Charlie Chan at the Olympics! Now there’s a title to send a B movie buff’s heart a-racing. I’m a huge fan of the Warner Oland Charlie Chans, some of the best B movies ever made, and this one has some special twists. For example, it’s the one where Charlie flies to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics on the zeppelin Hindenberg, its swastikas clumsily marked out. And it’s the one in which Lee (Keye Luke), Charlie’s “Number One Son,” wins a gold medal in the 100 meter swim.
Even more interesting, to me, is the attention the film pays to the politics of the Olympics. Adolph Hitler naturally presided at the Games, and the U.S., in defiance of Nazi racist protocol, entered an integrated team. There was immense publicity at the time over the achievements of Jesse Owns, the black track star from Oakville, Alabama, who won four gold medals at the Olympics, putting poor Adolph in the awkward position of awarding gold medals to a black man, thus “proving” that, when it came to racial prejudice, the U.S. was not as bad as Adolph Hitler, which was as much of a moral victory as we could claim back then.1
Charlie Chan at the Olympics works this into the plot of the story, installing a black girl in Lee’s circle of fellow athletes, so she can be shown cheering Jesse on to victory. Her role, though limited, is remarkably unstereotyped for a Hollywood film of the time.2 Naturally, it was never repeated.
Afterwords 1
Wikipedia’s entry for Charlie Chan details the “controversy” that swirls around the character, largely though not entirely due to the fact that Charlie was always played by a European actor. When I was in Vietnam, I had a Chinese friend (“American Chinese,” who spoke unaccented English) who told me that as a boy he and his friends loved Charlie Chan movies. As Keye Luke put it “Demeaning to the race? My God! You’ve got a Chinese hero! We were making the best damn murder mysteries in Hollywood.”
The Warner Oland Charlie Chans, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, are great fun, at least the ones I’ve seen, but somehow, when Charlie isn’t played by a drunken Swede, the magic vanishes. Both the dialogue and the plots of the Oland films are surprisingly crisp. Furthermore, murder mysteries were seriously black tie affairs back in the day, and who can resist a touch of class? Not me! After Oland drank himself to death in 1938, he was replaced by Sidney Toler. Although Fox continued to produce the films until 1942, none of the Toler films work for me at all. When the franchise left Fox it moved to Monogram, the famously low-rent studio whose offerings had one legendary fan, Jean-Luc Godard.3 Toler lasted until 1947, when he was replaced by the dreary Roland Winters, who continued the role with Monogram until 1949, when the TV monster was starting to devour Old Hollywood, and the B movie era drew to a close. The Monogram films bear the added burden of the often racist material given to black comedian Mantan Moreland as Charlie’s chauffeur “Birmingham” Brown. Moreland was quite a talented comedian, but there are plenty of gags that will make you wince.
If you are a serious B movie buff, you might check out Black Magic (1944), seriously dreary Monogram kitsch, but seriously enlivened by Frances Chan as “Frances Chan”, Charlie’s “Number One Daughter”—sadly, the only time this riff was used. Frances is a delight, but she vanished from the film world shortly after Black Magic was released.
Afterwords 2
I’m running this film in part because the Olympics bore the hell out of me, perhaps because I am the tenth-worst athlete in the world.4
- Owens developed his athletic career at Ohio State University. Despite being the preeminent track and field college athlete of his time—winning eight individual NCAA championships—he was not given a scholarship and lived in segregated housing while attending Ohio State. ↩︎
- Among other things, she is thin, speaks “educated English”, and never sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. ↩︎
- Godard dedicated Alphaville to Monogram pictures and famously said “The trouble with making movies is that by the time you are able to make movies you don’t want to make the kind of movies that made you want to make movies in the first place.” ↩︎
- I have an affidavit signed by Bob Richards, in case you’re interested. ↩︎
