Richard Loo Movies

In this crime thriller, a suicidal writer is saved by a helpful newspaper editor who gives her a much-needed job. Later she finds herself entangled in a plot to smuggle Chinese laborers into the country. She follows up on the many clues and ends up in the middle of Chinatown where she is eventually able get her story. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Ne'er-do-well Gary Cooper is so desperate for quick cash that he's willing to sell the custody rights of his own daughter (Shirley Temple), whom he's never seen. Cooper's girlfriend Carole Lombard is shocked by this callousness and walks out on him, but when Cooper meets his daughter and has a change of heart, he reclaims the little girl and is reunited with Lombard. Still, Cooper can't hold down a job. Another get-rich-quick scheme ends unhappily when Cooper is forced to participate in a jewel robbery. After fighting it out with his confederates, the wounded Cooper begs the victim of the robbery, a wealthy and loving woman, to adopt his daughter and give her the sort of life he is unable to provide. Now and Forever would have been mighty turgid stuff without the combined star power of Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard, and six-year-old Shirley Temple. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This second of MGM's Thin Man films reteams William Powell and Myrna Loy as, respectively, bibulous private detective Nick Charles and his socialite wife Nora. The Charleses are sucked into another murder case via Nick's lovely cousin Elissa Landi, whose husband Alan Marshall has vanished. Hubby has been conducting an affair with nightclub thrush Dorothy McNulty (later known as Penny Singleton) and is also blackmailing gangsterish Joseph Calleia. When the corpses begin piling up, Nick and Nora try to piece the clues together, with the earnest assistance of Jimmy Stewart, who carries a torch for Landi. You won't believe who turns out to be the murderer in this one--then again, given the plot's strict adherence to "least likely suspect" formula, you probably will. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this drama, the third remake of a popular play by Porter Emerson Browne, General Wu Yen Fang, "the White Tiger," is an outlaw general who controls the bulk of northern China. The story begins as he invades the village in which two fighters work to prevent avaricious Americans from foreclosing on their oil interests. The lover of one of these men is romantically involved with the estranged wife of one of the foreclosers. Because he once saved Gen. Wu's life, the officer returns the favor by killing the evil oil man. This causes the government to sentence the general to death. He willingly sacrifices his life and is at peace knowing that his friend can now marry the woman he loves. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

It took British author James Hilton six weeks to write his visionary novel Lost Horizon. It took director Frank Capra two years-and half of his home studio Columbia's annual budget-to bring it to the screen. After a lengthy preamble, inviting audiences to imagine their own ideas of Utopia, the film opens on a chaotic scene at a Chinese airfield. As hordes of bandits approach, hundreds of refugees scramble to board the last plane out. Only five people make it: Mildly disenchanted Far Eastern diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), his hotheaded younger brother George (John Howard), embezzler Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), dithery fossil expert Lovett (Edward Everett Horton) and consumptive prostitute Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell). As the plane flies off towards the Himalayas, Robert realizes that he and his fellow passengers are heading in the wrong direction. They are, in fact, being kidnapped-but why? And where to? The plane crash-lands in the snowy Tibetan interior. The pilot is killed, but the passengers are safe. By and by, a strange caravan approaches, led by an enigmatic Chinese named Chang (H. B. Warner). Joining the caravan, Conway and his party are led through a treacherous mountain pass and into a land of temperate weather and dazzling beauty. This is Shangri-La, the idyllic lamasery presided over by the aged, wizened High Lama (Sam Jaffe). In this fertile valley, people are not encumbered by such exigencies as crime, dictators and hatred; instead, everyone is devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and self-improvement-and best of all, the aging process has been slowed to a walk, allowing people to live well past the two-century mark. Though he still does not know why he was brought here, Conway is quicker to adapt to Shangri-La than his wary fellow passengers. He even falls in love with Sondra (Jane Wyatt), an attractive, intelligent young woman. Finally granted an audience with the High Lama, Conway discovers that the old man is actually Father Perrault, the Belgian missionary who founded Shangri-La-over two hundred years earlier. Dying, the High Lama has selected Conway, whose idealism and even-handedness is world famous, to succeed him-and hopefully spread the "love thy neighbor" edict of Shangri-La to the rest of the war-torn world. Conway is willing to assume leadership, but younger brother George, his mind poisoned by spiteful Shangri-La resident Maria (Margo), insists upon escaping to the outside world. The older Conway warns that, despite her youthful appearance, Maria is well past sixty and will surely perish once she leaves Shangri-La; but Maria retorts that the high lama is insane, and that everything he has told Conway is a lie. Disillusioned, Conway agrees to leave with Jack and Maria. The trek back to civilization is a grueling one, especially for Maria, who-true to Conway's prediction-shrivels from age and dies. Appalled that he has been misled, George kills himself. Weeks later, and amnesiac Conway stumbles into a Tibetan mission, where he is rescued and brought back to England. When his memory is restored, however, Conway runs back to Shangri-La, and into the arms of Sondra. When Lost Horizon was shown to preview audiences, it ran nearly three hours-and it was a disaster. In his autobiography, Capra claims to have rescued his pet project by merely burning the first two reels and opening the film with the evacuation scene; In fact, while Capra did remove the film's "flashback" framework, he made most of his cuts in the body of the picture. The release length of Lost Horizon was 132 minutes, pared down to 119 when it when into general distribution. When it was reissued in the 1940s and 1950s, it was rather clumsily pared down to anywhere from 95 to 100 minutes. Only in the mid-1980s was Lost Horizon restored to its original length, with stills used to illustrate certain scenes for which only the soundtrack existed. While not the enormous hit Capra and Columbia had hoped it would be, Lost Horizon was popular enough to allow the name "Shangri-La" enter the household-word category. In 1973, producer Ross Hunter felt the urge to inflict a wretched musical remake onto an unsuspecting public. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Alternating effortlessly between comedy and suspense and back again, Too Hot to Handle stars Myrna Loy as a famous aviatrix and Clark Gable as an opportunistic newsreel photographer. Gable and rival shutterbug Walter Pidgeon agree to accompany Loy on her search for her missing brother, sensing a good story and excellent photo op. Their odyssey takes them into the deepest jungles of the Amazon, where Gable's photographic prowess saves everyone's lives when hostile natives attack. Along the way, both Gable and Pidgeon fall in love with Loy. The classic opening sequence in Too Hot to Handle, in which the resourceful Gable fakes a bombing raid for the benefit of his cameras, was allegedly conceived by Buster Keaton, then a free-lance MGM gag man. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The gathering war clouds in the late 1930s prompted a number of Hollywood films about recent political upheavals, one of which was 20th Century-Fox's Barricade. While fleeing war-torn China by train, two Americans-singer Emmy Jordan (Alice Faye) and journalist Hank Topping (Warner Baxter)-are attacked by Mongol bandits. United in danger, Faye and Baxter fall in love as they attempt to escape the American embassy where they're holed up. More than one reviewer noted that Barricade resembled a modern-dress western, with the Mongol hordes substituting for American Indians. Also noted was the fact that the film had been completed as a nine-reel "A" picture in 1938, undergoing drastic cutting and script revisions before it finally emerged in its present truncated 71-minute form. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This sequel to Grand National's 1938 actioner Cipher Bureau once again stars Leon Ames as bureau head Major Philip Waring. In case you're wondering, the Cipher Bureau is a government agency in charge of decoding enemy messages. Teamed with agent Helen Lane (Charlotte Wynters), Major Waring is dispatched to the Panama Canal. Here the two operatives discover that an Oriental spy ring (no nationalities, please: this is still 1939) is stealing vital secrets concerning the Canal. Almost as dangerous as the spies is Abner Biberman in the role of a turncoat bureau agent. The very brief "Cipher Bureau" series was created by Arthur Hoerl and Monroe Sheff. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The FBI goes up against a female gang leader in this ultra-low-budget thriller directed by Raymond K. Johnson. Grant Withers stars as Ralph Dickson, an agent assigned to look into the killing of a colleague. Chosen for the task due to an uncanny likeness to the presumed killer, Dickson goes undercover and manages to learn the identity of gang leader Carney (Evelyn Brent), a sexy criminal also known as "the Illustrious One" and the "Daughter of the Tong." A veritable dragon lady, Carney is holed up at the Oriental Hotel while her henchmen are doing the dirty work. Dickson, meanwhile, loses his cover in an attempt at freeing kidnap victim Jerry Morgan (Dave O'Brien) but is saved in the nick of time by the young man's sister, Marion (Dorothy Short), who arrives with Agent Lawson (Hal Taliaferro) and what seems like the entire FBI. The final film to star silent screen femme fatale Evelyn Brent, Daughter of the Tong was also the final production of Lester F. Scott Jr., a purveyor of cheap Westerns in the late silent era. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

In his final "Mr. Wong" mystery, Boris Karloff solves the case of who killed shipping magnate Cyrus P. Wentworth (Melvin Lang). Wentworth's flagship "The Wentworth Castle" had tragically caught on fire with a tremendous loss of life. Near suicidal, the shipping tycoon is helped into the next world by persons unknown but dunderhead police captain Bill Street (Grant Withers) points the finger at Dick Fleming (William Stelling), the son of a rival tycoon and in love with Wentworth's daughter Cynthia (Catherine Craig). Promising to eat his hat if young Fleming isn't the killer, Street can only watch as enterprising cub reporter Bobby Logan (Marjorie Reynolds) assigns Mr. Wong (Karloff) to solve the case. Which the eminent Oriental sleuth does to the point where Bobby can gleefully add salt to Street's less than edible headgear. The burning of the fictional "Wentworth Castle" was actual footage from the infamous 1934"Morro Castle" fire, a tragedy that took the lives of 137 passengers. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Secrets of the Wasteland is a lesser "Hopalong Cassidy" western, with talk taking precedence over action. This time, Hoppy (William Boyd) and his pals Johnny (Brad King) and California (Andy Clyde) head out on an archeological expedition. While encamped in the San Fernando Valley, our heroes come to the aid of a group of Chinese settlers who are being victimized by land-usurper Salter (Douglas Fowley)and his minions.. As a nod to timeliness, the head of the Chinese colony, May Soong (Soo Young), is obviously based on modern-day China's Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek, while the treacherous Salter is most Hitlerian in his gestures and attitudes. Outside of these calculated anachronisms, Secrets of the Wasteland is nothing special. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmed in the months immediately following Pearl Harbor, 20th Century-Fox's Little Tokyo USA is 63 minutes' worth of speculation about prewar Japanese espionage activities. Los Angeles cop Preston Foster suspects that there's dirty work afoot in the city's Japanese community, but no one will believe him except for intrepid girl reporter Brenda Joyce. When the spies frame Foster on a trumped-up murder charge, Joyce does a little detective work herself. The enemy agents are rounded up just before they can do any real damage. Because of its strident insistence that most (if not all) Japanese-American citizens were secretly loyal to the Rising Sun, Little Tokyo USA is seldom seen these days. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The winner of four Oscar nominations, Wake Island was one of the first major Hollywood films to deal with America's forced participation in World War II. The first two reels takes place in the weeks prior to Pearl Harbor, as Wake Island military commander Brian Donlevy carries on a friendly rivalry with Seabee supervisor Albert Dekker. Once the US is in the shooting war, all previous differences are forgotten and the Wake Island personnel begin pulling together. Despite being heavily outnumbered during the subsequent Japanese attack on Wake, the Americans put up a valiant fight, at great cost to the Imperial Forces. In a scene calculated to evoke long, loud cheers from the audience, Donlevy, weary and battle-stained, relays to the American mainland the legendary (if offensive) challenge "Send us more Japs!" As in the like-vintage Bataan, the military defeat of the Americans is treated-and justifiably so--as a moral victory. Utilizing some of the top male talents in Paramount's contract pool-Donlevy, Dekker Robert Preston, MacDonald Carey, William Bendix--Wake Island remains an excellent example of propaganda-as-entertainment ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide