Eran trece

I just watched this film on DVD--it is in the new Charlie Chan box set on the disc with CC in Shanghai. It has English subtitles also. There is a scene where Charlie Chan is getting ready to board the boat to San Francisco. His wife and son are seeing him off at the dock. His wife speaks with to him in Japanese and at the end says "sayonara" to him (he answers in Spanish, of course. I guess back then they assumed that people would not know the difference between Japanese and Chinese!! By the way, another disc in the set, The Black Camel has a reading from the script of Charlie Chan's Chance, using still photos as a background. It is the complete script and since this is another lost Chan film, this might be the only was to see it

This Spanish version of the 1931 Charlie Chan film, "Charlie Chan Carries On" was fair to poor.....closer to poor because Charlie didn't show up in the film until it was over half over. I've never seen that in any of the English-speaking Chan films. He's always front-and-center.

This movie wasn't horrible but it was boring for several fairly-long stretches. It just isn't the same without Chan, and he's only in on screen in about 33 percent of the movie.

I had no trouble with Manuel Arbo's "take" on Chan. He's a little more subdued than Warner Oland or Sidney Toler but very comparable. His proverbs were fun and profound, as always. He was fine. The rest of the cast was so-so and a bit dated and silly with romance angles, gangster angles and an assortment of characters all of whom look guilty, of course.

As he did in some other episodes, Chan traps the murderer in the end with a clever scheme. The subtitles were easy to read but, as one reviewer said, this is more of a curiosity piece than anything else. It's for very, very hard-line Chan fans only. This was a bit boring even for me, and I love Charlie Chan films.

"Eran Trece" has obvious novelty value - a Charlie Chan movie entirely in Spanish! - but beyond that, it's a pretty good little mystery on its own; it certainly looks good and moves well for a 1931 production. However, it goes on too long (for example, the entire "impressions at the party" sequence could have been cut), and - as in many later Chan pictures - the killer seems to be picked out of a lottery; there are no particular clues to indicate that it has to be person A instead of person B or person C. **1/2 out of 4.

This is a gem for film historians. Almost all the early Charlie Chan films are lost--the silent ones and even several sound ones. This is one of the earliest known Chan film, though it's a Spanish language version using the same sets yet an alternate cast. That's because in the early days of talkies, Hollywood studios often filmed several alternate language versions of the same film instead of dubbing the films or using captions. Most had entirely different casts that filmed at night when the American cast went home to bed. In a few odd cases, such as with Laurel and Hardy, the stars appeared in multiple versions of their films--learning lines phonetically in German, Spanish, Italian or French. As for the Chan films, this is the only one done in multiple versions and this is a blessing as the original version starring Warner Oland is lost.

In this case, Manuel Arbó stars as the intrepid detective. While Oland was a Swedish-American and didn't exactly look or act authentically Chinese, Arbó looked and sounded even less like a Chinese-American than Oland. Also, oddly, Chan doesn't even appear until about half way through the film--something that also apparently occurred in other earlier Chan films. Instead, a murder mystery is being competently investigated and Chan only enters the scene once the trail has gone completely cold.

While this is an odd entrance for Chan compared to the later style of the series and Manuel Arbó isn't the greatest Chan, the script is definitely a winner. In fact, it compares very well to the rest of the Fox series and is better than most. This really, really makes me hope that someday they'll unearth the Oland version ("Charlie Chan Carries On")--and fortunately, in recent years, many supposedly lost films have been uncovered.

By the way, this film was included as an extra in Volume 1 of the Charlie Chan collection which was released by Fox in 2006.

I've held out for a long time not seeing this in the hope that the original Warner Oland version would be unearthed somewhere … no such luck, as yet! So is this surviving simultaneous Spanish language version any good then? Well, it's OK in it's own right, a bit stagey but I still missed Oland in what would have been his first Chan effort. Films 3-5 also remain lost.

A man on a world tour with a group of shifty fellow travellers with fishy attitudes is murdered in a hotel room in London, and of course Scotland Yard hasn't got an answer to all of the clues presented. Two murders later and 41 minutes in we all get to Honolulu where Charlie Chan carries on where his British Inspector friend was forced to leave off. Manuel Arbo was passable as Charlie, with plenty of killer aphorisms up his sleeve – "Man not fool until he does something foolish" – but he appeared very melodramatic and I wearied a bit of his grimacing. The rest of the suspects, er cast were intense stereotypes – unwary people might wonder at the simplicity of it all, but isn't everybody and everything on the planet a stereotype? It followed the usual rules, so if you know your Charlie Chan format you can whittle the suspects down to a final two or three, or one if you're lucky. Charlie, as he did many times later cheated by applying subterfuge over deductive reasoning in his unmasking of the dastard but I could see that coming as well.

Overall well worth it to a Chan completist, OK for Golden Age aficionados, so I enjoyed it on both levels but I did warn you if you hate either genre.