The Fatal Hour (1940)

Starring Boris Karloff, Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers, Charles Trowbridge, Frank Puglia
Directed by William Nigh
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

Captain Street counts on the aid of Mr. Wong to unravel the murder of a fellow cop who was drowned while investigating a smuggling ring.

Oriental detectives seemed all the rage in the 1930s and 1940s, with Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Boris Karloff's Mr. Wong all solving mysteries in their own series of pictures.  The Mr. Wong series, distributed by Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, had Karloff, but had probably the lowest production values of all the series. Although it's difficult to imagine the British horror icon as passing for Chinese today, the actor had been cast in exotic roles for some time before, notably as the sinister Fu Manchu, and to his credit gives a dignified performance uncouched in stereotype.   This installment is an at times boring affair, with long drawn out scenes and static photography, although I liked it more than other films in the series, due to the presence of Trowbridge, one of my favorite character actors, and a fairly clever plot device establishing a murderer's alibi late in the film.

20 Million Miles To Earth (1957)

Starring William Hopper, Joan Taylor, Frank Puglia, John Zaremba, Thomas B. Henry
Directed by Nathan Juran
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A spaceflight on a return trip from Venus crashes in the Italian sea, unleashing a creature from the planet that grows to a tremendous size on Earth.

We have here one of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen's finest films, with his detailed character animation for the Venusian creature, (dubbed the "Ymir" although never called that in the picture), among his very best work in my opinion.  The Italian setting also lends itself quite well to the exciting staging of the spaceship's waterbound crash, the Ymir's battle with an elephant in Rome's zoo, and the creature's final stand atop the famous Colosseum.  Avoiding the mistake other sci-fi filmmakers make in placing an overemphasis on the human characters and their subplots, the filmmakers wisely keep the monster front and center, and their cast largely relegated to the background.