This fascinating tale of San Francisco's Chinatown tongs, featuring an all-Caucasian cast, is Hollywood at its most audaciously ethnocentric: its Chinese heroes are at once more familiar and more exotic for being portrayed by Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. Robinson is the honorable Wong Low Get, the eponymous assassin in a complex system of obligations and loyalties that makes Jean-Pierre Melville's gangster fealties look anarchic. Wong must kill his best friend, who asks that he look after his daughter. The marriage of the much older Wong to his ward, Toya San (Loretta Young), puts Robinson in the unenviable role he often played for Fritz Lang (Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street) but here, he flaunts tradition with admirable grace.