As Good As It Gets

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Surprisingly much better than I expected, this expose of Chinese mob rule is filled with the typical clichés, often considered offensive today, yet well told in a dramatic story of tradition and honor not quite mixing together. Lois Wilson is a young writer, allegedly on the verge of suicide, who is rescued by newspaper editor Grant Withers and desperately seeks to become a decent reporter and get off the "sob sister" columns. She decides to take on the Tong, involved in an illegal immigrant smuggling racket, and what she finds leads her to bigger fish to fry.A secondary story has the head of the local Tong blackmailing his daughter's noble suitor into committing murder to get his approval, and this leads to danger for both Wilson and Withers whose fiancée (Dorothy Revier) somehow hits into all of this. It's a lot of plot for an hour long film, and impressively wrapped up with minimal clichés and only a few offensive moments. Coming in the year of MGM's "The Mask of Fun Manchu", Warner Brother's "The Hatchet Man", RKO's " Thirteen Women", and coming off the trail of Paramount's own "Fu Manchu", this poverty row entry is surprisingly the best of the bunch.

This is one of those little independent films made by Invincible Pictures at Universal Studios. This is copyrighted 1933, NOT '32. Chesterfield distributed it. It's about the Chinese labor smuggling racket. Grant Withers plays a newspaper editor who, while investigating the racket on his own, by happenstance runs across Lois Wilson, who is a failed writer about to commit suicide. He saves her, gives her a job as a reporter, and she tries to repay him by investigating the dangerous racket on her own. Her competition for the story is loudmouth fellow reporter Hal Price (the wan comic relief). The title character with the secrets is a leader in the smuggling racket. Add in the incredible coincidence that Wu Sin's partner is none other than Withers' fiancée' father (Robert Warrick), and you've got plenty of claptrap to follow. Famous Chinese actor Richard Loo is quite young and thin here, and plays a good guy. Overall, quite predictable, and loaded with bad acting and crummy dialogue. Revier (who plays Withers' fiancée) played a unlikeable character in Richard Thorpe's 'The King Murder' the year before.