Il serpente piumato

Yeah, it's bad but the fact that both Keye Luke and Victor Sen Young appear as No. 1 and No. 2 Sons make it worthwhile. I like the outdoor atmosphere and the wind howling at night. It's like Charlie Chan goes camping.

Here, Charlie and crew (Mantan Moreland; Keye Luke & Sen Yung), are on vacation in Mexico. They stumble upon a man, who is in terrible condition, walking in a nearby field. Charlie takes him into his auto and heads quickly to the nearest city for help. The man is delirious so Chan can get little information out of him other than the fact he was held prisoner and he was on an expedition hunting for a lost Aztec treasure.

Chan arrives in a nearby city and soon meets members of an expedition who are also hunting for this lost treasure. In fact the sick man is a member of their group. The ailing man and another archaeologist went missing during their search. Before the ill man can explain what happened he is murdered.

Charlie and company join the expedition with the purpose of finding the missing archaeologist and perhaps the lost treasure. Much is made out of the fact that this film features the return of Charlie's son Lee (Keye Luke) and the only teaming of Charlie's Number One and Number Two sons. It's interesting but the screenwriters don't pull off the union effectively. Lee is much more domineering here than he ever was in the Fox films. So it is a bit of a miss, but still of interest to a long time Chan fan.

Lastly, I'll comment on the other reviews who need to call the Monogram Winter's films garbage. Yes, they don't have the skilled writers of the Fox series. Yes, the production values don't match Fox, and the plots can be a little oddball. But these are solid little mysteries and quite good compared with other independent studios.

In a Mexican village, a team of Americans plan a trip into the mountains to search for an ancient treasure and two missing scientists. Charlie Chan stumbles into the case and joins their expedition, along with his number one and number two sons and chauffeur. Soon they are all tenting it, spying on each other and sneaking in and out of camp.

Bob Livingston is part of the search party but we soon discover that he actually heads a gang that's after the treasure. They have kidnapped the missing professor and are holding him in a secret temple whose hidden door swings open when you step on a certain big rock.

Roland Winters does okay in a fairly active role as the great detective. Keye Luke is a rather mature and serious Lee Chan. Victor Sen Young and Mantan Moreland, as Tommy Chan and chauffeur Birmingham Brown, are teamed up as usual to handle the comic relief. No explanation is offered for Keye Luke's surprising return to the series; we can only note that at the beginning of the picture the Chans are setting out on a family vacation, and guess that Lee must have been invited.

The plot is a little different from most in this series--we know who the villain is from early on. The production, of course, is cheap and the dialog seems hastily hashed out, although Mr. Chan does offer one or two of his wise sayings. ("Very difficult to estimate depth of well by size of bucket.") Overall it's really not very good...but enjoyable enough for fans.

Note: a fun double feature would be this picture preceded by 1937's Riders of the Whistling Skull. Not only is this Chan picture is a remake of that Three Mesquiteers western, but the earlier movie also featured Bob Livingston--as one of the good guys, in that case.

This Charlie Chan film is unique in that both Victor Sen Yung and Keye Luke appear in it together. During the climax with the bad guys they handle the rough stuff to bring the culprits to justice and Roland Winters is going to need both of them despite them constantly coming to the wrong conclusions.

Charlie and the boys and chauffeur Mantan Moreland are on a holiday in Mexico when they hear of the disappearance of an old friend of the Chan family, an archeology professor who has disappeared while looking for Aztec treasure, the equivalent of King Tut's tomb in the western hemisphere. They find a colleague of his friend out on the desert, but no sooner do they rescue him than he's murdered. Another murder follows and the the Chan family leads a search party out on the Mexican desert.

This film is more of manhunt than a mystery at least to us because the brains behind all the villainy is revealed just about halfway through the film. Why that was done who knows because it robbed us of any suspense.

That's a pity because for Monogram Charlie Chan feature it's not a bad one.

Yes, strangely, this Monogram productions movie concerning the Chinese detective is far better than a Twentieth Century Fox film, starring Warner Oland. I did not know at all this one, where adventure and action is more important than pure mystery. That suits me well, actually. It is more exciting and a total surprise for the audience, used to closed in mysteries. I should have seen this film earlier, that would have made me searching more Charlie Chan's stuff. William Beaudine is the director, not Bruce Humberstone or Eugene Forde, the Twentieth Century Fox home directors. Worth watching, if you have to see onlly an handful of Charlie Chan adventures.