Ah, hello, hello, accursed Charlie Chan movie, please, come in so I may write at length about you, and subsequently grow thoroughly disgusted by your existence.
I’ll admit, it’s largely the sheer immensity of the Charlie Chan franchise that is putting me off – but don’t worry. We’re quickly coming upon a natural pausing point. But before we can get to there, we must go through the two final Warner Oland Charlie Chan films, the first of those being 1937’s Charlie Chan on Broadway. So what say we put off the delays and dive right in?
We open (post-credits) on a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic. You know, I’d wager something like a healthy 25% of the entire franchise takes place on cruise ships, so naturally I am almost as sick at the sight of them as I am at Warner Oland, who I swear is now burned into my retina. So, Lee at sea sees Chan chucking chunks. Lee, as ever, is played by Keye Luke, who’s my favorite thing about the whole franchise. Meanwhile, below decks, a certain mustachioed (and thus villainous) ne’erdowell is poking around some similarly unidentified brunette girl’s stateroom – circumstances lead the Chans, Charlie and Lee, to enter before any more can come of this vagueness. They “rescue” the brunette from El Mustachio, and because she’s attractive enough to be a fifth-string Hollywood actress (Louise Henry), Lee is instantly struck with perpetual horniness. This is what they do with Lee when he’s otherwise useless.
I’m going to go ahead and mention a certain rapport between Lee and Chan that I’ve neglected so far, under the mistaken assumption that if I left it alone it would go away. It works no better in cinema than it does in medicine. There are certain stock phrases each uses…Chan likes to say, in his humblest self-effacement, “Thank you so much” and “Excuse, please.” Lee likes to whip out “Gee Pop!” with equal regularity, rendering what must’ve surely been normal verbiage for the 30s artificial even by those standards. Well, there you go, I can somehow find no briefer way of mentioning this.
The cruise ship docks in New York City, presumably on its way back from Berlin – Boy, good thing Chan neglected to take the Hindenburg roundtrip, eh? He took it to Germany last time (Charlie Chan at the Olympics), and considering this movie’s release date, this is what he’d’ve encountered on a return:
Ka-boom!
Okay, okay, back to Chan…New York Chief Inspector James Nelson (Harold Huber), he of a mustache that is distractingly similar to the unidentified El Mustachio, has been sent by the NYPD to collect Chan. This is all because of Chan’s inexplicable worldwide celebrity, for he has solved more formulaic murder mysteries in the past decade than have ever existed in the first place. There is also a pile of 1930s reporters on the scene, though they are reportedly only there to report on the arrival of a (mustachioed) maharaja and his turban. The only one with any concern for Chan – and for that brunette from the ship (now revealed to be named Billie Bronson) – is photographer Joan Wendell (Joan Marsh), who reminds me so much of Lois Lane that I can only deduce she was inspired by Torchy Blane, the “Superman” comics having not been created yet…Hey, an era before Superman! Poor people! Anyway, the mere physical appearance of Joan marks her out as the female half of the lovebirds, formula prerequisites are they. Soon enough I have also identified the male half, fellow reporter Speed Patten (Donald Woods). [Snore!]
The fact that the lovebirds are reporters is an easy way for the movie to heap mounds of bulging, thrusting exposition onto us for the entire first half of the movie in place of a murder and/or a mystery. Lacking Boris Karloff to entertain me with genre jollities, this leaves me little more to do than take copious expositional notes and wait for the movie to entertain me instead. (Okay, I suppose its adoption of the “gangster movie” tropes marks its “entertainment” value, but this is the blandest collection of molls and hoods I’ve ever seen.) And the receptacle for most of this disgusting exposition is Editor in Chief Murdock (J. Edward Bromberg) – a man so clearly not villainous that I thought him the eventual killer. It turns out I was wrong…dead wrong.
It seems Billie, that nebulous brunette, is a former prosecution witness who has been hiding off in Sicily with Michael Corleone for her protection these past few years. Why precisely she’s returned to New York who can say? Still, it’s awakened the hornets’ nest of gangsters, busy doing whatever illegal things period gangsters did once Prohibition was repealed. [Quick sip of delicious morning tequila.] Whatever Billie’s reasons for returning, she’s keeping her silly self busy, arranging appointments and struggling to break into the Chans’ New York hotel suite. In this latter effort, she is constantly stymied by Lee’s frequent sexual harassment, ‘30s-style. But let it be known, Billie is in possession of what would be a clue, were there a Charlie Chan murder mystery to be had, in the form of a key to Keye’s suite.
Cock-blocked off by Lee’s cock, Billie rather decides to sow the seeds for her own inescapable murder instead, and hoofs it to the Hottentot Club. Broadway, as we know it, never makes an appearance in this movie. No fun backstage mysteries or anything like that, even while Charlie Chan at the Opera showed just how much fun such things could be. It should rather be called Charlie Chan and the Mob Slap Each Other Around a Bit, for this is merely another tale of Chan up against a generic criminal cabal. I swear it, I am getting sick of this plot, even though it’s probably there as an alternative to the “tiresome” parlor mysteries I’d much rather be watching at this point.
Not that it matters. Charlie Chan barely figures into this movie, or at least the first half of it. For while that murder (of Billie) is supremely delayed, there’s a good half where, in all honesty, Charlie Chan isn’t seen once. God!
I keep muttering about the bland gangsters we’ve been given, so I guess I should present them, eh? Sure, here they all are, at the Hottentot Club I mentioned two paragraphs ago. Meet criminal kingpin, as per a mere one line of dialogue, Johnny Burke (Douglas Fowley), distinguishable by his…mustache. Meet another new Señor Mustachio, Buzz Moran (Leon Ames), who seems inserted into this mess purely to confuse me. The original El Mustachio is also there, and I eventually learn (after his murder 20 minutes from now) that he is Thomas Mitchell (Marc Lawrence). What is with the mustaches?! It seems like the moviemakers honestly think giving a guy a mustache makes him stand out more, an effect that is rather ruined when all the guys are given the same distinguishing feature – it’s Alien3 all over again! If they could, they’d give their female cast mustaches too! No joke. But as it is, the females merely occupy the same continuum of mollish ‘30s ingénues, which is nearly as indistinguishable, except a few of them show a scant amount more cleavage than others. So I’m telling people apart based solely on boobs? It’s Ilsa all over again!
Now everyone’s introduced, the movie can proceed to…waste our time. That is, one of the female molls, Marie Collins (Joan Woodbury), must’ve been “talented,” since the already-stalled story is allowed to screech to a complete halt so she can dance around a bit. I’ve been watching these things long enough, I’m no longer even astounded by the bizarrities of period dancing. Why’d these old franchises have to be so prolific?! This all rather reminds me of Charlie Chan in Paris, with the same basic sort of cast, dances, murders, indistinguishable facial features, etc. And of course I rather disliked that entry, though to be fair Charlie Chan on Broadway isn’t quite Paris awful.
Okay, literally half way through our inefficient 72 minute movie, I guess it’s about freaking time for a murder! Okay, so Billie has been killed (entirely off screen, increasing my rage). Because Lee was there at the club at the time, peeping through keyholes in hopes of seeing female genitals, he is now in police custody. This finally beckons Charlie Chan to join his own plotline. Next is the traditional suspect interview scene, making those 36 minutes of exposition up ‘til now totally useless. So basically, everyone had a motive to kill Billie, and everyone could have. Why can’t we start at this point?! I mean, each entry makes it here eventually…I guess they merely knew they had a lame mystery on their hands, and had to fill it out with inane jitterbugging and gabbity gabbity gabbity…
Okay, so, the facts: Billie has been shot in Burke’s office. Bland, insipid lovebird Joan took a photograph of the beautiful corpse upon discovering it. That photo, now developed, shows the room differently than it is now – a napkin is now missing, as are the keys to Chan’s hotel room. The napkin thing inexplicably becomes a major preoccupation, though all of us today raised on our police procedurals could say precisely its function – to keep fingerprints off the gun (which is also there, by the way)! There! The killer left no fingerprints! I just saved us all about 15 minutes worth of disengaging detection to follow.
But the first clue to provoke any action is the missing hotel key. Quick, to the Chan-mobile!...Er, some random, unmarked taxi cab…Everyone (the whole freaking cast) piles into Chan’s hotel room, to find the great El Mustachio himself (Miller) dead on the floor, ker-stabbed. Just to confuse matters purposelessly, here is Millie to explain how Miller was her husband. It doesn’t matter! But at least now we learn of the stupid MacGuffin that is driving all this inept storytelling – Billie had a diary, the evidence needed to rid New York entirely of crime once and for all…Sure. And it turns out she’d dumped it into Chan’s luggage back on the steamer ship, which Chan is only now aware of. Good one there, Chan!
What happens next? Well, I’m at a loss, and so is this film, so it’s back to the lovebirds, doing their proto-Daily Globe thing (and their sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-His Girl Friday thing) in the creation of newspaper stories to commemorate the latest murderations. This at least spurs something I always find interesting – the spinning newspaper montage! Oh man, I’ve seen it before in old movies, but this particular outdated cliché never failed to thrill me. Now this is efficient expositing – had we not already been aware of Billie’s death, that is.
Next up is Chan’s lengthy investigation into that stupid napkin, which I have already pardoned myself of above.
A few more scenes happen – blah blah alibi this blah blah motive that. Whatever, let’s move on to the finale. Here Chan does something I thought I’d never see again: He assembles all the suspects together for a final “I solve the crime in front of you” floorshow. By now we know how this stuff works – Chan will issue threats all around, hoping to draw the (known) killer out of his shell. The bait this time is a forged page from Billie’s missing diary. Speed is quick to identify it as a forgery, so he’s the killer – Wait, Speed! The lovebird?! Okay, this ain’t the first time the (male) lovebird’s been the killer (it’s the second), but it still comes across as a twist. And Speed, making poor use of that intellect God gave him, revealed his guilt to Chan earlier by writing and printing a newspaper story with info only the killer would know – Good one, Speed! Now, if only we’d been made privy to such info at some point to give us a fighting Chan-ce. Nah! They could never jeopardize Chan’s superiority to us all in that manner!
Anyway, Speed’s not about to go quietly, though he is quite happy to blab out his confession. Then our former-lovebird gets his murderous hands on a pistol, prepared to blow away all twelve or so main characters. Here Lee does a Lee Special, something I thought I’d never see him to again – he plays the action hero! Lee wrestles the gun away from Speed, though earning himself a “humorous” closing injury in the process. The end!
One more to go!...in the Oland era. Fact is, there’re really 29 or so more Chan movies to go – We’re not even half way through here! And Warner Oland is becoming pretty useless in these movies, perhaps because the man was dying. I expect a similar disengaging experience from Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo. Until 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. 17 Charlie Chan at the Olympics (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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