a5c7b9f00b In the middle of a pictorial lecture on his recent expedition to the Mongolian Desert, Dr. John Benton the famous explorer, drinks from the water bottle on his lecture table, collapses and dies. His last words &quot;Eternal Fire&quot; are the only clue Chinese detective Jimmy Wong and Captain Street of the police department have to work on. Win Lee, Benton&#39;s secretary, reveals the doctor&#39;s dying words refer to a scroll which tells the location of rich oil deposits. Wong and Street then begin the search for the killer among Benton&#39;s associates. Detective James Lee Wong is on the scenearchaeologist Dr. John Benton, recently returned from an expedition in China where a valuable ancient scroll was recovered, is murdered while giving a lecture on the expedition. The 1940 film is quite good in it&#39;s mood and theme. It is a detective film that keeps you engaged and moves in a fast pace. The film stars an Asian actor, Keye Luke and Mr Luke does a very fine job playing an alert intelligent detective that could be set in today&#39;s times. This was produced in the WW2 years and it is interesting to see that this film was made with many Asian actors. Sadly that would not continue with the anti-Asian hysteria of the war years. Mr Luke survived on with a long and memorable movie &amp; TV career with his major rolethe High Lama/teacher in TV&#39;s &#39;Kung-Fu&#39;. IN this film a murder strikes during a lecture on the discovery of a lost Mongolian tomb. A scroll with a valuable secret is missing. It&#39;s up to Jimmy Wong and the Homicide Squad to find the killer and learn the tomb&#39;s secret. This was the last of the Mr Wong serials. Enjoy it. As Boris Karloff moved on to bigger and better things in the horror film genre, the Mr. Wong series from Monogram got a final run with an actual person of Oriental heritage in the title role. Fascinating the mind set of Hollywood in those days.<br/><br/>And who would it have to be for, but a poverty row outfit like Monogram in one of their series films. Keye Luke who moviegoers knew betterthe number one son of that other Chinese detective Charlie Chan, gets to play a younger version of that noted scholar and criminologist James Lee Wong. Luke plays him justBoris Karloff dida man who went to both Oxford and Heidelburg and did not speak in fortune cookie aphorisms.<br/><br/>But I&#39;m sure it must have confused the living daylights out of the Mr. Wong audiences when the relationship between Wong and homicide police captain Street of the SFPD was so different. Grant Withers played Street in all the Wong films and he was not at all resentful about deferring to the older man&#39;s knowledge. The same way Captain Stottlemeyer defers to Adrian Monk on that show.<br/><br/>But with Luke, Withers is at first downright hostile, in fact this film of necessity is set back to when they first meet and Withers most reluctantly bows to Luke&#39;s skill for investigation.<br/><br/>The leader of an expedition to China where an ancient scroll was taken from a Ming Emperor&#39;s tomb is murdered while giving a lecture. And the scroll goes missingwell. There are a whole host of suspects, including a pilot that had been lost in the desert, but he turns up rather early in the film.<br/><br/>It might have been nice if Keye Luke had inaugurated the series instead of an Occidental like Karloff, goodhe was. History could have been made.
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