In short: Dead Men Tell (1941)

Looking for his Number Two son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung), who has cavorted off looking for adventure, Chinese-Hawaiian master detective Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), stumbles into the kind of murder mystery that’s right up his alley: an elderly rich woman is apparently frightened to death by the ghost pirate who is said to visit all members of her family on their death beds, and the four parts of the map leading to a pirate treasure need to be assembled. Also involved are – of course – a parrot, a mental patient (and yes, prepare for stuff that can be called “problematic” there too), an escaped murderer and Jimmy Chan’s tendency to fall into the ocean.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you ever want to enjoy one of the numerous Charlie Chan movies of the 30s and 40s, you really need to be able to just overlook – or not mind – that its Chinese American hero is played by a very Caucasian guy in crappy yellowface, who also dons a dubious accent, while, curiously enough, all other Asian characters are played by people who are indeed Asian American. The second half of the Charlie Chan cycle is not exactly helped by Sidney Toler having taken over the role from Warner Oland, for while Oland was also about as Chinese as Boris Karloff, his caricature of a Chinese accent and his performance always had the undercurrent of his Charlie Chan playing up his otherness to use his adversaries’ prejudices against themselves. Toler, on the other hand, tended to a stiffness that suggests all the wrong ideas about “inscrutability” (shudder), and only seldom sells an audience on the self-irony the scripts give the character.

On the other hand, while he’s played by a white guy, Charlie Chan’s still that most curious of things on screen for his time: a Chinese character who is undoubtedly the hero of the piece, as well as the character with the superior intellect as well as morality. And while the writers of this film and those of most others in the series don’t seem to have had much of a clue of Chinese or Chinese American culture, these films never go the route of mock mysticism you’d find in many a comparable character in the pulps (who did indeed include some non-white heroes among the more white and square-jawed type).


The film at hand, as directed by Harry Lachman is for my tastes one of the better ones of the Toler Chan films, which are generally inferior to the ones starring Oland, presenting its silly but fun story in a zippy manner. Sure, the various suspects could be delineated more clearly from each other (or simply have better actors portraying them), and the mystery is mildly complicated more than actually mysterious, but as a bit of good-natured fun from the past, there’s little to complain here. Visually, Lachman has his moments too, turning on a bit of the old expressionist influence for a couple of shots (always a sure winner) and generally staging the dialogue-heavy scenes he has to work with clearly and without things becoming too stagey.