Dinero fatal

A foggy night on a cruise ship. Charlie Chan huddles at the rail with a man who confides that he is a government agent investigating hot money circulating in the islands. Already two attempts have been made on his life. Chan nods sagely.

It's an atmospheric opening that sets the scene nicely, reminiscent of the best Chan mysteries made several years earlier. Various characters slink by or stop to say hello as Chan and the agent talk....all suspects?

Moments later, sure enough, the government man is struck down in the ball room, victim of a knife thrown by an unseen hand. Chan takes on both the murder and the counterfeiting investigations.

Sidney Toler is fine once again as the famous detective. Sen Yung and Willie Best are along as Mr. Chan's assistants, and while this series entry has less comedy than usual, Yung and Best do manage to get some humor out of a pair of two-way radios they use in their efforts to spy on passengers and gather clues.

Overall, the plot is nothing special but manages to hold together for 66 minutes. The cast is solid and includes some familiar faces like ship captain Joseph Crehan. It's not the best Charlie Chan movie but certainly a decent late series entry.

Best movie prop ever: One of the suspects is a professor of ichthyology and he spends most of the movie carrying around a big book called simply FISH.

Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) investigates when a treasury agent is murdered aboard an ocean liner. Penultimate Toler Chan film has some pros & cons. The pros: Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen Yung) is assisting his father. Jimmy breathes life into the Monogram series which, with the exception of the one movie with Frances Chan as Charlie's daughter, saw Charlie saddled with lifeless sidekick Benson Fong and bug-eyed comedian Mantan Moreland. Another pro is the decent supporting cast that includes Dick Elliott, Richard Vallin, Joseph Crehan, and pretty Gloria Warren. The cons: typically cheap Monogram production, as well as the inclusion of stereotypical comic relief Chattanooga Brown (Willie Best). This is the second and final appearance of Chattanooga in the series. Thankfully, he's overshadowed by the likable personality of Victor Sen Yung. Not a particularly strong Chan film, but helped by the presence of Jimmy.

Ocean-going steamships and trains make great settings for 1940s mysteries. Charlie didn't have any adventures in a train, but this is the second on a ship--the third if you count the docked sailing ship in one of his outings. Toler is outstanding as always, in one of the greatest ongoing screen characterizations of an ideal film detective: clever, humane, with a sense of humor and of justice. It's his ability to make Chan so very likeable which really elevates these films, putting them, on the whole, on about the same level as the great Universal Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. And Toler never had the support of a truly first-rate, all-pro actor, as Rathbone had in Bruce. This movie is pure fun. Lots of action. The humor is sometimes very corny, but that's part of the charm. Highly recommended!

Storywise, this is yet another disposable Chan story, industrialized movie-making.

There are two things of interest here.

One is how the needs of the Chan franchise ferret out peculiar corners of the American national story. In this case the US was well into the beginning of administering regions in the Pacific. This gave opportunities for new kinds of crime and the novelty of the crime was one of the attractions of the series at this point. So we have the smuggling of colonial currency, an esoteric illegality — and the use of new weapon, a "knifethrowing" pistol.

Ho hum. I suppose that will be interesting to historians. But for students of film there's a lesson here too. What do you do if your story depends on matters of race and you want to exploit that but also want to bury it? You fold it into other narrative elements of race.

For those who don't know the franchise, it was very long and successful. It stars a white guy pretending to be a Chinese master detective, the acting mostly through a halting English and a few phrases like: "a hasty man can drink tea with a fork." Incidentally, this fits in an odd place in the detective genre because we never really see any detecting, any real wisdom. The only thing we see is him setting traps with the trap revealing the hidden crook. He never figures it out directly.

Back to race. Chan's race is hidden twice. First, we have one of his sons as "assistant," a comic, bumbling idiot. This truly is racist and deliberately so. The contrast between the son (played by a real Asian) and his lack of insight and his father is amplified by the physical appearance and the obvious appearance.

And this is further folded or shadowed (an appropriate term) by the black guy. He is placed as far from the son in all dimensions as the son is from the father. He is that much more comic, and independently clueless, and also independently "ethnic." Its a vile notion to exploit by today's standards, but the method of shadowed folding is clear.

Its a device used in literature, but much more common in film because you can link so many more qualities in parallel, here all aligned to "detection" qualities. That Africanamerican's name is Chattanooga, derived probably from Jack Benny's "man" Rochester.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Charlie is on board a cruise ship. While there he is approached by a government agent. He represents the Treasury Department. After confiding to Chan that there have been threats on his life, he is killed. Tommy and Chattanooga are on board as his assistants (I thought he was on vacation, but). There are several plots at work. A young couple is keeping some sort of secret. There is a blowhard who is driving everyone crazy with his invasive behavior. People are being killed with knives that are thrown with amazing accuracy. To complicate things, there is a knife thrower on board. Anyway, it's typical Chan. There is the obligatory scene where the lights are turned off and chaos ensues. The writers really couldn't let go of some obviously tired plot elements.