Loo (often cast to subvert stereotype by being very American) is commanded to perform an 'oriental manicure', and instead of an elaborate Fu Manchu torture scene we get what looks like an actual manicure, complete with nail-clipping sounds.... I'm now obsessed with the idea that all lady gangster movies should replace the ubiquitous 'rough up the detective' scene with a 'force the detective to trim his nails' scene.

While it starts as a 'yellow peril' -- most of the action takes place in the Oriental Hotel (HQ for human trafficking, obviously) with an un-convincing import/export business in the front parlor -- no one seems interested in resolving that story.... By '39 tastes had shifted to organized crime and political corruption so the production feels patched together and the script almost incoherent, climaxing as noisily as they could afford: car chases, gun shootouts, and 2-fisted brawls.

It's a B-movie from a B-studio. If you watch with low (no) expectations you might be amused by a film struggling to figure out its genre, and an unapologetic lady crime boss performance by Brent which somehow isn't sabotaged by the goofy script.

Too many things wrong with this film to list them all. Multiple tropes are introduced but go nowhere; themes are dropped without resolution, and characters are announced to have "mortal flaws" up until *whoops* they conveniently don't.

It's unclear who the protagonist is meant to be, or what morality we're suppose to surmise. A few sympathetic but 1-dimensional caricatures of servants serve as scenery, but no one is better for it. The humorless plot drags on.

Probably the worst performance by Robert Montgomery ever. He spends half the film affecting a bad accent, and the other half staring like a deer into headlights.

A Hop-head blackmailer, East Coast mobsters, a sit-com actress, a creepy doctor, an annoying farm girl, Bruce Lee, and a stripper collide in Raymond Chandler's funhouse called Hollywood.

It's not as stylish as Murder, My Sweet - the lighting and camera work here are artless - still, there's a kinship to Dick Powell's arch-theatricality, and all the personalities are teetering on the brink of camp.

Every character actor in this is a standout. Rita Moreno sizzles in a defiant striptease. Carrol O'Connor and Sharon Ferrell are so good they somehow make their archetypes feel real. But Garner is too handsome and inoffensive for the role, and the film makes the interesting choice to cut all those existential monologs that define the noir era. Garner's Phillip Marlowe bounces from crook to kook, playing straightman to a parade of star performances.

There are many deliberate nods to nostalgia and old movies, and a lot of the dialog is straight from Chandler's book, but some of the updates clunk or make no sense. Somehow, this Phillip Marlowe has a European supermodel girlfriend he takes to swanky restaurants, and to bed which erases any feelings he's supposed to have for the actress.... Bruce Lee's scenes have the odd effect of inserting Bruce Lee into the movie - it feels like a parody, but it's his US film debut.

The story is serpentine but never dull. Marlowe guesses. He has part of a bone and doesn't let go. Like most of Chandler's pulp, the "mystery" is being chased rather than solved. The plot holds up (I think?) but leaves you to fill in motives and connections. The result is character reveals that come as quickly as betrayals and double-crosses.