William Nigh

A wartime espionage quickie from Monogram, rushed into theaters three months after Pearl Harbor. Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Melcher, a plastic surgeon who has spent years transforming six agents of Japan's Black Dragon Society into doubles of prominent American industrialists — a fifth column planted to sabotage the US war effort. When the infiltrators start turning up dead with ceremonial daggers in their chests, a doctor and a detective try to untangle the conspiracy. Clayton Moore, a few years away from the Lone Ranger, plays a young FBI man. Cheap even by poverty-row standards, but a vivid snapshot of wartime paranoia. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Thriller · Mystery · War

Evelyn Venable plays the wife of a small-time crook who takes the fall for a payroll robbery and goes on the run, hiding out as a cook on a truck farm where Craig Reynolds's earnest farmer slowly falls for her — while her husband's gang closes in. A Crescent Pictures production released through Monogram, it is a compact poverty-row crime melodrama built on the era's favorite engine: a decent woman on the wrong side of the law through no fault of her own. Director William Nigh keeps it moving at the pace Monogram audiences expected. It entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Crime · Drama

Mickey Rooney plays Shockey Carter, a small-town Indiana schoolboy whose quick temper and ragged clothes hide the real problem: a widowed, shell-shocked father (Frank Shields) who's lost the will to work. When the town's new schoolteacher takes an interest in the boy, local busybodies use it as an excuse to run the family out of town. A Monogram drama directed by William Nigh that gave the teenage Rooney one of his better pre-Hardy dramatic roles. The film is in the public domain.

Drama

The third entry in Monogram's Mr. Wong series, with Boris Karloff in the unlikely role of the gentlemanly Chinese detective James Lee Wong. A Chinese princess visiting San Francisco to buy warplanes for her country is murdered in Wong's own home, and the trail winds through Chinatown tongs, shady ship brokers, and a counterfeiting ring. Marjorie Reynolds co-stars as wisecracking reporter Bobbie Logan, with Grant Withers as the eternally exasperated Captain Street. Karloff's quiet, courtly Wong remains one of the odder delights of the Poverty Row detective series. The film's copyright was not renewed; it is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Crime

Lon Chaney plays a dual role — both the Chinese patriarch Mr. Wu and his grandfather — in this MGM silent drama directed by William Nigh. When Wu's daughter Nang Ping (Renée Adorée) falls in love with a young Englishman and becomes pregnant, Wu kills her according to custom and then turns his vengeance on the Englishman's family. Louise Dresser co-stars as the mother who offers her own life to save her children. Chaney's elaborate makeup and prosthetics for the role were as remarkable as ever, though the film's racial politics have not aged well. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A 1934 American Pre-Code mystery film directed by William Nigh and based on an Edgar Wallace story. Captain Holling (Noah Beery) is relieved of command of his ship after suffering a nervous breakdown. His replacement takes over the liner just as it is about to be used for an experiment in remote control. Professor Grimson has devised a system for controlling the ship from a land-based laboratory, but as Grimson demonstrates the system, a rival group is listening in, hoping to use the device for its own purposes. The film was entered as a feature attraction at the 1934 International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art in Venice, the forerunner of the Venice Film Festival. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Bernard Adrian, a gentle small-town physician still grieving his wife and daughter's deaths from polio, now experimenting with spinal fluid to cure a paralyzed young woman. When a vicious circus ape escapes and is shot, Adrian sees a grim shortcut to the human material he needs — and the killings that follow are blamed on the ape itself. A Monogram horror cheapie that gives Karloff an unusually sympathetic mad scientist. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Mystery

Bela Lugosi plays the title role in this Monogram poverty-row thriller, a Chinatown crime lord hunting down the twelve legendary coins of Confucius, which are said to grant their possessor control of a Chinese province. Bodies start turning up across the district as Wong's men retrieve the coins one by one, and wisecracking reporter Jason Barton, played by Wallace Ford, follows the trail into Wong's secret headquarters. Lugosi is clearly enjoying himself in a dual role that lets him be both the suave mastermind and his own humble shopkeeper cover. Directed by William Nigh, a Monogram regular who also helmed several of the studio's Mr. Wong detective films. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller