Well, I was complaining about the lack of really offensive Chinese stereotypes so far in the Charlie Chan franchise (I am an idiot). I knew Warner Oland wouldn’t let me down! While The Black Camel is Orland’s second film as Charlie Chan, the (surprisingly large) Oriental dick, it is the first one anyone can see. Thus it gives a really good insight into this cracker’s take on the wise Chinese-American detective from Honolulu.
I’d suspect The Black Camel wasn’t put into production until producers were certain of the success of their former Charlie Chan Carries On. Three Charlie Chan pictures had bombed before it, so nothing was guaranteed yet. Well, Oland’s unseen ethnic mockery in that previous picture is unfindable now, but it must’ve done Chinese gangbusters on 30s audiences, since this beast was put out later that very same year. How’s that for a fast turnaround? Of course it’s easier when your stock players are on contract, and you have novels to adapt. And for some reason, they adapted the fifth novel fourth, so they they’d go ahead and adapt the fourth novel fifth.
The simplest way to critique such a movie is to just dive in, and let the observations pop up where they may...
We start with the same stock footage of Hawaiian surfers as seen in Charlie Chan Carries On – or at least Eren Trece. That’s right, this time they’re going with Chan’s own home surf and turf over and endless progression of London and the vaguely exotic nations of Darkest Orient. This practically forces an entire movie’s worth of Charlie Chan, which is astoundingly only happening now in the fifth Chan picture. Something tells me that Behind That Curtain was an experiment of sorts, to see if audiences would really be receptive of Oland’s racist interpretation of the character. Now confident in their offensive decision, the Fox executives could begin the series in earnest. Yes, in a sense I’d say this is the true start of the Charlie Chan franchise – the formula setter.
But yet, it seems we always have to greet the suspects before we can join Chan. So we see two attractive young people having a poorly acted romantic discussion on the Hawaiian beach and – Cut! Yeah, they’re just filming a movie, which justifies the bad acting here. If only they’d found an excuse for most of what follows.
Shelah Fane (Dorothy Revier) is a beautiful actress, and the toast of Hollywood, quite unlike the actress playing her. She quarrels with her director (in jodhpurs for some reason) and confides in her good friend Julie (Sally Eilers). Wow, the filmmaking in this entry has improved significantly, because it seems now they’re finally comfortable with sound technology, and it isn’t a movie made by drunken Mexicans at midnight (Eren Trece). They actually pull off a tracking shot, on location, with extensive dialogue done with competent dubbing! Expose yourself to technically archaic movies for long enough, and the most minor achievements seem overwhelming.
Anyway, Shelah is destined to marry one Alan Jaynes (William Post Jr.), who is our traditional once-per-movie blah blah blah useless romantic hero. Shelah ponders eloping, and has her own personal psychic fortuneteller fly in from California to help her – whoa, actors have always been vain, superstitious and idiotic! She meets said psychic Tarneverro at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel (I know the hotel’s name because onscreen titles told me so). Tarneverro is possibly the single best thing about this movie, full stop, since he is played by world-class hambone Bela Lugosi, hot off his lifetime triumph in Dracula. There’s nothing like seeing an entertainingly bad actor work with confidence, hurling his soupy Hungarian accent around like so much fine wine. I love Lugosi in this! (Considering Lugosi here, and Karloff in the last one, I half expect to see one or more Chaney appear at some point down the line.)
And some psychic this Tarneverro is, as all of his “predictions” are precisely what we’ve already seen printed in the daily newspapers – as an aftershock of silent cinema, this movie opts to linger long on newspaper articles occasionally, assuming the audience wants to read whole stories in the midst of their B-flick. Shelah buys Tarneverro’s proverbial snake oil, though (the psychic industry never changes), and proceeds to reveal some very silly things to our beloved turban-clad Hungarian dope-fiend. All this centers around a three-year-old murder of oddly-named actor Danny Mayo (oddly-named so we can remember him when it becomes important later). We don’t learn the important details now, since that’d spoil the upcoming murder.
Ah yes, aren’t these things supposed to start with murders? It takes until the twenty minute mark for Shelah to get her blonde actress butt killed off, and they’re actually able to squeeze Chan’s introduction in long before that happens. How ‘bout that? So my first introduction to Warner Oland’s take on Charlie Chan comes when he disguises himself as a Chinese cook to talk with Tarneverro in the hotel lobby. There’s nothing like two extreme caricatures playing off each other, and there’s no one like Lugosi to underplay Oland’s own sick ethnic nonsense.
Having now met Chan for what truly feels like the first time, I shall stop and discuss him. As played by Oland, Charlie Chan is fat, mustachioed, and humbled in the presence of crackers. That whole Panama suit thing remains the same. Basically, this Chan, though a good guy, is a limited good guy, a one-dimensional Benevolent Other. He is emasculated, asexual (despite a Chinese brood of about twenty, ‘cause you know those people breed like rabbits, eh), and perpetually inferior to whitey. And given Chan’s back story (not dumped at me in any film so far, so bless you, Internet), the man emigrated from Darkest and Yellowest China in his extreme youth, settling for life in Hawaii. Still, somehow, he retains a caricatured broken English accent and a perpetual problem with indirect pronouns. How he picked this up, living in civilized Caucasian society, I cannot say, nor can I say how it doesn’t impede on his detection. And per Oland’s line readings, Chan is rendered far more “ethnic” than the script calls for, actually devising stilted line readings such as “Me so solly” and “Me rikee lice.” Ah, so that’s where that came from! It all sounds like when someone tries to make a joke out of reading a menu, only…imagine it stretched out over some forty-odd movies. I don’t think I’ll be able to feel offended for the Chinese that long.
The curious thing is, Chan isn’t even by far the most offensive Chinese stereotype on display. He has a buck-toothed, bumbling assistant named Kashimo (in my notes, I called him Asimo). This guy, played by dignity-challenged Japanese actor Otto Yamaoka, has so little control over his flailing limbs and intellect, I suspect he eats Flubber for breakfast. Race aside, Kashimo remains one of the single most aggravating excuses for comic relief I’ve ever seen, right up there with much of George Lucas’ output. Imagine a guy who’s not only confused by the ins and outs of formulaic murder mysteries, but also confused by there more corporeality of matter. Kashimo, I salute you, you mask Chan’s own ching-chong-ding-dong deficiencies nicery – excuse me, nicely. Here is some of Kashimo’s dialogue: “I got idea! What you go do libaly?” He meant to say “library.”
So, it’s time to return the narrative, and leave outdated cultural mores behind us. Shelah paces about in her hotel pavilion, meeting with pal Julie. This gives me an opportunity to get distracted by their dated, early 30s hairstyles, all wavy, bobbed, and globbed full of styling grease. Julie in particular looks like Betty Boop. She leaves, and a French maid enters the room in order to arouse suspicions and males. Then the maid departs for a short, possibly useless scene with a butler.
Oh, murder mysteries, how you love your maids and butlers! It’s a commonly assumed trope about the genre that the butler always did it – the all-knowing sooths on the Internet assure me this has hardly ever been the actual case. Still, one is expected to react in a tale of this sort when butlers show up. What I cannot say, in such an extremely early example, is how much they’re trying to mislead me with this stuff, or how much it’s being played straight. You see, maybe no one had caught on yet that the butler might “do it.” If they had, then he’s obviously just there as a red herring – “helling,” as Chan would eventually stutter. But maybe the filmmakers know we know they’re red herrings, which means it’s then a twist if the butler did it. And so forth on, as far down as the tropic cycle evolves…
The same thing goes for that other standard murder mystery figure – the obvious suspect. Bela Lugosi is that suspect here because, you know, Dracula. Again, if we’re meant to think that, then Bela’s a great big hammy Hungarian herring. But if the director (uncredited, but IMDb assures me it’s 30s mediocrity Hamilton MacFadden) actually thinks his viewers are morons (Fox movie, remember), then Lugosi is a legitimate suspect, and the likely eventual killer. I find myself endlessly out-guessing, or under-guessing, or side-guessing these mystery movies, and even the old tried-and-true “least likely suspect” method ain’t working here. Ah, but we’ll discuss the final culprit towards the end.
So now, twenty minutes and countless recap digressions in, we come to Shelah’s big, plot-starting murder. A whole mass of mystery-ready intelligentsia are assembled in the hotel lobby throwing Shelah some sort of party, only to find her dead in her pavilion. The traditional gimmick clue comes in the form of a crushed orchid and holey footprints – these are possibly the details Derr Biggers started with when fashioning his novels.
And around here I notice something else astounding about this movie – it has a non-diagetic soundtrack! Look, guys, by 1931 this was a pretty big deal (neither of Universal’s classic monster movies from that year employ this technique). Hell, King Kong in 1933 is often given credit for this particular movie element, and yet I’ve found it here in a B-movie two years older. And what a soundtrack it is, anticipating the appropriate yet off-putting zither work in The Third Man, only done here with ukuleles – you know, Hawaii.
Chan is summoned, and he sequesters the mass of mostly-unidentified suspects in the hotel lobby, fulfilling the classic “lobby interview sequence” all good mysteries must have. Here he says one of his “classic” aphorisms, slightly justifying the movie’s non sequitur title: “Death is a black camel that kneels unbitten at every gate.” Okay, you know, that still don’t make no sense. Maybe it’s about nicotine. Ah, but it barely matters, since the movie goes crazy and anticipates noir lighting a decade in advance, lighting Oland’s pudgy little faux-Chinee face from below. It sort of looks like this:
As for all those aphorisms I keep mentioning, they are truly massive in number and minimal in import. Certain awe-inspiring fan sites make brilliant catalogues of all these sayings, keeping fortune cookie writers and Karate Kid knockoffs in business for decades. By some counts, there are roughly 33 aphorisms in The Black Camel, an average of one every two minutes. Since Chan isn’t on screen for the whole film, that density actually increases. And to give you a taste of what these “Chanphorisms” are like, so I never have to make constant reference to them again, here’s a small taste:
“Even wisest man sometimes mistake bumblebee for blackberry.”
“Soap and water never can change perfume of billy-goat.”
“Learn from hen – never boast about egg until after egg’s birthday.”
Good, so now you get an idea of Chan’s speech patterns, syntax, etc. Let them now be forever forgotten, partly at the request of noted Chan-hater George Takei.
The lobby interview scene goes on for quite some time, making me genuinely wish it will comprise the entirety of the movie. (I like compressed plots like that, they require more discipline and more suspense. Consider, Sleuth happens entirely in real time.) Chan questions the various characters, many of whom I haven’t outlined, learning the timing of the murder, identifying clues, and so forth. Chan equates lie detectors with wives. Kashimo impugns the very notion of intelligence by intentionally thrashing the crime scene after misinterpreting Chan’s orders. Shelah’s ex-husband Robert Fyfe (Victor Varconi) is now here to serve up alibis and misdirection. Early evidence seems to point to Lugosi’s Tarneverro, which means he’s surely not the killer (unless he is).
Sadly, the back third of the movie cannot occur in the hotel lobby, but over the next day or two as the suspects bungle their ways about all over Honolulu. A certain dirty man named Smith (Murray Kinnell) mentions having heard a crucial clue whilst creeping about outside Shelah’s pavilion like a common pervert. It turns out, though, that Smith is an “artist,” which justifies his filth. Smith then finds his way into a stylishly lit portion of the beach – this being an indicator that he is about to be killed. Or shot, at any rate, as Smith shall not shuffle off this mortal coil until after revealing an essential clue to Chan on his death bed: Shelah murdered actor Danny Mayo three years prior. Ah, our killer has a motive!
It turns out Danny Mayo had an identical twin brother Arthur, which is just the sort of fictional development I’d expect from this genre. This explains why all the photos of Mayo in the recent local newspapers (which are now suddenly interested in a long-dead bit actor from another state) have been cut out. Well, at any rate, the library’s newspaper has been cut out, because surely that isn’t the sort of thing that’s mass produced and strewn all over. All evidence now suggests Lugosi (or, er, Tarnverro, which I really hate typing) is Mayo’s brother – Wow, what did Shelah think was going to happen by letting a psychotic psychic psycho know she’d murdered his brother?
So that’s where this movie lays on the great “sneaky plot twist” continuum, way over on the far “obvious killer is the killer” end…Or not. For while the chief of police thinks Tarnverro is the killer, Chan doesn’t. Despite his ethnicity, as hero Chan cannot be shown as wrong, so…sure, Tarnverro isn’t the killer. Okay, move it one notch further to the right on that continuum.
A mystery like this can only be resolved by assembling the whole mass of suspects for another “lobby scene,” so naturally that is Chan’s solution here. He seats them all around a dinner table, in the same positions as they’d been in last night. It seems the killer had scratched the table’s underside, so of course the killer will sit in that chair. And it’s…Tarnverro again. Ah hah, fooled you! Chan learns the nameless maid had maneuvered everyone around the table at some point, then fingers her further (so to speak) by discovering she is the possessor of the fabled odd-holed shoe (having trod all over Shelah’s jewelry and orchids). So yeah, the maid was the killer – alright, move that continuum even further to the left, this is the most cliché ending a murder mystery can have. It’s always the hired help! (It’s easy for racist old movies to blame the lower classes.) Ah, but why the hell did this maid commit murder? Um, because she was Mayo’s wife. Sure, why not, that isn’t, like, a left field reveal this late in the game.
No, wait, I know, we can make this ending even more cliché! Wasn’t there a butler on screen for about five seconds an hour earlier? Indeed there was, so moving right along, he killed Smith! Because…why not…butlers and maids are always in cahoots. Oh who cares, there are but ten seconds left in this movie now, just enough time for Kashimo to make an unwelcome appearance and set the Chinese equality movement back by one dynasty.
And you know what, this is by far the best Charlie Chan movie so far. For once, this has an actual compact murder mystery, with the slightest emphasis on useless side romances. Charlie Chan is indeed the main character, and when you ignore Oland’s endless gay bowing and mutterings of “ah so,” his plot function is fairly entertaining. I can now see this as a franchise, with Chan happening upon one murder mystery after another, two or three times a year for two decades (I’ve only had to deal with one or two in my whole life). My enthusiasm is piqued ever so slightly, and I think I may be at least slightly capable of going on with these films.
Related posts:
• No. 3 Behind That Curtain (1929)
• No. 4 Charlie Chan Carries On (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. 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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