In short: Dead Men Tell (1941)

Looking for his Number Two son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung), who has cavorted off looking for adventure, Chinese-Hawaiian master detective Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), stumbles into the kind of murder mystery that’s right up his alley: an elderly rich woman is apparently frightened to death by the ghost pirate who is said to visit all members of her family on their death beds, and the four parts of the map leading to a pirate treasure need to be assembled. Also involved are – of course – a parrot, a mental patient (and yes, prepare for stuff that can be called “problematic” there too), an escaped murderer and Jimmy Chan’s tendency to fall into the ocean.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you ever want to enjoy one of the numerous Charlie Chan movies of the 30s and 40s, you really need to be able to just overlook – or not mind – that its Chinese American hero is played by a very Caucasian guy in crappy yellowface, who also dons a dubious accent, while, curiously enough, all other Asian characters are played by people who are indeed Asian American. The second half of the Charlie Chan cycle is not exactly helped by Sidney Toler having taken over the role from Warner Oland, for while Oland was also about as Chinese as Boris Karloff, his caricature of a Chinese accent and his performance always had the undercurrent of his Charlie Chan playing up his otherness to use his adversaries’ prejudices against themselves. Toler, on the other hand, tended to a stiffness that suggests all the wrong ideas about “inscrutability” (shudder), and only seldom sells an audience on the self-irony the scripts give the character.

On the other hand, while he’s played by a white guy, Charlie Chan’s still that most curious of things on screen for his time: a Chinese character who is undoubtedly the hero of the piece, as well as the character with the superior intellect as well as morality. And while the writers of this film and those of most others in the series don’t seem to have had much of a clue of Chinese or Chinese American culture, these films never go the route of mock mysticism you’d find in many a comparable character in the pulps (who did indeed include some non-white heroes among the more white and square-jawed type).


The film at hand, as directed by Harry Lachman is for my tastes one of the better ones of the Toler Chan films, which are generally inferior to the ones starring Oland, presenting its silly but fun story in a zippy manner. Sure, the various suspects could be delineated more clearly from each other (or simply have better actors portraying them), and the mystery is mildly complicated more than actually mysterious, but as a bit of good-natured fun from the past, there’s little to complain here. Visually, Lachman has his moments too, turning on a bit of the old expressionist influence for a couple of shots (always a sure winner) and generally staging the dialogue-heavy scenes he has to work with clearly and without things becoming too stagey.

Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)

The US secret services get wind the mysterious German (though that word never falls) spy and saboteur Reiner (?) is coming to Panama, and given the timing with an American fleet to make its way through the Canal shortly, to do something rather dangerous and dastardly against the future war effort. A US agent contacts Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) - who has gone undercover as a merchant in fine Panama hats - with the news. However, before he can give any hints concerning the identity of Reiner, the spy dies from a poisoned cigarette right in front of Chan.

Ironically, it’s this murder method that enables Chan to reduce his pool of suspects to a manageable number of people, all of whom came to Panama City on the same plane; less fortuitously, these are all highly suspicious people: there’s local cabaret owner Senor Manolo (Jack La Rue), a man so suspicious I’m not clear why he has never been arrested before nor why anyone would actually trust him with even the tiniest piece of information, Kathi Lenesch (Jean Rogers, not even trying to do an accent), a young woman with some secret or other that makes her susceptible to some of Manolo’s wishes, the absurdly British writer Cliveden Compton (Lionel Atwill), Egyptian cigarette merchant and part-time sneak Achmed Halide (Frank Puglia), German scientist Dr. Rudolph Grosser (Lionel Royce) who, as we will soon learn, likes to play with rats infected with bubonic plague, Miss Jennie Finch (Mary Nash), a middle-aged American schoolteacher on the first adventure of her life, and engineer Richard Cabot (Kane Richmond), a man so boring he can’t even be a red herring and must be innocent; also, the film’s romantic lead.

Chan has his work cut out for him, but it will take a bit of time to sort through everybody’s suspicious actions and secrets, to take care of the dead bodies Reiner leaves, and to avoid getting too perturbed by the over-excited help of second son Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen Yung).

I’ve already laid down my thoughts regarding the racial politics of the better Charlie Chan film in my last write-up of a film in the series (or at least the series before the character got into the hands of Monogram), The Black Camel, and what I wrote about the earlier film still holds nine years later, now with Sidney Toler having donned the yellow-face, and the film still treating an American Chinese as its hero. Actually, at this stage, the inclusion of actual American Chinese Victor Sen Yung looks like more positive progress for the series. Despite the character mainly having comic relief (and accidentally stumbling over hints) functions, Jimmy is allowed a degree of dignity not exactly typical of Asian actors in this period in Hollywood – while he’s hapless, Jimmy isn’t hopeless, and he’s also courageous, daring, and clearly doing his best fighting the good fight. He’s also – at least for my tastes – quite unlike a lot of comic relief characters by being actually funny and sympathetic instead of a hateful monstrosity that needs to die but never does.

It helps Charlie Chan in Panama’s case that the script by John Larkin and Lester Ziffren does have a nice line in funny dialogue, zipping through a film that otherwise is a serious war (or pre-war for you Americans) mystery/spy movie which features some elements I wouldn’t have expected of a movie that’s part of that corner of Hollywood that was – thanks to various political pressures - quite squeamish about naming enemy country names at the time.  I find one émigré character’s fear of being sent back to what’s left of her home country after “the invaders” now own it and ending up in a concentration camp quite a remarkable thing to hear, for example. There’s also the film’s obvious surety that the United States’ entry into the War can only be a matter of time, but that’s really the film taking on a (realistic) propagandist role of preparing its audience for the inevitable, censors who fear calling Germany by name notwithstanding. It’s quite an enlightening watch if you care for the idea of genre films as mirrors of the anxieties and obsessions of their times; in this case, the mirror turns out to be quite a direct and political one.

Apart from that cultural historical aspect, Charlie Chan in Panama is also a fine little mystery/spy thriller, as a Fox production still able to avail itself of a degree of production values, and even actually decent library footage, with a generally fine cast (even though I preferred the more charismatic and wry Ohland to Toler’s a bit blander Chan) doing good, professional work, and sure-handed, zippy, and often atmospheric direction by Norman Foster.

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