Technically this is a Saturday Afternoon movie as the film I tried to watch Sunday Night could not hold my interest and I crawled off the bed rather early. (A weekend filled with Universal Studios, Harry Potter 7.2, fantastically lucky Scrabble games makes for a very short Sunday Evening.)

When I was younger I watched a lot of the old Charlie Chan films. Sometime ago I learned about another Asian detective from Hollywood’s less than enlightened period, Mr. Moto. Think Fast, Mr. Moto is the first in a series of movies starring Peter Lorre as a Japanese Businessman and dilettante detective. Made in 1937, before Lorre absolutely stunning job in The Maltese Falcon, Lorre, a Hungarian raised in Austria is of course cast as a Japanese detective because at this time Hollywood would never stoop to have an actual Japanese actor in a lead.

If possible this film is more insulting in its portrayal of Japanese peoples than the Chan films were of Chinese peoples. It seems that the script writers had a default rule, when in doubt has Moto say, ‘Ah so‘ for absolutely any and no reason at all. Lorre’s small stature made stature, fake buck teeth, and round glasses all added to the stereotypical image Americans had of the Japanese in these pre-war years. (While far from an expert in any manner shape or form on Japanese culture I saw nothing that indicated any research or study of the island nation by the writers. as shame.)

This mystery worked out in a standard B-mobvie plot kind of way. Moto is brilliant and two steps ahead of the crooks at nearly every turn. Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to this story is that Moto plays at being a villain to gain information and trust, a subtly of performance that Lorre does admirably. (That would be no surprise to anyone who had seen in the Fritz Lang’s M.)

However, as much as I like Lorre, this series offers too little to entice me to watch the other seven film.