Having made it deep enough into the Charlie Chan franchise, I’m beginning to lose sight of what these movies were originally about. Perhaps for my sake, I shall reiterate the central premise and reground myself. For Charlie Chan, our hero, is a literary creation (of Earl Derr Biggers) meant as a positive response to the racist Yellow Peril notions of baddies like Fu Manchu – bringing with him a whole new set of racist notions. He is a Benevolent Other Chinese detective working mostly out of Honolulu (though don’t tell the dozens of sequels that), apt to solving generic and pedestrian murder mysteries of the ‘30s and ‘40s. In the American movies, he is always played by a Caucasian awkwardly slanting his round eyes. He speaks wholly in awkwardly-stated, ching chong aphorisms (which I ceased noticing twenty movies ago), and prefers dramatic climaxes (Chanquests) to draw the killer out.
Perhaps this is a good time to reconsider the franchise as a whole, because 1940’s Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise is possibly a return to franchise roots. (I can’t yet say; I’ve yet to watch it…) Here we have the second adaptation of Derr Bigger’s “Charlie Chan Carries On,” now starring Sidney Toler – Previously was Charlie Chan Carries On, natch, a lost film starring Warner Oland. (I still had something to say of it, by aid of the Spanish language remake Eran Trece.) It would be nice to say we could now directly compare Oland and Toler in the same tale, but it can never be so. And damn it all, even with the former entry lost, I am still sick of seeing Charlie Chan on boat cruises!
I have a few questions before the movie starts: Will this return Chan to its roots? Will it reinvest a somewhat wandering series with purpose? Will Toler compare to my vague impression of Oland’s lost performance? Will the boat bore the hell out of me?
Having now seen it, here are my answers: kinda, at least for one entry, Toler’s better, and not as much as I expected.
It certainly helps that they have an original novel to (re)adapt. Behold the James Bond series’ recent Casino Royale for a similar example where the long-dead author proved to be the “reboot’s” greatest asset. For once we don’t have a plot woven from over-tired formula combined with a new setting; this is one of the originals, and possibly Derr Biggers’ best work. Of course it still has to conform to contemporary Chan formula, but like Casino Royale that helps to spice things up with subtle changes they may not have otherwise made.
The opening scenes here were halfway through Charlie Chan Carries On, as the grotesquely incompetent Inspector Duff (C. Montague Shaw in this one) trades off his case with Charlie Chan. I cannot say what the arrangement is in Derr Biggers’ novel, but here it means two things. First, Duff has a fantabulous heaping mound of exposition pre-warmed for Chan right off the bat, and second, many portions of Duff’s former story now belong to Chan himself. But first for that astounding exposition: Duff explains how he’s been traveling incognito around the world on a cruise ship, following a tour group of passengers that includes a murderer – an unknown London strangler. Now, at long last, Duff has one week until the cruise ship reaches San Francisco, and the case is dropped. The suspects are presently in a hotel here in Honolulu, and a fresh phone call reveals our murderer has killed again – the specific murder that opened the former adaptation, leading us to briefly ponder what that London strangulation here was all about. But before Chan can do anything more, Duff gets his fool self murder-killed as well – Now it’s personal.
Initially, at least, the plot details are quite similar to Charlie Chan Carries On, with Chan finding the same clues connected to Mr. Kenyon strangled in his bed – a luggage strap, a sack full of 30 coins…Derr Biggers’ original clues are much more interesting, actually, than what the series has been coming up with on its own afterwards.
Now, one of the major problems with Eran Trece (and why I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it) was that it involved a huge cast of suspects, all of them interchangeable greased Hispanics. Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise realizes the difficulty inherent in the novel’s mandated huge cast, so it takes as much care as possible to introduce a truly varied suspect roll call. To do this, is takes well up to half an hour to introduce everyone.
First we meet the bearded beggar who is clearly the killer in disguise, and thus not yet identified. Revealed simultaneously (and thus surely not the killer…right?) is Archeology Professor Gordon (Leo Carroll, Hitchcock regular and cast member of TV’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”). There is also Chan regular Lionel Atwill as Dr. Superman – er, Suderman. That’s a lot less interesting.
So we may not have Superman, but we do have Batman!, that is, an actor who once played Batman in an old, lost serial – Robert Lowery as Dick Kenyon, the murdered man’s nephew and now sole inheritor – motive! Still, here’s his alibi/love interest, Paula Drake (Marjorie Weaver) – I guess this series’ writers, so obsessed with the name “Paul,” have to assign the name to a female, as their hero is a Dick….Ah, back in the day when “Dick” meant “manly man,” not “outrageously hateful asshole.”
The steady, gradual drip of suspects continues with Gerald Pendleton (Leonard Mudie), the man sleeping next door to the murdered Kenyon. Actually, Kenyon’s body was moved – Pendleton first discovered him dead in Pendleton’s bed, and replaced it without telling anyone, because, you know, inconveniences. Jumping ahead of schedule, and resolving a potential confusion, they’d switched bedrooms before because of a noise problem. Kenyon was killed by mistake, under the assumption he was Pendleton. Ah, just like Charlie Chan Carries On…
Now, who turned out to be the murderer in Charlie Chan Carries On? Some guy named Ross. And the names are relatively consistent here, so here is our obvious culprit this time around, James Ross (Don Beddoe, foil to the Stooges and star of Broadway’s Nigger Rich – it was 1929 then). Well, mystery solved then, right? Not so fast! This series knows its audience is a tricky, sneaky bunch, and accordingly there are a few more snarls to come.
We’re still not done meeting suspects! Idiotic screams draw everyone to our failed comic relief figure for the evening – Suzie Watson (Cora Witherspoon), a dowager of sorts who ineptly struggles, Valley Girl style, to form a coherent sentence. An example: “Maybe it was a woman – no, it was a man, because WHOOOOSH! And then suddenly he went all VROOO! And there I was!” It isn’t funny.
Jeepers, even now we’re not done with suspects! Yeesh! It’s a pair of inconsequential psychics, who have little real bearing on this mystery, Jeremiah Walters (Charles Middleton) and Mrs. Walters (Claire Du Brey). These are the traditionally useless extra credit suspects thrown in mostly to confuse an already tizzied audience.
Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen Yung) is there too, naturally.
At last we’re off on the titular “murder” cruise, which will surely be full of murder. As in Toler’s inaugural Chansterpiece, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, this revitalized series inspires my confidence by dropping the flat, clinical lighting scheme of the Warner Oland movies in favor of darker, generally more stylish noir visuals. So despite my remarkable fatigue with cruise ships, the setting is for once given a dingy, industrial feel, full of fog and shadows – it’s much better.
The cast in place, wheels spin for a bit with the pursuit of motives and clues. Chan figures out the whole “Pendleton was the intended victim” thing, and so follows this track. Pendleton reveals further knowledge about the coin sack, saying his wife received a similar message five years ago. This is, by the way, amongst the useful clues, for this movie, like all Chan pics, is full of red herrings (everything to do with Dick doesn’t mean dick).
Really, these middle sections are always difficult to recount, as they’re mostly a way to pad the time between “assessing the asses” and the “detective denouement.” Eventually the entire cast is engaged in a depraved 1940 celebration, a “hobby horse race.” Based on the onscreen evidence, I’d assume huge amounts of drunkenness, delirium or denial. Chan distracts us a little by focusing on the lovebird subplot (Dick and Paula), which was probably a much greater concern in the Derr Biggers novel than the formulaic lovebird storylines we’ve been getting ever since. Here Chan utters a particularly bizarre aphorism that rather made me spit take: “Young man’s explanation like skin of sensitive woman. Very thin.”
Pendleton is dead! No mistakes this time, that killer got the right guy! (All in all, actually, this is the most bloodthirsty and death-happy Chan film of the regularized series.)
Chan investigates Pendleton’s quarters, using that old Big Lebowski method of applying pencil lead to a notepad to reveal traces of the last-written note. Rather than a great big honking sketch of a phallus, Chan discovers a radiogram sent to Pendleton’s wife on shore, advising her not to meet him in San Francisco. Checking with the ship’s crew, Chan further learns that the nebulous killer has superseded Pendleton with a second radiogram telling Mrs. Pendleton to come out – pretending to be her husband.
Now that the shipmates have clearly seen the killer, the net is clearly closing in on him…right? Jimmy leads a tense, 1940 shootout against that masked beggar man up on the moodiest parts of the deck. Finally the man is shot dead (from a very bizarre angle – mysterious). And the beggar murderer turns out to be – Ross. Eh, just like before, right? Right? Well, that mysterious firing angle suggests a second culprit, a mastermind, a plot twist. (Of course, that I can see 15 minutes remaining in the running time suggests this rather longish Chan picture has far more up its sleeve.)
They dock in San Francisco, and everyone except Chan (who sees that running time) thinks the case is over. But if Mrs. Pendleton already knows who her husband’s killer might be (and this is Chan’s theory, and therefore 100% infallibly correct), it is a simple matter of having her show up and identify the man…right?...Plot twist! In a moment that speaks purely of “writer’s coincidence,” Mrs. Pendleton has been in a random plane crash on the way out, so it’ll be up to Chan alone, and with midnight at the deadline. Da dum dum!
It’s time for our traditional Chanquest at the SF County Morgue. Everything’s all set when – Mrs. Pendleton shows up anyway. Oh well, I guess it’s plot solved then! Again, no, since she’s been (temporarily) blinded from that silly airplane crash – still, Chan thinks she could identify the killer by voice. First Mrs. Pendleton tells a tale of her former marriage to Jim Everheart, a thief who sought her convoluted aid in his lame smuggling operations. Mrs. Everheart, soon to be Mrs. Pendleton, rather divorced and imprisoned Jim – methinks they had an insufficient engagement period. Time passes, Jim is released from prison, threatens Mrs. Pendleton with those evil coin sacks (it’s a Judas reference, by the way), is sent to prison, then escapes again. This story is getting a little convoluted, but the gist is that Everheart was on the worldwide cruise tour as part of an incredibly roundabout revenge scheme that involved killing four other people along the way. Ross was merely an accomplice, for whatever criminal gain there is in circumnavigating the globe in order to kill one lady.
Ultimately, though, Suderman is identified as Jim. So, movie’s over now…right? Hah, you don’t know this movie too well, do ya?! Everyone is dismissed (Suderman runs off into the night as cops fire at him), and Chan realizes that Ross’s mask and beard are missing. There’s a scream from next door, where they find that beggar guy strangulating Mrs. Pendleton. The cops stop this, and it’s really – Gordon…the archeologist. And since Mrs. Pendleton can see, this whole past ten minutes was simply Chan showing off because he can. And risking the lives of both Mrs. Pendleton and the intentionally-misidentified Suderman, who’s currently getting shot at in an alleyway for no damn good reason. The reason Chan knew Gordon was Jim is because of an archeological slipup Gordon made earlier – which I was sorely inclined to point out then.
Body count aside, this is also perhaps the most complicated plot in any Chan film so far – the result of employing an already-complicated story by Derr Biggers, and weirding it up even more with further twists to keep those genre-savvy 1940 audiences guessing. As a pure murder mystery (minus the extra horror elements I usually respond to), this is surely among the strongest of all the Chan movies – it always helps to return to the source novels. And the cast is strong, the cinematography is strong, technically it’s an entirely decent B-movie – just add the original author, and our now-experienced filmmakers can really go to town! And in this entry, at least, my boredom with overused series formula definitely tapers; this is a return to pre-formula stories, and an interesting example of applying said formulas to such material. A few hiccups aside (and my fatigue aside), the series is getting much more consistently good.
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. 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. 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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