#sidney toler

Speak Easily (1932) Edward Sedgwick

In fairness, in the original novels by Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan has much less of an asterisk. Mr. Biggers strongly disliked the "Yellow Peril" stereotypes common in American fiction of the 1920s, so he modeled Mr. Chan on Chang Apana, a real life Chinese police officer in Hawaii, as an intelligent, amiable and non-threatening police detective.

The Hollywood movies, which is where most of us get our impressions of Charlie Chan, were a somewhat different matter. Mr. Chan was played by various "white" actors, spouting broken English and fortune cookie sayings. (But still being smarter than everyone else in the room.) His children, on the other hand, were usually played by actors of Chinese descent, most notably Keye Luke as Number One Son.

The Charlie Chan movies I've reviewed on my blog are all from a boxed set of later Sidney Toler movies made on a shoestring at Monogram Studios. They costar Mantan Moreland as cabbie/chauffeur Birmingham Brown, who is very funny, yes, but his character is based on demeaning stereotypes about black people as cowardly and superstitious.

If you can get past the antiquated stereotypes, and the obvious lack of budget, these are fun movies for a lazy afternoon. They're short, so maybe make it a double feature with a John Woo movie?