Charlie Chan na Ópera

My favorite of the Warner Oland Chans, Charlie Chan At the Opera, is an excellent entry in the series. It begins like a horror film, on a stormy night, as Boris Karloff overcomes a guard in a sanitarium, then escapes. We are then introduced to a motley group of characters, including a temperamental opera diva, who has been recieving threatening notes, then Charlie and son arrive, and soon the action moves to the opera house, where the film remains. Karloff turns up backstage, where he is hiding, above the dressing rooms, and we soon learn the truth: he is a famous singer who had supposedly died in a fire but escaped, and has been suffering from amnesia ever since. He has only recently begun to remember who is, and is now looking for the person who tried to kill him.

There's a lot of plot in this film, and it isn't brilliantly developed. What makes the movie so watchable is the acting, which is uniformly good (and in Karloff's case outstanding); the music, courtesy of Oscar Levant, who wrote the score; the set design, which is marvelous; and occasionally the dialogue, which is often funny. Director Bruce Humberstone juggles all these elements masterfully, making the movie hum. Karloff brings gravitas and real menace to his part, and elicits pity as much as terror. Oland is his usually Buddha-like self, delivering his fortune cookie homilies with aplomb. William Demarest is the Irish cop this time around. As was so often the case with murder mysteries, a suggestion of the supernatural helps the mood enormously. Karloff isn't quite the phantom of the opera, but people react to him as if they've seen a ghost, since they all assume that he's dead.

The movie is a very accomplished piece of work. Its theatre and backstage atmosphere give it the feeling of a show within a show, and it's a pretty good one whichever way you look at it.

This was my first-ever look at Charlie Chan. It wasn't one of his better adventures but I've seen worse, too. It sports a famous guest actor, Boris Karloff, and a semi-famous, if you will, actor in William Demarest.

Demarest plays a cop and his lingo and his prejudices are very early '30s. He couldn't say those lines (cracks about Asians) on film in this day-and-age.

The usual witty and profound Chan proverbs are in here and the usual loyal son (Keye Luke, number one son) is there to help. The ending left me a bit confused. Granted, I was tired when I watched this but Charlie's last-minute explanation and conclusions came so fast they confused me. I'd have to see this at least one more time to understand it. I think this is coming out on DVD soon and I'll get that and watch it again.

I'll always have a fond memory for this since it introduced me to this extremely entertaining film series. I've seen around 20 of them since this one and enjoyed them all.

A madman loose in an opera house is the background for Charlie Chan to investigate a double murder of leading singers in Charlie Chan At The Opera. Son Lee Chan played by Keye Luke even gets in the act as a member of the chorus with his fraternity buddies.

Boris Karloff is the madman, but if I had gone through what he had been through I'm sure I would have become unhinged myself. Some years back Karloff was trapped in a burning opera house by his cheating wife and her tenor lover. He was presumed dead and burned up, but in fact has been an amnesiac patient in a mental asylum. A glance at a newspaper story about the opera brought his memory and a resolve to escape the asylum and seek out his tormentors.

This probably was Karloff's way of playing and not playing the Phantom Of The Opera. As he was in the Frankenstein films or playing The Mummy, Karloff is both a frightening yet pitiable figure. He truly steals this film from Warner Oland as Charlie Chan.

As for Oland he has to solve a pair of murders that occur while Karloff is on the loose. In that he has to work with thick as a brick police sergeant William Demarest. In fact Demarest makes a few racial remarks in Oland's direction, but in the end he's a convert to the wisdom of Chinese parables.

This is one of the best Charlie Chan features and one of the best of the Oland Chan films which were given much better production than later when the series moved to Monogram.

Given that Boris Karloff is one of my favorite actors, it's no surprise this is my favorite Charlie Chan movie. Now, of course since Karloff is here, we have to start the movie with an atmosphere akin to that of a horror film. Karloff plays an amnesiac opera singer named Gravelle. He regains his memory and escapes from a sanitarium on a stormy night to go find his daughter, whom he hasn't seen since she was a child. The police are desperate to catch Gravelle, so they call in Charlie Chan (Warner Oland).

Oland is pitch-perfect as always. Keye Luke as "Number One Son" Lee gets to have lots of fun running around in costume backstage at the opera, trying to help his father on the case. William Demarest plays a police sergeant jealous of Charlie who makes several bigoted remarks throughout the movie but comes to respect the superior detective by the end. Boris Karloff gives a terrific performance, which should come as a surprise to no one familiar with his work. He's the only actor in the entire series to be able to match Warner Oland's screen presence.

Fast pace, interesting setting, great performances, and a particularly nice atmosphere make this an exceptional entry in the always delightful Charlie Chan series. I'm not big on opera but the music written by Oscar Levant for this film is pretty good and adds to an overall excellent production. As I said before, this is my favorite Charlie Chan film and I see by many reviews here I'm not alone. It's definitely a highlight of the series, with a top-notch guest star (Karloff) and an exciting story, helped greatly by the opera backdrop and music.

According to my sources, there seems to be a slight disagreement on the singing in this movie. Denis Gifford's Karloff bio says that Karloff did his own singing (and he could have; he was a fair baritone and sang in the Dulwich College chorus). Oscar Levant's autobiography claims that Karloff was dubbed. Oscar Levant, however, seems to have been writing from an unreliable memory, as he gets other details wrong including the movie synopsis. There are three singing voices heard in the movie: soprano, tenor, and baritone. The tenor was never seen, but was heard onstage while Chan and Number One Son were backstage. Both actresses playing sopranos were synching to the same recording. Karloff may also have been synching to a recording, but it could well have been his own, both for the reason given above and because Levant's opera was written for the movie--no previous recordings existed at the time, and why would the studio have spent extra money on a second singer for a B-budget film when they already had someone on the film who could handle the baritone singing? (Even the Faust costume worn by both baritones onstage was secondhand--it was first worn by Lawrence Tibbett in "Metropolitan", filmed earlier in 1936!)