8/2/23
Newsletter #415
The Crack of Dawn
I find it odd that I remember this so clearly. It was 1975 and I was attending Eastern Michigan University. I have no idea why Charlie Chan films were having a bit of a renaissance, but they were showing all of them on TV. Charlie Chan movies had previously popped up now and then, but nobody had bothered to put them all together before as the Charlie Chan Theater, then show them all on late-night TV. This finally allowed me to see all of the 16 initial Fox Charlie Chan films starring Warner Oland.
Warner Oland was terrific as Charlie Chan — the best in my opinion — because he was an extremely talented actor. He had a long, successful career in movies before Charlie Chan (his first film was in 1912). Warner Oland wisely played Charlie Chan as an amiable, sly, kind, sharp detective who was blatantly smarter than everybody else, but particularly white policemen. Plus, he had an amusing relationship with his eldest son, Number One Son, played by another talented actor, Keye Luke. No, Warner Oland wasn’t Asian; he was Swedish, but he oddly looked Asian. Warner Oland also played an Asian (although a completely different character) in Joseph von Sternberg’s classic film, Shanghai Express (1932), with Marlene Dietrich, right as the Fox Charlie Chan movies were beginning. This is just me surmising, but I think Warner Oland appearing in a big, classy picture like Shanghai Express, and playing a similar role, helped launch the Charlie Chan series to success. But mostly the films’ success was based on the fact that they were good, and Warner Oland and Keye Luke were talented actors.
The Fox/Warner Oland Charlie Chan films were ridiculously popular. They were cheap, B movies, but they made so much money that the studio finally allowed a few of the films to get to B+ budgets, with a pretty good director, H. Bruce Humberstone. My favorites are Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), with young Rita Hayworth in one of her very first parts; Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), with Boris Karloff as a wonderfully sinister opera singer; and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), where Number One Son competes in a swimming competition at the 1936 Olympics in Germany. Charlie and his son travel to Germany in a zeppelin.
After 16 successful films from 1931-1937, Warner Oland went and died in 1938. He was replaced by Sidney Toler, who was also not Asian. Sidney Toler had appeared in many movies, but generally as one of the bad guys. Sidney Toler was not a very good actor, he was simply stereotyped bad guy, and his interpretation of Charlie Chan made him sneaky, creepy and unlikable, and I hated it.
Eventually, Sidney Toler went and died in 1947, and by then Monogram was spending about ten cents on the productions. American actor Roland Winters took over and is nothing but a white man with fake slanty eye makeup, and no clue what he was doing. The films are so bad it’s almost sad.
So, in 1975 when they decided to show all of the Charlie Chan movies again, that’s when the Asian actors in Hollywood finally made an issue out of it, and they subsequently took Charlie Chan movies off of TV. Of course, my feeling was that they should have left the Warner Oland films on, which were good, and depicted Asians as smarter than everybody. But to still keep showing all those horrible Sidney Toler Charlie Chan films offended me, so I commiserated with the Asian actors. Nor was I sad to see those films go, except that the Warner Oland films got thrown out with them because Oland wasn’t Asian. But he was such a good actor, with an interesting foreign look, that he pulled it off.
There’s actually another reason that Charlie Chan films got banned. For some reason, first Fox Films, then Monogram, felt that the obvious comedy relief for a Chinese detective in Honolulu was a black comedian playing the broadest, oldest, most stereotypical gags humanly possible. Honestly, I haven’t seen Charlie Chan in Egypt, which I liked, since 1975, yet I’m still slightly aghast, shocked and embarrassed for what passed as comedy in 1935. In the movie the comedy relief is the well-forgotten black comic actor, Stepin Fetchit. He has a couple of long, grueling, entirely unfunny scenes, playing his trademarked vaudeville routine of “The Lazy Darkie.” Stepin Fetchit walks, moves and speaks as slow as he can, always complaining about how overworked he is. That anyone ever found that funny is a befuddlement to me. The only improvement in the Sidney Toler films is that they shit-canned Stepin Fetchit (what a name), and got Mantan Mooreland as the chauffeur, and he’s kind of funny. He and Number Two Son (Victor Sen Yung, who later played Hop Sing on Bonanza for 14 seasons), had an amusing relationship.
Anyway, we can only thank all of the gods in heaven that we’ve passed that sort of humor. But it should never be banned. I think that it’s important to be able to look back at Charlie Chan in Egypt in 1935 and see someone like Stepin Fetchit. He was a very popular, highly paid, in-demand, vaudeville performer. But even by 1940 his routine was in bad taste.
Charlie Chan movies, like any old movies to me, are time capsules. And I just love looking into the past.
The dawn arrived without me noticing.