"Necessity - mother of invention.
But sometimes stepmother of deception."
You certainly love or hate Charlie Chan's figure (created by Earl Derr Biggers, played (this time) by Warner Oland), the Chinese detective, who used to tiresomely repeat these laconic sentences of dubious wisdom, who is sometimes wearing a terrible white suit, and who is using limited English with a bad, but characteristic pronunciation. Maybe in the real world I would like to hit him on his small moustached face, but actually in a movie like the whole series around his investigations he is a private eye full with individual virtue.
This time (Charlie Chan's Secret by Gordon Wiles) the film starts with a headline of a special edition of a newspaper: "S.S. Nestor lost in storm off Hawaii!" The rescue is going on already, because many prominent persons among missing. And just like it used to be, there is something "fishy" around the whole case: "A man walks out on a fortune seven years ago. Then all of a sudden, he appears from nowhere to claim it." The man's name is Allen Colby, and from the passanger list of the sunken ship he is the only one who is missing. He maybe disappeard in the deepest dephts of the ocean, but nobody could say that he died. Charlie Chan won't for sure...
There is something common between the film professor David Bordwell and me: Charlie Chan's movies were one of our favourites during our childhood. Maybe he had luck to see them in some local movie theatre while I enjoyed some from the television. If you're regularly watching and analyzing films it isn't a surprise thet you've been amazed with these films: following Chan's methods, trying to find out his Columbo-like tricky logic, being interested in the wisely told and unfolded crime shows similarities with our everyday's interpretative methods like collecting small pieces of informations from images amd sequences, trying to look at the given narrative from different points of view, approach from parallel perspectives, build up hypotheses, summarizing existing knowledges. Actually Charlie Chan's stories contain all the values how we like and read movies.
Even if it's a bit overacted (there is a living ghost of a silent cinema in the air), even Chan's irritating character (after a while you will like him more and more) ten out of ten without a single doubt. Nothing's left but quoting the detective's most used words:
"Thank you so much."
10/10
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