West of Shanghai
(1937)
The movie tells the story of a party of Westerners who fall into the clutches of a renegade Chinese warlord, Wu Ynfang, played by Boris Karloff, anticipating his Mr. Wong series at Monogram Studios later in the decade. Like his Bad Man antecedents, Fang's characterization is semicomic. He turns out to be essentially honorable and dispatches the real villain of the piece before facing a firing squad at the end of the movie.
