Charlie Chan in the Secret Service

This movie has some of the best film noir photography I have seen in all the Charlie Chan entries. This is one I am still waiting to have issued on DVD, so I can enjoy those visuals.

Storywise, it's a decent story with an interesting cast of suspects. My complaint is fairly minor: it is a little below-average in the amount of humorous Charlie Chan proverbs that we Chan fans love so much. Otherwise, I enjoyed the movie.

Although not Charlie's official chauffeur-assistant in here as he was in most of these Monogram Chan films, Mantan Moreland ("Birmingham Brown") plays his usual role as a guy helping out and adding humor. He's a likable guy as are all of Charlie's kids, two of them joining in this mystery. We get Number Three Son "Tommie" (Benson Fong) and daughter "Iris" (Marianne Quon. Chan's kids are always nosy, goodhearted and, in the latter-day films, not that helpful.

A few quick action scenes help keep things rolling and, as usual, we get Charlie's summary of the case at the end in which our hero exposes the crook. Overall, is this a great Charlie Chan film? No, it's average....but just average is still good to me. I love these films and hope all of them eventually are available on disc.

A house full of guests is the setting for this mystery story, wherein a scientist is murdered. Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) investigates, along with his two irksome kids. The wonderful Mantan Moreland plays a bug-eyed Birmingham Brown, a role inserted presumably to add comic relief.

This sixty-three minute film contains about fifty minutes of story. The rest is filler, mostly in the film's first half. The story, about a secret WWII torpedo plan, is simple and direct. It's the kind of film I can envision as being typical for a 1940's Saturday afternoon matinée. There's a stage play quality to it, in that most of the scenes take place in three or four rooms. As with other films in the Chan series, the production design here is minimal and cheap looking. The emphasis is on the whodunit puzzle, but that's what counts most for murder mystery fans.

And the script does provide a good puzzle. The killer is camouflaged amid well thought out red herrings, in a way that makes solving the puzzle not real easy.

For Charlie Chan fans, this is one of the better mysteries in the Monogram series. For everyone else, the film has little or nothing to offer.

Just watched this, the first of the Monogram Charlie Chan movies after Fox dropped the Honolulu detective two years before, on DVD. It has Chan as a government agent in Washington, D.C., investigating a murder of a scientist who's invented a weapon used to stop some enemy spy missions. I'll stop there and just say that at just a little over an hour, there isn't too much in the way of excitement especially since nearly the entire thing seems to take place on a mansion but there are some good atmospheric shots and a few good suspenseful moments and also some amusing comic relief courtesy of no. 3 son Jimmy (Benson Fong), no. 2 daughter Iris (Marianne Quon), and, in his first appearance, chauffeur Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland, who isn't as outrageous as his later appearances in the series). So in summary, Charlie Chan in the Secret Service is a pretty entertaining first entry for the series at its new studio. P.S. In once again identifying someone from my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life, Sarah Edwards-who was Mary's mother in that Frank Capra classic-plays Mrs. Hargue, a housekeeper here.

I'm pretty sure there wasn't a Chan film made that I didn't like: I preferred Oland to Toler and Fox to Monogram but am more than happy (maybe even keen!) to watch a Toler Monogram effort. They all transported you to a world of more or less cultured baddies, each hiding a thousand secrets which Charlie (and us of course) has to work his way through. Usually, as in this case, to find the murderer from a roomful of shifty twitching eyes.

Electrical scientist murdered and the secret plans stolen, Charlie with a little ... help from offspring Tommie and Iris has to decide which of the house guests did it. The Monogram house's hanging drapes and thick carpets lend a nice atmosphere to the mystery. Only gripes: the incongruously brash and childish music track and the continual visual reference to a Watching Evil Eye from a Dark Place.

Watched from the Chanthology DVD and with the widescreen TV set to mild zoomview meant it was like the first time again for me seeing this, an experience I'd have to recommend and one I want to repeat with the other titles in the set.

Aside from this being the first appearance of Mantan Moreland in a Charlie Chan movie, there's not a lot about this film to distinguish it from a long line of Monogram Pictures Charlie Chan movies. In other words, it's a pretty standard B-movie mystery. While it is a fun picture and I enjoy Charlie Chan pictures, I just can't understand the very biased group of individuals that give EVERY Charlie Chan movie a score of 10 on IMDb. Have these individuals no shame?! After all, the movies were always intended to be light entertainment--not films that would rival GONE WITH THE WIND or THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.

In many ways this film is similar to THE JADE MASK--a Chan film that came out a year later. Both involve scientists working on War Department projects who are murdered and their top secret plans were stolen (why, by the way, these super-duper top secret projects are always carried out in their homes and not a secure facility is beyond me). And, like so many other Chan films, there are very fancy murders--with gadgets and gizmos instead of a hard blow to the head or a bullet in the chest! Believable?! Not in the least--but also highly entertaining. While this and most of the Monogram Chan movies are not as good as the earlier series by Fox, this is still pretty good and a lot of fun.

PS--Yes, I KNOW that the guy playing Chan is some white guy and Mantan Moreland plays a stereotypical "dumb, scared black guy". This was considered pretty acceptable in its day, though it will no doubt offend many today.