Charlie Chan


Charlie Chan is a fictional Honolulu police detective created by author Earl Derr Biggers for a series of mystery novels. Biggers loosely based Chan on Hawaiian detective Chang Apana. The benevolent and heroic Chan was conceived as an alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu. Many stories feature Chan traveling the world beyond Hawaii as he investigates mysteries and solves crimes.
Chan first appeared in Biggers' novels and then was featured in a number of media. Over four dozen films featuring Charlie Chan were made, beginning in 1926. The character, featured only as a supporting character, was first portrayed by East Asian actors, and the films met with little success. In 1931, for the first film centering on Chan, Charlie Chan Carries On, the Fox Film Corporation cast Swedish actor Warner Oland; the film became popular, and Fox went on to produce 15 more Chan films with Oland in the title role. After Oland's death, American actor Sidney Toler was cast as Chan; Toler made 22 Chan films, first for Fox and then for Monogram Pictures. After Toler's death, Monogram made six more Chan features starring Roland Winters.
Readers and moviegoers of America greeted Chan warmly. Chan was seen as an attractive character, portrayed as intelligent, heroic, benevolent, and honorable; this contrasted with the common depiction of Asians as evil or conniving which dominated Hollywood and national media in the early 20th century. However, in later decades, critics increasingly took a more ambivalent view of the character. Despite his good qualities, Chan was also perceived as reinforcing condescending Asian stereotypes, such as an apparent incapacity to speak idiomatic English and a tradition-bound and subservient nature. No Charlie Chan film has been produced since 1981.
The character has also been featured in several radio programs, two television shows, and comics.

Books

The character of Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers. In 1919, while visiting Hawaii, Biggers planned a detective novel to be called The House Without a Key. He did not begin to write that novel until four years later, however, when he was inspired to add a Chinese-American police officer to the plot after reading in a newspaper of Chang Apana and Lee Fook, two detectives on the Honolulu police force. Biggers, who disliked the Yellow Peril stereotypes he found when he came to California, explicitly conceived of the character as an alternative: "Sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff, but an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order has never been used.":
The "amiable Chinese" made his first appearance in The House Without a Key. The character was not central to the novel and was not mentioned by name on the dust jacket of the first edition. In the novel, Chan is described as "very fat indeed, yet he walked with the light dainty step of a woman" and in The Chinese Parrot as being " … an undistinguished figure in his Western clothes." According to critic Sandra Hawley, this description of Chan allows Biggers to portray the character as nonthreatening, the opposite of evil Chinese characters, such as Fu Manchu, while simultaneously emphasizing supposedly Chinese characteristics such as impassivity and stoicism.
Biggers wrote six novels in which Charlie Chan appears:
  • The House Without a Key
  • The Chinese Parrot
  • Behind That Curtain
  • The Black Camel
  • Charlie Chan Carries On
  • ''Keeper of the Keys''

    Adaptations

Films

The first film featuring Charlie Chan, as a supporting character, was The House Without a Key, a ten-chapter serial produced by Pathé Studios, starring George Kuwa, a Japanese actor, as Chan. A year later Universal Pictures followed with The Chinese Parrot, starring Japanese actor Kamiyama Sojin as Chan, again as a supporting character. In both productions, Charlie Chan's role was minimized. Contemporary reviews were unfavorable; in the words of one reviewer, speaking of The Chinese Parrot, Sojin plays "the Chink sleuth as a Lon Chaney cook-waiter … because Chaney can't stoop that low."
For the first film to center mainly on the character of Chan, Warner Oland, a white actor, was cast in the title role in 1931's Charlie Chan Carries On, and it was this film that gained popular success. Oland, a Swedish actor, had also played Fu Manchu in an earlier film. Oland, who claimed some Mongolian ancestry, played the character as more gentle and self-effacing than he had been in the books, perhaps in "a deliberate attempt by the studio to downplay an uppity attitude in a Chinese detective." Oland starred in sixteen Chan films for Fox, often with Keye Luke, who played Chan's "", Lee Chan. Oland's "warmth and gentle humor" helped make the character and films popular; the Oland Chan films were among Fox's most successful. By attracting "major audiences and box-office grosses on a par with A's" they "kept Fox afloat" during the Great Depression.
File:Dangerous Money - Sidney Toler 1.jpg|thumb|Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan in Dangerous Money
Oland died in 1938. "When he died I wanted to leave the series," said Keye Luke. "He died midway through a film, and we simply brought in Mr. Moto instead to complete it on deadline." The partially completed Charlie Chan at the Ringside was rewritten with additional footage as Mr. Moto's Gamble, featuring another East Asian protagonist. Luke appeared as Lee Chan, not only in sequences already shot but also in new scenes with Moto actor Peter Lorre.
Fox decided to continue the Charlie Chan series, and selected another white actor, Sidney Toler, to play the lead. Fox produced 11 more Chan films through 1942. Toler's Chan was less mild-mannered than Oland's, a "switch in attitude that added some of the vigor of the original books to the films." He is frequently accompanied, and irritated, by his Number Two Son Jimmy Chan, played by Victor Sen Yung, who later portrayed "Hop Sing" in the long-running Western television series Bonanza.
In 1942, when Fox decided to produce no further Chan films, Sidney Toler purchased the film rights from the author's widow. He had hoped to film more Charlie Chan pictures independently, to be released through Fox, but Fox had already discontinued the series and had no interest in reviving it. Toler approached Philip N. Krasne, a Hollywood lawyer who financed film productions, and Krasne brokered a deal with Monogram Pictures. Krasne and James S. Burkett co-produced three of the films for Monogram, and then Burkett produced the rest of the Monogram Chans on his own. The budget for each film was reduced from Fox's average of $200,000 to $75,000.
For the first time, Chan was portrayed on occasion as "openly contemptuous of suspects and superiors." Victor Sen Yung was slated to continue in the role of Number Two Son, but his acting career was interrupted by military service. He was replaced by Number Three Son Benson Fong. African American comedian Mantan Moreland played Chan's cheerful but easily rattled chauffeur Birmingham Brown in 13 films. Moreland had been a valuable drawing card at Monogram since 1940, and his amusing antics were always well received by trade reviewers when the films played in theaters. Today's audiences, however, find Moreland a matter of taste: some call his performances "brilliant comic turns", while others describe Moreland's role as an offensive and embarrassing stereotype. In The Scarlet Clue and Dark Alibi Moreland was teamed with actor-comedian Ben Carter; Moreland and Carter were so popular that they embarked on a coast-to-coast personal-appearance tour for eight weeks, which is why Moreland was missing from The Red Dragon and Dangerous Money. Veteran African-American comic Willie Best substituted for him.
In 1946, Sidney Toler, terminally ill, valiantly continued as Charlie Chan, and Victor Sen Yung returned to the series, replacing Benson Fong. After Toler died in February 1947, he was succeeded by character actor Roland Winters for six films. Keye Luke, missing from the series after 1938's Mr. Moto reworking, returned as Charlie's son in the last two entries. Monogram had planned to continue the series into the 1950s, with Roland Winters and Keye Luke set to begin filming at Monogram's British studio. "I was all packed and ready to go when I got a studio call telling me it was off," Luke recalled. " planned on using up the currency reserves they had stored over there, and all of a sudden Attlee went and devalued the pound!" The Charlie Chan movie series thus came to an end.

Spanish-language adaptations

Three Spanish-language Charlie Chan films were made in the 1930s and 1950s. The first, Eran Trece, is a multiple-language version of Charlie Chan Carries On. The two films were made concurrently and followed the same production schedule, with each scene filmed twice the same day, once in English and then in Spanish. The film followed essentially the same script as the Anglophonic version, with minor additions such as brief songs and skits and some changes to characters' names. A Cuban production, La Serpiente Roja, followed in 1937. In 1955, Producciones Cub-Mex produced a Mexican version of Charlie Chan called El Monstruo en la Sombra, starring Orlando Rodriguez as "Chan Li Po". The film was inspired by La Serpiente Roja as well as the American Warner Oland films.

Chinese-language adaptations

During the 1930s and 1940s, five Chan films were produced in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In these films, Chan, played by Xu Xinyuan, owns his detective agency and is aided not by a son but by a daughter, Manna, played first by Gu Meijun in the Shanghai productions and then by Bai Yan in postwar Hong Kong.
Chinese audiences also saw the original American Charlie Chan films. They were by far the most popular American films in 1930s China and among Chinese expatriates; "one of the reasons for this acceptance was that this was the first time Chinese audiences saw a positive Chinese character in an American film, a departure from the sinister East Asian stereotypes in earlier movies like Thief of Baghdad and Harold Lloyd's Welcome Danger, which incited riots that shut down the Shanghai theater showing it." Oland's visit to China was reported extensively in Chinese newspapers, and the actor was respectfully called "Mr. Chan".