Benson Fong Movies

Cowboy Line Bartlett (Jack Lord) comes to San Francisco and meets Kim Sung (Nobu McCarthy), a Chinese slave girl coveted by the manager of a whorehouse. To save her from this fate, Bartlett buys the girl himself and takes her home to serve as a housekeeper. His mother, Ma Bartlett (Josephine Hutchinson), is not happy that a Chinese girl is living in her home, and even less happy when Kim Sung and her son fall in love. Their affair also arouses the jealousy of Cheng Lu (James Shigeta), a Chinese immigrant living in town. The proud Cheng learns to become a western-style warrior by taking sharpshooting lessons from the mysterious Deacon (Mel Torme). ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

The celebrated author of 1975's Shogun, James Clavell, directs (and produced and wrote) this effective, if low-budget World War II drama. The story takes place in French Indochina (later Vietnam) where a group of two Red Cross doctors and seven nurses are captured by a guerrilla band and taken to the side of a grievously ill warlord. The realities of war and its effects on everyone are brought forward as the doctors are eventually killed, and the nurses use sex as a means of escaping their captors. Brutal scenes of the stabbing of a patient under surgery and the symbolic murder of a nun are qualified by the even-handed portrayal of the damage war does to the human side of human nature. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Doris Hocksley (Toni Gerry, long-lost daughter of the late Adam Hocksley and sole heir to Hocksley's estate, arrives in Los Angeles and contacts Alan Neil (Warren Stevens), nephew of the estate's executor Elston Carr (Anthony Joachim). Later, Carr is found murdered in his home--and Doris is hiding in on the premises. With her fingerprints all over the murder weapon, Doris would seem to be caught red-handed, but Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) believes in her innocence. Problem is, the only other likely suspect is Alan Neil--and he turns up murdered as well. This episode is based on a 1941 novel by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

George Pal's now-quaint science fiction odyssey concerns a multi-national group on the first space flight to Mars. Pal pulls out all stops in the special effects department, creating "The Wheel" (a earth-orbiting circular space station), rocket launches into space, and a breathtaking near-collision with an asteroid. The film itself concerns the travails of the crew of the spaceship as they make their way to Mars. General Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke) heads the team. Supporting him and along for the ride are his son, Captain Barney Merritt (Eric Fleming), Sergeant Mahony (Mickey Shaughnessy), Jackie Siegle (Phil Foster), and Imoto (Benson Fong). As the ship gets closer to their Martian quest, General Merritt cracks and tries to sabotage both the mission and the crew, babbling about the blasphemy of mankind trespassing upon God's domain. His son is forced to kill him and save the mission, whereupon the crew peacefully lands on the Martian surface and scouts out the terrain like a group of sightseers at Lourdes before returning to Earth. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Dragonfly Squadron is set in 1950 in the months before the beginning of the Korean War. John Hodiak stars as Major Mathew Brady, assigned to the base at Kongju to train South Korean troops for possible combat. These troops are to be used to protect civilians in the event of an evacuation, thus Brady is obliged to run them ragged in order to transform them into a lean, mean fighting machine. Despite the gravity of his job, Brady manages to find time to romance Donna Cottrell (Barbara Britton), the wife of an American doctor (Bruce Bennett). The Casablanca aspects of this triangle are the only forgettable aspects of this taut and timely adventure yarn. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Back at the Front is the second of two film comedies based on the wartime cartoons of Bill Mauldin. As in Up Front, the principal characters are woebegone GIs Willie and Joe: Tom Ewell is back as Willie, but Harvey Lembeck replaces David Wayne as Joe. The original purpose of Mauldin's newspaper cartoons--to give enlisted men a surreptitious means of blowing off steam concerning the iniquities of war and the occasional idiocies of their officers--is completely ignored in Back at the Front. Instead, we are offered a very standard spy plot set in postwar Tokyo, involving femme fatale Mari Blanchard and a shipment of booby-trapped food tins. Back at the Front could have been done just as well with Abbott and Costello--better, in fact. Watch in the closing scenes for David Janssen, playing a one-line bit as a rookie soldier. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With no stars or production values, Korea Patrol has the rough-edged look of a war documentary. Though billed third, veteran Asian-American actor Benson Fong is the star of the proceedings, playing a South Korean scout guiding a group of UN soldiers through hostile territory. Ordered to destroy a vital enemy bridge, the small troop is made smaller as the film progresses, and soon only three men are left to carry out orders. One of these men is played by Al Eben, who later gained a measure of prominence for his many supporting appearances on TV's Hawaii 5-0. Director Max Nosseck adds a veneer of verisimilitude by inserting newsreel footage of the actual Korean conflict. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this final episode of the Boston Blackie mystery series, our hero and his side-kick find themselves accused of murder after they are seen exiting a Chinese laundry where the proprietor is soon found murdered. Blackie must find the real killers before he gets in real trouble. Action and mystery ensue. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The scene is Shanghai: the time, WW II. An international group of women left stranded during the Japanese invasion are rounded up by the local authorities to act as "comfort girls" for high-ranking Nazi and Japanese officials. Bridling at this degrading treatment, the ladies secretly work on behalf of the Chinese Underground, relaying vital information to the Allies and, at one point, committing murder in the name of Democracy. The plot thickens with the introduction of a Nazi "cosmic ray" device, which OSS operative Van Arnheim (William Henry) hopes to destroy before it can be used in battle. Van Arnheim's courageous wife is played by Virginia Christine, light-years removed from her stint as "Mrs. Olsen" in the Folger's Coffee TV commercials. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alan Ladd stars in Calcutta as devil-may-care pilot Neale Gordon. With his equally fearless partners Pedro Blake (William Bendix) and Bill Cunningham (John Whitney), Gordon handles the air-freight route between Calcutta and Chungking. When Cunningham meets his death at the hands of jewel smugglers, Gordon vows to play judge and jury and bring the criminals to justice himself. Among the suspects are the film's two gorgeous leading ladies, sweetie-pie Virginia Moore (Gail Russell) and sultry nightclub singer Merina Tanev (June Duprez). Once Gordon figures out who his real friends are, he relies on his fists to mete out retribution, resulting in one sequence that's guaranteed to raise the hackles of every feminist in the crowd. Even with a short running time of 73 minutes, Calcutta secured top-of-the-bill bookings. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Deception is an operatic rehash of the 1929 film Jealousy. Music teacher Bette Davis--who evidently has a large student pool, judging by the size of her penthouse apartment--is reunited with her cellist lover Paul Henreid, whom she believed to have been killed in the war. Henreid wants to marry Davis, but he is unaware that she has, for the past several years, been the "protege" of composer Claude Rains. Rains agrees to keep quiet about his affair with Davis, but takes sadistic delight in tormenting the woman and working behind the scenes to sabotage Henreid's career. When Rains tells Bette of his plans to publicly humiliate Henreid, she shoots her ex-lover dead. Henreid agrees to stand by Davis no matter what is in store for her. Director Irving Rapper had originally wanted to treat the hoary plot twists of Deception comically, with the three principals walking off together at the end with a "what the hell?" attitude. He was tersely told to stick to the script; after all, people didn't pay to see Bette Davis but to see her suffer. Like the 1929 version of Jealousy, Deception was based on a play by Louis Verneuil. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Just as Edgar C. Ulmer would at PRC around the same time, young Phil Karlson turned Monogram's almost nonexistent production values to his advantage in two Charlie Chan whodunits: The Shanghai Cobra (1945) and Dark Alibi (1946). Karlson added touches of film noir to the usual hoary Chan melodramatics and the result was arguably the best of the Monogram "Chans." In The Shanghai Cobra, Charlie (Sidney Toler) is investigating several murders connected with the manufacture of wartime radium. The employees of a bank connected with the radium experiments have an unfortunate tendency to get themselves killed by the injection of cobra venom. Charlie remembers a similar case back in Shanghai in 1935, but the suspect in those murders escaped. Since his face was damaged in an explosion, the only tell-tale sign to identify him is by a streak of white in an otherwise jet-black mane -- unless of course the murderer has heard of hair dye. As always, Charlie's faithful if bumbling companions, Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland) and Tommy, the Number Three Son (Benson Fong), are along for the ride, offering their now patented sidekick humor. Toler, whose fondness for imbibing on the job was legendary, could basically sleepwalk through his role by 1945 and does so here. As for director Karlson's noir-ish touches, they quickly give way to business as usual, but the opening scenes of The Shanghai Cobra remain quite evocative. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide