The Sky Dragon

Cabin Clue

The Sky Dragon
USA 1949 Directed by Lesley Selander
Monogram (via Warner Archive) DVD Region 1 

I don’t think it was deliberate but, for one reason or another, The Sky Dragon was the last of the 47 Charlie Chan talkies made between 1929 and 1947. This brought to an end what had been a ‘mostly’ profitable series of films, albeit via a law of diminishing returns as the series went through cheaper studios and shrinking budgets as it wore on. Original number one son Lee Chan, as played by Keye Luke, is back as the only one of the Chan offspring present, playing opposite Roland Winters in his last go at the honourable Hawaiian detective. Luke had returned a few films previously and, while he was once the juvenile comic relief, putting him back in here in that spirit maybe made a bit less sense because he and his on screen father Winters, were both the same age.

Also back, of course, is the later series regular Mantan Moreland, continuing his wisecracking, perpetually fearful chauffer routine as Birmingham Brown although, it has to be said, the only decent scenes he gets in this are opposite Lousie Franklin, who plays the maid of one of the murder suspects in this film.

There’s also, much to my delight, the inclusion of actress Noel Neil in the proceedings. Noel Neill was, as you no doubt know... the original Lois Lane, first starring in that role opposite the very first cinematic Superman Kirk Alyn in the theatrical serials Superman (1948) and Superman Vs Atom Man (1950). This was one of a few movies she made in between those two serials. Of course, she also went on to reprise her role as Lois Lane opposite George Reeves in the 1950s TV show The Adventures of Superman from the second series onwards (Phyllis Coates left the role after her first season). She later turned up in a “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo as Lois Lane’s mother in one of the extended cuts of the 1978 motion picture Superman The Movie (again opposite Kirk Alyn, playing Lois' dad) and later performed as an old, dying woman ripped off by Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor in the opening of the 2006 movie Superman Returns. I think she also got some ‘Super’ TV cameos under her belt as well (before her death last year at the age of 95).

Alas, Noel is wasted in this movie as she doesn’t have much to do except provide a friendly female face and provide Charlie Chan with helpful information to clear her fiance of the murder charge when the occasion arises but... it was nice to see her here again, for sure.

This film starts off in an airplane as a man is murdered for the half a million dollars he is carrying while the rest of the crew and passengers are drugged, unconscious. These passengers include Charlie Chan and his number one son who then set about the rest of the movie trying to find the identity of the killer and, as usual, try to find the truth of the matter while the police jump at every opportunity to convict an innocent person of the crime. The police never really came off that well in these films, to be fair.

This is not the best of the Chan films I’ve seen, in all honesty, but it is pretty fast moving for it’s ‘just over an hour’ B-movie running time. The trail of the mystery is kept lively by a bunch of murders, incidents, tussles with possible suspects and Lee Chan pulling a wedding director from a fire after his garage has been set ablaze... with him in it... in an effort to destroy some camera negatives which will reveal the all too obvious, to this viewer at any rate, identity of someone in the film.

However, while the pacing is quite tight, I can’t say I was really all that impressed with the film and nothing much really stood out other than the occasional, expected, Charlie Chan aphorism which are peppered throughout the short running time with, it seemed to me, just a little less joy than they have been in some of the previous films. I liked the idea of the murder and theft taking place on the plane but would have really loved it if the entire movie had taken place in that plane with Charlie solving the crime before the plane lands and it would have given the perpetually cash strapped Monogram Pictures a cheaper budget, too, I would suspect... having to shoot on only one set. However, after the first quarter of an hour the action moves out of the plane and I suppose it’s easier to keep the pacing up when your characters can go from incident to incident as the story progresses. Monogram had been going since 1924 but released their last movies in 1952, so things must have been really tight by this point.

It would have been nice to see the series continue on after The Sky Dragon, although there was still a little life in the character after these films had come to an end. For me, those early days of Warner Oland playing Charlie opposite Keye Luke as a much more youthful “number one son” are still my favourites... but I honestly don’t mind Sydney Toler and Roland Winter’s takes on the character and I will probably be rewatching these movies over and over until I die (which hopefully won’t be very soon). Take this movie for what it is, a mildly entertaining entry into a great series of classic Hollywood detective yarns. And...  just by way of a heads up... although it’s the last in that series of Charlie Chan films, I’m not planning on making this my last review of a Charlie Chan movie. Watch this space.

Shadows Over Chinatown

Toler Powered

Shadows Over Chinatown
1946 USA
Directed by Terry O. Morse 
Monogram - Warner DVD Region 1

Shadows Over Chinatown is the penultimate of the Charlie Chan films to feature Warner Oland’s replacement, Sidney Toler. I reviewed his final film in the role, before Roland Winters continued in the series, in my review of The Trap (here).

The film starts off very promisingly... 13 passengers on a bus in a rainstorm, including Charlie Chan, Number Two son Jimmy and regular chauffeur Birmingham Brown (as played by Victor Sen Yung and comedian Mantan Moreland), are forced in to a stop to sort the bus out. This is almost a perfect recipe for a murder mystery, I thought to myself, as I was expecting the whole film to be set in the large passenger waiting room... however, it was not to be and is only a brief stop to get the plot up and running and also have someone make an attempt on Charlie Chan’s life.

Two things happened in this opening sequence. One was that I spotted, right off the bat, that one of the background passengers, who even has a couple of words, is an uncredited appearance by John Hamilton... who would, in later years, go on to play Perry White opposite George Reeves in the 1950s TV series, The Adventures of Superman. So it was nice seeing him for the brief amount of screen time he gets here.

The other thing that happened, which popped me right out of the movie, is the little bit where the passengers come into the interior of the bus station. In long shot, the aforementioned Hamilton is seen making a show of taking off his light grey raincoat, to reveal a much darker suit, and then removing his hat before sitting down at the right of the screen. However in the next shot, which is a close up grouping of the same set of characters, he is sitting with his raincoat on and all done up. If I could spot that on what may be my first viewing (I may have seen this one back in the 1980s, I’m not sure) then I’m sure audiences back in 1946 seeing it on a much larger screen would have spotted that error as well. It’s a big one and I had to wind it back to make sure I hadn’t got confused with the characters and believe what I’d just seen. Such a shame.

And then, after an attempted murder in which Chan is saved from certain death by the birthday watch his son gave him stopping a bullet, the bus journey continues and the plot switches to the big city... which is a shame really.

Now then, this film is really not terrible and had me entertained throughout... but it did seem a little tired and lazy for a Charlie Chan mystery, to be sure. For instance, the identity of the killer, who I’m not about to reveal here, is someone who I was suspicious of throughout the whole movie and so it came as absolutely no surprise when the killer is finally revealed. Which is a shame because I was really hoping I was wrong and there are enough suspects in this one... at least at the start of the film... by the end they’ve kinda thinned out a bit due to either transforming themselves into allies of Charlie Chan or turning up on the receiving end of a bullet or knife blade.

The usual comedy shenanigans of Victor Sen Yung and Mantan Moreland are all present and correct, although in some sequences they are starting to get a little surreal and, in all the sequences, I’m afraid that they feel like exactly what they are... comedy padding to puff up the running time.

All the performances are fine, though, and if the script does seem very lacking at some points, it’s at least convoluted enough to keep the characters up to various pursuits... even if the identity of the killer seems to be more and more obvious as each fresh corpse turns up. The dialogue seems equally jaded, for this humble viewer, too... with the usual Chan aphorisms and retorts seeming a little less cute or charming and a far cry from the sparkling pearls of wisdom that had turned up in other films starring either Oland or Toler in the role.

All in all though, this is not a spectacularly dull film and the overall feel, while maybe not a solid, mystery thriller, is still one of “they don’t make movies like these anymore”... while at the same time begging the dubious question of... “But, should they?”

I am, however, very pleased that Warner Brothers have seen fit to release this Region 1 boxed set of four, previously unreleased on commercial DVD, Charlie Chan films, which includes this Toler film and three of the Roland Winters entries. I’ve only ever seen one of Winter’s films, in a previously released box set, so am looking forward to watching the three in here to see how well he does in comparison to his predecessors. Reviews of those three will be coming soon... watch this space.

Chantastic Voyage!

Dangerous Money 1946 US

Directed by Terry O’ Morse

Monogram DVD Region 1

This review kinda contains spoilers... not that you’d know it.

Gee pop!

Yes, the Chan is back... well he’s back for me at least, in this 1946 far-from-classic adventure. Hot on the heels of the blistering Dark Alibi, here’s a Chan tale that I thought would be a really good one. All the signs were great... for starters, it’s set on a cruising liner (woohoo... love thrillers where the detective has to solve the murders while on a touring, luxury cruise)! And then, during the opening credits I let out a startling and, apparently, scary whoop as Tristram (King of the Rocket Men) Coffin’s name came up on the credits.

My joy was short lived however... in this one there has been a change of assistants. We’re back to Victor Sen Yung as Number Two Son replacing Benson Fong’s Number Three Son for a stint, although Charlie does receive a helpful telegram from Number Three Son during the voyage. And Willie Best is back as the racial stereotype black comedy relief, taking over again from Mantan Moreland for one film only before they switch back to Mr. Moreland. Although referred to as an “assistant” in this one rather than a chauffer... he still retains his chauffers cap. Just to make sure you are not confused that it’s a different person than the last film, Best plays Chatanooga Brown... as opposed to Moreland’s Birmingham Brown. So... must be a family thing I guess... although why Charlie Chan would need a chauffer on a luxury cruise is anybody’s guess. As an aside though... turns out Chattanooga’s legs shake in close-up under duress just like Birmingham’s... odd that ‘-)

This film is a hundred times weaker than the previous movie. Dark Alibi had some pretty creative photography and a certain amount of innovation in the shots... on this one we’re back into standard Monogram potboiler mode and I’m afraid any pretensions to creativity have been firmly picked up by the scruff of the neck and tossed aimlessly out of the window. And it’s quite obvious when actors miss their cues or, in one case, where Sydney Toler as Chan keeps looking around to read his script off of cue cards, that Monogram were way too cheap a studio to bother with retakes.

This story of murder, blackmail and conspiracy to launder “hot money” on an ocean liner suffers terribly from... well, being terrible I guess. For starters, the guy doing the actual murders is really easy to spot. He spends the whole movie masquerading as a woman and not being allowed to say anything... presumably so the audience doesn’t cotton on to the fact that this “dame is a man”. Secondly... you know those films that have so many suspects that you don’t know which person has the strongest motivation for being the culprit of the crime, in this case the crime of money laundering... well you don’t have to worry about any clever writing on this one because the writers have gone for something very much resembling Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express when it comes to the final solution to the problem. Honestly, if you kept just the people who aren’t guilty of this crime on the boat and threw everyone else off... you’d have a luxury ocean liner transporting just three people around the world... and two of them would be crew members.

Oh... and it turns out that my whoop of joy at a Tristram Coffin was short lived. Within the first 5 minutes of the film he reveals himself to Chan as an undercover government agent... and you just know that means this character is in for an early demise. Sure enough... after another five minutes have played out he’s survived one attempt on his life only to have a knife thrown into his back a couple o’ minutes later. Poor Tristram... never the starring role he deserved.

If you are a fan of Earl Der Biggers oriental detective and you like the Charlie Chan films in general, then you are duly warned that Dangerous Money is one of the dullest and badly made in the series... even the usually witty Chantastic aphorisms are slight and badly written. Not a happy viewing.