Here we are, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, the seventeenth Charlie Chan picture (the fourteenth with Warner Oland), and we’re getting something like the fourth example of Chan fighting against a cabal of obvious evildoers rather than a single, mysterious murderer. This is happening often enough, it’s no longer a brave departure from the Chan formula, and rather a common variation on it. Suffice it to say, certain patterns start to emerge in this particular Chan subset. Most notably, there must always be a twist suspect revealed in the final moments; clear-cut villains or not, Chan always gets to do some of his trademarked detection. Within the specific context of something like Charlie Chan at the Olympics, it may come across as a non sequitur, but knowing this generic necessity makes it a foregone conclusion instead.
Lamentably, this is one of those Chan movies that delays its titular promise for a long time, as somehow they couldn’t figure out a simple way to get Charlie Chan at those Olympics at. Rather, we open with Chan at home in Honolulu (every so often an entry must do this, just to reiterate this easily-forgotten fact of Chan’s life). This is also one of those entries that doesn’t even allow Chan to take a direct part in the case until he’s forced to – here Chan is more concerned with his family life, notably with “Number Two Son” Charlie Jr. (Layne Tom, Jr.). Considering Junior’s notably youthful age, I choose to interpret the “Number Two Son” handle not as being literally his second born, but rather he is Chan’s second favorite son – out of roughly a dozen children, being behind only the stalwart Keye Luke ain’t too shabby.
So what’s gonna get Charlie Chan to leave his content fishing lifestyle and solve the Olympics-based crime we’re all here for? Well, how about he and Junior happen upon a downed aircraft right along the Hawaiian coastline, someplace where surely someone else would’ve already seen it, right? Right?
It turns out this plane was an experimental new prototype, capable of being radio-controlled minus a pilot. The MacGuffinny device that could grant the plane such astounding, futuristic capabilities is missing. More importantly for Chan formula, the pilot has been murdered. To hell with you, Charlie Chan Jr., there’s a plot contrivance afoot!
Chan meets up with the various U.S. Air Force men responsible for the kerjigger, each of them so clearly not suspicious that my suspicions are instantly aroused. Notably, there is Mr. Cartwright (John Eldredge), the doohickey’s inventor, and Mr. Hopkins (Mr. Dithers – that is, Jonathan Hale, of the Blondie series, making his amazing fourth Chan appearance), military liaison. Because I’ve suddenly gone screen cap happy, here’s an image of the whole gang:
In investigating how a second man could sneak into the plane and murder the pilot, Chan chances upon some over-elaborated nonsense concerning time stamps and whatnot. Boiling this down, it leaves everyone to suspect a certain Miller is the villain. They track him to his Honolulu hotel room, except – he’s been murdered too! They’re getting pretty corpse-happy here.
Considering Chan’s delayed discovery of the downed plane, whomever killed Miller must’ve already managed to flee Hawaii. Following another series of leads with rather heavy convenience and plot prediction, Chan somehow connects Miller back to the unfortunately-named Dick Master (Allan Lane), a member of the U.S. Olympic Team. Ah, so that’s how they’re gonna tie this in with the games! And Master, like the entire Team for some ridiculous reason, is traveling via steamer ship from Hawaii to Berlin…I couldn’t come up with a more circuitous route if I had to.
Okay, I’ve gotta backtrack a little, for I’ve neglected a whole lot of onscreen evidence clearly depicting members of the evil spy cabal which is currently smuggling the radio gewgaw. See, Dick Master is a red herring – he’s no spy. Still, he is inexplicably tied in with the real spy, Yvonne Roland (Catherine DeMille), via some means I forgot long ago – I watched this movie half a week before writing this up (I maintain one hell of a buffer on this blog), and am rather forcing myself through this twaddle now. Okay, uh…we know Yvonne’s a villainess, and we have strong suspicions of another guy on the ship, noted aviation pioneer Arthur Hughes (C. Henry Gordon) – Oh right, someone connected with aviation named Hughes, sure! And of course Hughes must be evil, because he has a mustache!...And we saw him doing strange, nebulous, eeevil things right around the time that plane crashed – in an entire sequence I didn’t bother to recap…Ugh, I need coffee!
Okay, here’s a little more about this mass of characters on the steam ship – a rather lengthy detour indeed this is. There is Betty (Pauline Moore), a useless and blandly attractive Olympian wench – if there were an obvious male paramour for her right now, I’d say we had our lovebirds. Ah, but for the time being, her likely romantic partner is the almighty Lee Chan himself, Luke Keye! Okay, all of a sudden Lee, master of disguises and amateur detection, is an Olympian?! Actually, he’s fulfilling the same U.S. role here as Michael Phelps some 72 years later – swimming superstar! Okay, fine, whatever, ‘cause there was no other way to plug Lee into this mess. And here are our noble Olympians readying themselves for athletic glory:
It turns out later Betty’s love interest is actually the Dick Master – perhaps she’s attracted to him by the mere promise of his astounding name. Whatever the case, it is this fact more than any non-meta evidence which proves Master’s complete and total innocence in regards to that spy ring I could care less about. And at least the lovebirds were not obvious this time out.
…
[Lengthy delay due to phone call from home…]
[Second lengthy delay concerning those jerks at Comcast…]
[Another delay involving a census taker!...Mmm, fava beans…]
Okay, guys, can I finally finish writing about this Charlie Chan movie?!
Ah, where was I? Okay, so that steamer ship is taking the stupid way to Berlin. In order to beat it, Charlie Chan identifies a much more intelligent route – the Hindenburg! Cool! And say what I will about this movie’s plotting and whatever, but it really has the best assembly of stock footage I’ve ever seen in a non-Ed Wood movie. For instance, here’s that zeppelin:
Actually, there’s a good reason for the high quality of the stock footage – it’s by Leni Riefenstahl! Specifically, all the extensive (real) Olympic action from here on out comes from her documentary Olympia – included for our delectation is actual footage of Jesse Owens’ world record-shattering sprint! I’d’ve preferred watching the sports documentary to see this, but I’ll take what I can get. And considering these are the 1936 Berlin Olympics, with their blatant Third Reich theming, and Riefenstahl was already noted as the creator of Triumph of the Will, the Naziest non-Producers movie ever made, there’s a lot of unfortunate subtext going on in this disposable little racist B-movie programmer. Actually, seeing as this film was made in 1936, it’s strangely more complimentary towards the nascent Nazi state than just about anything else from Hollywood outside of Paul Verhoeven’s oeuvre.
But as much as I’d love to rant incomprehensibly about ze Germans, that damned plot must intrude. Charlie Chan, happily welcomed into racially-tolerant Berlin, joins forces with a Kraut stereotype named Strasser (Kraut stereotype Frederik Vogeding). They know Yvonne is our evil non-Nazi spy, so they go to her quarters on the ship. It looks like she’s been murdered, only she hasn’t been murdered, she’s missing, and Lee is there, and – Look, I don’t quite have the inspiration to continue on with this, okay. Let’s just say that a sub-Hitchcockian spy thriller happens all over the screen, and footage of our actors is artlessly intermingled with far grainer footage of the Berlin Olympics. The chintzy MacGuffin device changes hands often, allegiances switch with the grotesque regularity of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and it all leaves me rather nonplussed.
Let’s just move on to the climax, where something interesting happens entirely independent of Nazi propaganda. Lee gets his once-competent ass kidnapped by that most obvious of all villains: His Excellency, the Honorable Diplomat of Wherever, Charles Zakara (Morgan Wallace). This puts Charlie Chan in the unenviable position of complying with the kidnappers’ demands, delivering the whatchamacallit to the baddies in exchange for Lee’s sorry Olympian butt. There are certain genre demands for kidnapping thrillers, ones which are largely separate from the demands of a murder mystery, so very little is made of them here.
Prior to his collection, Chan has the thingamajiggus wired with a tracking device, so that those hyper-competent German ubermenschen can close in on the bad people and save the day. So in come Strasser, Hopkins and Cartwright to save Chan and Lee from the vile, vile hands of Zakara, Yvonne and Hughes.
Well, that resolution was pretty simple and telegraphed, so obviously that big Chan twist is coming right up. Soon enough Hopkins is found shot (though not dead, ‘cause it serves no plot function to have a fatality at this late stage). Charlie Chan then goes and does what he does best, accuse the least likely suspect – Cartwright. So the guy trying to steal the radio device was…the guy who invented the radio device!...Oh…kay…So, to recap, in order to get his hands on the thing his hands created in the first place, Cartwright had Miller kill the pilot, then he killed Miller, passed the device on to Yvonne to give it to Zakara to give it to him, all the while utilizing the U.S. Olympic Team as the inadvertent smugglers. When asked why he didn’t just, you know, make a new device for himself, Cartwright explains that he did it the complicated way to avoid suspicion…of something they’d have never known he did otherwise. [Clanging head endlessly against my desk.] Here’s the problem with having to squeeze a twist into every one of your movies – plots cannot always stand up to such left-field scrutiny. This same bane riddled all those twisty post-Sixth Sense knockoffs Hollywood was briefly obsessed with. Sigh.
Then Lee goes right ahead and wins the gold medal. Well, that was easy!
This is by no means the worst of the Charlie Chan films; it’s merely the victim of my present disinterest. I’ve had hardly any time to dedicate to these accursed movies lately. Oh well, it’s now off of my chest, which had to happen at some point. Hopefully I’ll be able to build up some steam for next time.
Related posts:
• No. 3 Behind That Curtain (1929)
• No. 4 Charlie Chan Carries On (1931)
• No. 5 The Black Camel (1931)
• No. 9 Charlie Chan in London (1934)
• No. 10 Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)
• No. 11 Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)
• No. 12 Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935)
• No. 13 Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936)
• No. 14 Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
• No. 15 Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936)
• No. 16 Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936)
• No. 18 Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937)
• No. 19 Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1938)
• No. 20 Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)
• No. 21 Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)
• No. 22 Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939)
• No. 23 City in Darkness (1939)
• No. 24 Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)
• No. 25 Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940)
• No. 26 Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940)
• No. 27 Murder Over New York (1940)
• No. 28 Dead Men tell (1941)
• No. 29 Charlie Chan in Rio (1941)
• No. 30 Castle in the Desert (1942)
• No. 31 Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944)
• No. 32 The Chinese Cat (1944)
• No. 33 Meeting at Midnight (1944)
• No. 34 The Shanghai Cobra (1945)
• No. 35 The Red Dragon (1945)
• No. 36 The Scarlet Clue (1945)
• No. 37 The Jade Mask (1945)
• No. 38 Dark Alibi (1946)
• No. 40 Dangerous Money (1946)
• No. 41 The Trap (1946)
• No. 42 The Chinese Ring (1947)
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