Search - Charlie Chan Collection, Vol. 1 (Charlie Chan in London / Charlie Chan in Paris / Charlie Chan in Egypt / Charlie Chan in Shanghai / Eran Trece) on DVD

Confucius Meets Sherlock Holmes

Dave Clayton | San Diego, CA USA | 11/16/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Confucius Meets Sherlock Holmes

One of the cultural icons of the 1930s, in print and on screen, was Charlie Chan. As is well known, Chan's creator, Earl Derr Biggers, based the figure upon a real Hawaiian detective,Chang Apana. But underneath the disguise we have no difficulty in detecting the features of Sherlock Holmes. At a moment when Asian characters frequently appeared in Western novels or stage plays as kowtowing houseboys or opium smoking fiends, Biggers showed real audacity in coming up with his sleuth.

But he was tapping into another stereotype, that of China as a land of ancient wisdom populated by oracular mandarins, from whose golden tongues aphorisms from Confucius or Lao Tzu flew like plum blossoms in the spring wind. Charlie Chan is Sherlock Holmes as an Eastern sage. Chan is a man of impeccable dignity and aplomb, who has no bottles hidden in his desk drawers and no blondes lurking in his closet, and who solves crimes by superior skull skills, in the words of Churchy La Femme.

There had been a couple of attempts at transferring Chan to celluloid in the 1920s, but the series really geared up when Fox cast Warner Oland in the role in 1931. Oland, who had previously played Jackie Robin's father in The Jazz Singer and the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu in some early sound pictures at Paramount, was no great actor, but he made the role of Chan incontestably his own. It is just as impossible for anyone who has ever seen Oland as Chan to imagine another actor in the role as it is to imagine anyone other than Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes.

A number of the Oland-Chan pictures have been previously available in VHS format, but this DVD set is an absolute treat, indispensable for Chan fans and for devotees of studio filmmaking in the heyday of Hollywood. The set consists of four pictures starring Oland made from 1934-35, along with Eran Trece (They Were Thirteen), the 1931 Spanish language version of the no longer extant Charlie Chan Carries On. In addition, there are three quite informative and well-made short documentaries dealing with the origin of the Chan figure and its development, the production of the films, etc.

One mystery that might have baffled Chan himself is the omission of The Black Camel (1931) from the set. Photographed partly on location at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and its environs, the movie boasts a cast that includes Bela Lugosi, Robert Young--in his first screen appearance--and Dwight Frye, albeit uncredited. I appreciate the inclusion of EranTrece, but it is mainly a curiosity, and inferior to The Black Camel. Fortunately, the latter film is not lost, and converts to the Chan cult can obtain an acceptable DVD copy of it from Sinister Cinema, which they will want to add to their collections.

All of the pictures in the set are quite entertaining if conventional thrillers set in foreign locales, Eran Trece being the weakest of the lot, mainly owing to Oland's absence. Eran Trece uses a global cruise as background for a murder mystery, while Charlie Chan in London--with a very young Ray Milland--recounts Chan's efforts to free an innocent man facing execution. In Charlie Chan in Paris, the detective visits the City of Lights to clear up a bank fraud, and supplies one of the series' more memorable lines, when he says to a companion, "Many strange crimes committed in the sewers of Paris," while gazing into some impenetrably murky subterranean waters.

Charlie Chan in Egypt centers upon the theft of relics from an Egyptian tomb, and Charlie Chan in Shanghai shows Chan breaking up a ring of opium dealers. Although these are all B productions, usually lacking well-known performers apart from Oland, Fox was a major studio, and the cinematography--honor to your memory, Joseph August, Ernest Palmer, Daniel Clark, and Barney McGill!--and set design are generally outstanding. The opening of the tomb at the beginning of Charlie Chan in Egypt, to cite one example, utterly puts to shame a comparable scene in The Mummy, when archaeologists unearth the tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.

Serious critics at the time would have dismissed the Chan movies as escapism; present day partisans of political correctness would have far harsher things to say. More than anything else, they are relics of a pre-World War II, pre-Cold War America that viewed the outside world with suspicion, if not necessarily hostility. They are not racist but outdated, so outdated that they have acquired the etiolated charm of a once stylish table lamp found moldering in the shadows of an antique store. To use a felicitous phrase of James Joyce's from Finnegan's Wake, they are "Only the fadograph of a yestern scene,"

Most importantly, one of the motives that first brought paying customers into movie theaters burns brightly in all of these films: to transport viewers to hitherto unrevealed lands of excitement and mystery. In the old days, the dimming of the house lights and the opening of the curtains was always the promise of a revelation. For this reason, my favorite of the set is Charlie Chan in Egypt which plunged me into an Egypt of the 1930s hardly less fabulous than that of the pharaohs, mesmerized me with its luminous procession of black and white images, and entrapped me in a silver nitrate labyrinth cleverly fabricated by the Fox studio. On the veranda, I sipped a gin and tonic, while an overpowering odor of ancient incense filled my nostrils. Could it be the same incense Ardath Bey burns for Helen Grosvenor in The Mummy?



"