One of his greatest fans was his co-star. Oland’s interpretation proved a great success with the public. In 1931, fresh from two leading roles for Paramount as the satanic Fu Manchu, he was hired by Fox Films to star in a movie version of Biggers’ Charlie Chan Carries On. Warner Oland - a Swede with Russian blood - was already a distinguished stage actor before appearing on film as an Italian gangster, a handful of “Oriental” villains, and as a Hasidic cantor, Al Jolson’s father, in The Jazz Singer. His story offers a unique window into both American cultural history and the curiously contradictory manifestations of xenophobia. Today, though, Chan is often vilified for embodying the racist attitudes he, in fact, helped mollify - targeted as an indefensible and insidious stereotype, with his fractured English, fortune-cookie wisdom (long before “Chinese” fortune cookies became popular in the States), and seemingly servile manner, an Uncle Tom as pernicious in his appeal as Aunt Jemima.Īn exemplar of what critic Stanley Crouch called “cultural miscegenation,” Chan continues to both delight and offend millions - in part because all but the first three Chan films (lackluster “silents”) starred white actors in the title role. Though more unlikely a hero than his pipe-smoking English counterpart, Chan was as 20 th century “American,” in his own way, as Holmes was Victorian British. Part of Chan’s appeal was that he was the opposite of Fu Manchu - a kind of Sino-Dracula fond of kidnapping innocent young white girls, plying them with opium and forcing them into sexual depravity – a fictional villain who played a significant role in spreading an already rampant “Yellow Peril” racism throughout the Western world. The New York Herald Tribune described Chan as “philosophical,” and “one of the most endearing and likable characters of the cinema.” Far from feeling offended, native Chinese audiences “got” that Chan’s pseudo-Confucian proverbs were often used to comic, even ironic, effect. Carroll (small-time black marketeer), newly-minted Dracula Bela Lugosi (suspicious fortune teller), and future Superman George Reeves (suspicious cruise ship passenger).Īccording to The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History, Chan’s exploits were the most popular movies in 1930s China, as well as among Chinese expatriates. The film series, which disseminated Chan’s fame far beyond the six novels it was based on, included some masterful cinematography, anticipating the best of Film Noir, along with a cast of supporting actors en route to major film careers - Ray Milland (as a romantic lead), William Holden (lawyer and suspect), J. By the 1930s, the witty sleuth was practically a household name, a media star embraced as the first positive Chinese role model. Between 19, Hollywood cranked out 47 Chan adventures - some 52 hours of screen time. No one, least of all his creator, could have anticipated Chan’s popularity, especially at a time when anti-“heathen Chinese” sentiment in the US was raging. Intended as a minor character -“a mere bit of local color,” as Biggers later put it - Sergeant Chan grew in importance as the novels evolved. Colorful settings – a racetrack, a swanky night club, a wax museum, a high-end casino, an archeological site – populated with appropriately colorful characters, added to his allure.Ĭharlie Chan was the invention of Earl Derr Biggers, a small-town Ohio “rube” who managed to matriculate to Harvard, then worked as a newspaper columnist and night police reporter before trying his hand at mystery novels. Distinguished by his wispy mustache, three-piece suits, Panama hat and, most notably, his often witty, pseudo-Confucian aphorisms (“Bad alibi like dead fish – cannot stand test of time,” “Love is as unexpected as squirt from aggressive grapefruit”), Chan specialized in solving murders in cities around the world. For much of the 20 th century, Charlie Chan was one of the most famous detectives in the world, on par with Sherlock Holmes.
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