Peter Lorre Featured As Master Sleuth.

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 45, 23 February 1938, Page 11

Peter Lorre Featured As Master Sleuth.

“THINK FAST, MR. MOTO,’ ORIENTAL STUDY

(State: Screening to-day week.) “Mr Moto," the new kind of sleuth who proves astonishing on the screen as Peter Lorre, the star who could portray J. P. Marquand ’ s diffident Japanese to the life, undertakes the role in “Think Fast, Mr Moto," Twentieth Cen-tury-Fox picture. Not since he startled the world with his sensational triumph in "M" has Lorre given the screen such an amazing performance —the strange Mr Moto, whose eyes are as mild as his timid smile, but whose mind is as quick as his trigger finger. Strange events in Frisco’s Chinatown place the amazing detective on the trail of a criminal band that has the international police at their wits’ end. From the Golden Gate he follows mysterious clues across the Pacific to Shanghai, nest of a thousand iniquities, harbourer of a thousand evil-doers. Enmeshed in the tragic toils of the gang that is tho object of Lorre’s search, Virginia Field and Thomas Beck find their romance fearfully beset by all manner of dangers, and so welcome the advent of the mysterious little Japanese. Foremost among the Shanghai group is Sig Rumann, the burly proprietor of a waterfront gambling den which is the headquarters of Lorre’s enemies.

Norman Foster, who directed the picture in addition to collaborating with Howard Ellis Smith on the screen play, introduces the mild-mannered Oriental to a series of rough-and-tumble jujutsu combats that climax the film by exposing the members of the gang.