SUNDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2025

Although the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ saw the release of almost fifty Charlie Chan films, this blog will largely focus on those made between 1931 and 1937, with Warner Oland as Chan and Keye Luke as Number One Son. The main reason for this is that they’re by far the best in my opinion. They may still be little more than entertaining hokum but they’re charming and enjoyably corny, perfect fare for a rainy Sunday afternoon, and, despite cheesy plots and moments of far from subtle humour, the Oland/Luke movies otherwise have a freshness of mood and lightness of touch which is lacking in many of those that followed.

The classic detective film in which a private eye with a logical, laser-sharp mind figures out who committed the murder was a popular form at the time, with series like The Thin Man and the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes, plus two other series featuring Asian detectives played by white actors in yellowface, Mr Wong and Mr Moto. The first movies featuring Chan, in which he was played by actors of Asian extraction, came out in the mid- and late-1920s, but he was a secondary character in these and the films were not a huge success. He took centre-stage when Warner Oland, a Swedish actor, appeared in Charlie Chan Carries On in 1931, and he then played the part until Charlie Chan At Monte Carlo in 1937, sixteen films in total, half of which included Number One Son. After Oland’s death in 1938, Sidney Toler took over the role and eventually portrayed Chan in more films (twenty-two) than Oland, although Oland is the actor with whom the character is most associated. Then Roland Winters was briefly handed the baton in 1947 for a run of six films, but the magic had totally faded by then and Chan was finally retired.

I suspect that many fans of Chan would agree with me that the films in which Oland and Luke work together are generally the most watchable, for the chemistry sparkles between them and Charlie and Number One Son clearly have a genuine love for each other. There is a passage in Charlie Chan at the Olympics when Number One Son is kidnapped and held hostage which allows the actors to display this deep affection between father and son. Luke also adds a dash of comedy which lightens the plodding nature of what would otherwise often be uninspired whodunits, and which is lacking in the movies where he doesn’t appear, since these comic interludes help to liven up the flow of the films by adding changes in mood and variety of pace.

Oland plays Chan as avuncular, deferent and polite, but intelligent and shrewd, and is the polar opposite of the evil Fu Manchu plotting to bring down the west that we see in other movies of the era. Charlie is warm and likeable, and we catch glimpses of his wife and huge brood of children in a few of the films (twelve at the time of Charlie Chan at the Circus), so he is very much the family man unlike many movie detectives, about whom we learn nothing of their life outside of their work solving crime. One scene in particular at the beginning of Charlie Chan in Shanghai shows Charlie’s rapport with children. He is on a ship and playing leap frog with a group of them, a mix of Chinese and Caucasian; they clearly adore him, and then one of them asks him to sing a Chinese song about a princess and the children excitedly gather around to listen.

Following the commercial failure of the films featuring Chan in the 1920s, and realising the need to make Charlie more accessible to American audiences if they hoped to churn out a successful product, Hollywood did everything it could to soften its depiction of him in what many argue was a form of racial bleaching. First, and most importantly, the actors of Asian extraction of the 1920s were replaced by the Swedish Oland (the contemporaneous Mr Wong and Mr Moto were also played by Caucasians). In addition, Charlie became a gentle stereotype of the inscrutable and diffident Oriental, full of humility and self-abnegation (for example, he repeatedly says ‘please’, refers to himself as ‘humble servant’ or ‘humble self’, and never uses the pronoun, ‘I’). Meanwhile, his colourful mock-Confucian aphorisms mark him out as Other but render him totally unthreatening.

Luke as Number One Son provides a total contrast and acts as a balance to Oland’s low-key portrayal; although he is of Chinese extraction, he comes across as completely all-American, confident and outgoing. He peppers his speech with the latest trendy slang (‘Gee, Pop!’ is his catchphrase) and moves with an energy and ease compared to Oland’s restricted body language and apologetic physical presence. Despite Luke’s Chinese ancestry, the character he plays is totally Americanised and if you listen to the dialogue with the screen turned off, he could be a white American. He serves as a kind of bridge between America and Asia, living proof of assimilation, while Chan, with his flowery language and his deference, comes across as stereotypically Oriental. Significantly, though, as well as being the opposite of the all-American male, he is also the antithesis of the cruel and despotic Fu Manchu.

So Hollywood had succeeded in its attempts to create an Asian detective who was personable and innocuous, but who at the same time added a splash of the exotic that turned standard whodunit fare into something more intriguing and appealing to US audiences. Moreover, this tinge of safe exoticism extended beyond Chan’s characterisation. A key feature of the Charlie Chan movies produced by Fox is that they were often set outside the United States, in places such as Monte Carlo, Shanghai, Paris and Egypt, and one of them in Berlin at the time of the Olympics (with some actual footage from the Games). We have to remember that few of its American audience travelled abroad at the time or had much awareness of foreign cultures or the world beyond their local region, so there are many scenes set on ships and planes in the movies put out by Fox, offering moviegoers glimpses from a safe distance of a modern, cosmopolitan globe in which the rich and sophisticated sailed and flew to places where the natives had strange, un-American ways. (In reality, of course, they were mostly shot in the studio.)

Charlie is based at police headquarters in Honolulu in Hawaii, another exotic setting for most of its US audience but simultaneously American territory and therefore nonthreatening. While it is true that this simply follows the books from which the films are adapted, in the films we rarely see him in Honolulu for he fulfils the role of the gifted amateur detective that was common in early film whodunits rather than a salaried employee in an official police department. Even when they were Caucasian, these amateur detectives tended to have their quirks and eccentricities (Holmes playing his violin, for example) and the tools of their trade were the magnifying glass, the microscope and the chemistry set. Their clues were usually lipstick on cigarette butts, fingerprints on wine glasses, and foxfur hairs on upholstery rather than anything more high-tech and forensic.

Turning to the films themselves, the one which many Chan fans would rate most highly is Charlie Chan at the Opera, starring Boris Karloff as an opera singer in a plot that is a variation on The Phantom of the Opera. Karloff plays Gravelle, a baritone who everyone believes had died in a fire in a theatre in Chicago but is in fact housed in a mental institution at the beginning of the film, suffering from amnesia. Then the opera comes to Los Angeles and he begins to remember who he is and what has happened, and escapes the institution to stalk the concert hall where the opera is playing, determined to get revenge on the people who had locked him inside the burning building. As nearly always with Karloff, his talent shines through and he does much to lift the film above the standard whodunit just as he also raised a lot of cheesy horror films to a level that wasn’t embarrassing. Even when working with total schlock (and this film isn’t remotely that, nor were his 1930s horrors at Universal Studios), he still managed to bring a kind of seriousness and sincerity to all of the roles he played.

A composer called Oscar Levant wrote an opera, Carnival, as the soundtrack for the film and this, along with the frantic activity in the theatre and scenes of the opera being performed, give the movie a liveliness and energy that some of the Chan films lack. They help it to avoid those longueurs that mar so many whodunits while essential elements of plot, along with a sprinkling of red herrings, are presented to the public, often in a leaden way. The role of Number One Son as a source of humour is largely replaced by Sergeant Kelly, an irascible and narrow-minded gumshoe who refers to Chan as ‘Chop Suey’ and ‘Egg Fu Yung’ (more of which later), but blunders through the case in boneheaded fashion, including some slapstick routines of being tripped and crashing to the floor and getting smacked in the face. Luke still has his comic moments, though, most of them centred around a suit of armour that he wears when he inadvertently becomes part of the show in his attempt to escape the pursuing Sergeant Kelly. And finally a quick thumbs-up to the scriptwriters, with their classic line from the stage manager that the show will go on ‘even if Frankenstein walks in’.    

After Oland passed away, Sidney Toler took over the role and the movies gradually declined in quality, at least in my opinion. The scripts were generally as good (or some might suggest just as bad) as those of Oland’s tenure, but Toler comes across as a rather tetchy Chan and had none of his predecessor’s warmth and likeability. This toughened the character up and reduced the stereotyping but removed a lot of the charm, and the linguistic fun and inventiveness of those poetic aphorisms was lost (for instance, Oland’s ‘roses in romance like tenor in opera – sing most persuasive love song’ and ‘envelope like skin of banana, must be removed to digest contents’) In contrast, Toler’s Chan largely eschews these lyrical bursts, and when he does resort to them they are blunt and basic (‘if befriend donkey, expect to get kicked’). Comic relief was now supplied by Number Two Son, played by Victor Sen Yung, but for me his gift for comedy was inferior to that of Luke, nor was there the same chemistry between him and Toler that had existed between Luke and Oland.

There were high points, though, and one of Toler’s films, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, is up there with the very best of the catalogue. In this movie, Chan’s investigation of a murder leads him into a world of phoney psychics, professional magicians and mind-reading acts, and the film contains some ghost-train visual effects and spooky moments, while the comic interludes with Sen Yung work well for once. Also, just as Karloff had done much to carry Charlie Chan at the Opera, in this film Cesar Romero’s smooth depiction of the magician Rhadini makes him a perfect adversary for Chan’s keen and observant mind. (Romero later became the Joker in the gloriously camp 1960s Batman.) In addition, the script is good, the supporting actors strong, and the plotting tight.

Our contemporary response to the Chan films partly depends on our feelings about the racial politics of the movies, although at the time they were released there seemed little debate surrounding this, and what we nowadays might castigate as racist stereotyping was largely ignored. The author of the books on which the Chan films were based, Earl Biggers, intended his portrayal to counter the negative stereotypes of people from East Asia that was standard practice in fiction and films of the time, and to serve as a corrective to the fear-mongering propaganda which preached and spread the threat of ‘the yellow peril’. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that later generations accuse the Chan films in their turn of blatant racism and stereotyping, and their racial politics remains contested to this day.

This is easy to understand given that Chan and Wong and Moto were all played by white actors in yellowface, which to contemporary sensibility seems insensitive at best and at worst downright insulting. Wong and Moto, however, were portrayed with hardly any faux-Oriental exaggeration and benefitted from being played by two of Hollywood’s finest actors, Boris Karloff (again) and Peter Lorre respectively, so that as we watch the films it is easy at times to forget that their characters are supposed to be Asian. In contrast, Chan as portrayed by Oland is far more marked as Other with his fortune-cookie similes and his demeanour of extreme humility, and nowadays some argue that this stereotype is just as reprehensible as that of Fu Manchu, and more dangerously insidious because of its attractiveness. One common stereotype of men from the Far East is that they are feminised and passive, not at all like the rugged Marlboro Man cowboy of the States but the products of an effete and decadent culture. Seen from this perspective, Chan as portrayed by Oland is reassuring to white audiences for it confirms western superiority in their minds. In contrast, the character of Fu Manchu is so ludicrous and its prejudice so blatant that it borders on a kind of risible camp.

However, we should be wary of judging cultural texts from the past by the standards of today. There are many positive aspects to how Chan is depicted in these films. He is capable, honourable and intelligent, in contrast to the local American cops who he encounters in his investigations, dull and literal-minded rednecks who he invariably outfoxes and out-thinks. This is a very common ploy in whodunits and detective films, where one function of a sidekick or a dim-witted officer of the law is to serve as a foil to the smart hero and make him seem much more brilliant in contrast (Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes series of the 1940s is a perfect example of this.) In addition, the stereotyping that occurs in these films is not limited to Asians: in Charlie Chan at the Olympics, Captain Strasser is a stereotyped German, barking out his orders and clicking his heels, while in Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, Jules Joubert is an extravagant Frenchman, bursting into fits of anger and wildly waving his arms in the air. (I know that this is more a stereotype of Italians than the French, but hey, this is Hollywood, and to resort to a stereotype of my own, Americans aren’t renowned for their grasp of geography or foreign cultures.)

In addition, the subtext of the scripts often slyly undermines this assumption of western supremacy. As already stated above, the local American cops in the Chan films lack education, insight and subtlety of thinking. For example, in Charlie Chan at the Opera, Chan uses the word ‘hypothesis’, which Sergeant Kelly clearly doesn’t know, and Charlie patiently explains to him that it is ‘a word of Greek derivation’, quietly relishing the chance to get revenge for being called ‘Chop Suey’ and ‘Egg Fu Yung’. It is also normal in these Chan movies for the obtuse cop to come around at the end and show respect for Chan’s work on the case and to recognise his ability as a detective, and Kelly eventually tells him, ‘You’re alright, like chop suey a mystery, but a swell dish.’ Toler’s Chan is equally erudite, instantly identifying an ancient table lamp as coming from ‘ancient Egypt – Ramesses dynasty’ in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island.  Finally, it is worth pointing out that Keye Luke was very relaxed about the depiction of Chinese people in the films, arguing that it was an advance on Fu Manchu and better than portraying them only as restaurant staff or laundry workers.

Furthermore, it is difficult to avoid stereotyping as a way of categorising people, especially in films and theatre. Stereotypes do not exist alone; they are placed in a kind of web alongside others, and avoiding one often means falling prey to another. For example, many contemporary movie directors try their best to avoid portraying women as shallow, narcissistic, decorative and overly emotional, but their attempts to escape this stereotype by presenting tough, powerful or intellectual women are in danger of turning them into ball-breakers, harridans, bluestockings or butch lesbians in the eyes of the audience. There is a space between these two extremes, of course, but one sure way to kill a movie is to fill it with characters who are bland, while stereotypes in contrast have a liveliness that can help to carry a weak script. So, in avoiding the evil Fu Manchu stereotype by making Chan mild-mannered and disarmingly polite, the moviemakers ran the risk of merely exchanging stereotypes: from the vicious, tyrannical despot to the passive and timorous Asian.

One area in which some of the Chan movies spectacularly fall down is their depiction of African-Americans. This spoils for me what is otherwise one of the better Oland/Luke films, Charlie Chan at the Race Track, which contains an offensive, demeaning stereotype of a black American, the horse groom Streamline, played by a white man in blackface, who is depicted as lazy, uneducated, superstitious, barely able to string a sentence together, and, to top it all, has a monkey as a pet. In some of the Toler films produced once Fox had relinquished its rights to Chan and Monogram took them up, a black actor, Mantan Moreland, played Birmingham Brown as Chan’s chauffeur and functioned as comic relief. At least this was a black man playing the part, and Moreland had real comic talent, but the bulging eyes and preposterous exaggeration was almost as pronounced as before.  

The response of present-day viewers to the Charlie Chan movies of the 1930s and 40s depends on two key things: firstly, their willingness to enjoy black-and-white movies which come across as corny and amateur and hackneyed to many modern-day audiences, and secondly, their reaction to the racial assumptions of the time which are embedded in these films. I remember when I was staying with a friend and suggested we watch a Charlie Chan film one evening and I could see from his reaction that he couldn’t understand how I could like something that was so theatrical, unslick, and laughably old-hat, especially since this particular one (Charlie Chan at the Circus) included a man in a gorilla suit. As for the accusations of racism, I don’t see anything in these movies which gets close to the vicious politics of The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will. And if all that we ask of works of art is that they are on the side of the angels, we may as well just hand them over to the priests.

I know many people would counter that the Charlie Chan movies aren’t works of art but disposable trash. Yes, they might not explore the human condition or offer even the slightest hint of transcendence but they provide temporary joy and escape from real life and I still love them. In many ways I regret the greater sophistication of many contemporary films as audiences have got wise to the clichés of the past and see themselves as more worldly-wise and cultured. Nor am I totally convinced that this greater sophistication actually exists and suspect that much of this is down to fashion rather than superior refinement and critical acumen. For sure the technology has vastly improved, but are movies based on Marvel comic-book heroes really an advance on these potboilers from the past or just their modern equivalent? Audiences of the future may well look back on the films of our time and find them equally crude. In the meantime, I will go on enjoying not only the Charlie Chan films but many others from the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’, an appellation which I believe is thoroughly deserved.