Monday, August 2, 2010

Charlie Chan, No. 21 - Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)


If the James Bond movies have taught me anything (and they’ve taught me roughly 75% of all I know), it’s that an actor’s second movie is where we can really start judging the performance. This is a shame for most new Bonds, because the actor’s second film is always relatively sucky (Sean Connery aside, naturally). As it is, though, I cannot say that Charlie Chan in Reno is a particular change in quality from Charlie Chan in Honolulu. Sidney Toler’s marquee performance as Chan is pretty much the same as before, and entirely comforting. That leaves the film itself to signal the differences. While we lose some of the fun elements from Honolulu (brains and lions all over the freaking place), we get some new elements in their place (a murder mystery that is central enough, I’ll have to recap it). Let’s dive in...

A montage of casinos and gamblers welcomes us to Reno. This is also the last time casinos will play any part in this film, for just like Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo, the series seems almost disgustingly disinterested in casino heists or other such joyous crimes. Ah, but Reno, that developmentally disabled younger brother of Las Vegas, still plays a part in the plot, for it is to impulse divorce what Las Vegas is to impulse marriage.

Well, the mystery is actually important here, so let’s meet our cast of suspects first off, and then dutifully move on to murder and to Chan. Newly arrived in Reno is Mary Whitman (Pauline Moore), fully intent on getting herself one of them there divorces like they got in the movies – I’m actually surprised Hayes would let a word such as “divorce” get used in 1939. She is driven to the Hotel Sierra by a comic relief cabbie, which is notable only because he’s played by Eddie Collins, hot off his amazing lion-wrestling in Honolulu. Nothing quite so marvelous happens here, unless you find exposition delivered in front of a projection screen interesting.

Setting up shop at the hotel, Mary meets with Vivian Wells (the very attractive Phyllis Brook, who would go on to marry Massachusetts Congressman Torbert Macdonald – good for her). I am rather smitten by Vivian, so let’s get an image up there.


Now, the various inter-suspect relationships here are ridiculously complex, perhaps the most ridiculously complex in this oft ridiculously complex franchise. This is gonna take some effort to parse out…

Vivian, Mary’s dear good friend, is in a tawdry, fulfilling relationship with Dr. Ainsley (Ricardo Cortez) – a mustache-free fool with greased hair and a tux…just like every other male character in this entry. What is it with the Charlie Chan franchise and insisting upon only one male type per episode?

Despite his primary affair with Vivian, Ainsley is also having a secondary affair with proto-Paris Hilton socialite Jeanne Bentley (Louise Henry, also of Charlie Chan on Broadway, in her final show business role, full stop).

Jeanne, for her part, is also having a secondary affair, with completely personality-deprived and useless fop Wally Burke (Robert Lowery). But don’t let Ainsley and Burke stop her, for she also fully intends to go and marry Mary’s husband Curtis Whitman (Kane Richmond) the instant Whitman’s divorce comes through.

Of course, to pull this off, Jeanne’s gonna have to go through a divorce of her own first. See, she’s presently married to George Bentley (Morgan Conway), who is too busy puttering around the abandoned Reno copper mines to be very useful.

But that’s not all! Jeanne also used to be married to Wayne Russell, who died back in 1936 of mysterious circumstances. Dr. Ainsley was the administering physician who pronounced Mr. Russell’s death a heart attack. Hmm…suspicious.

Then there’s Mr. Russell’s former, former wife, Mrs. Wayne Russell (Kay Linaker), who owns and operates the Hotel Sierra where all these ne’er-do-wells make their leech-like residence. She’s also probably having an affair with Dr. Aisley, just because. Who’s to say?


In short, essentially everyone’s having 1939 sex with everyone else, and all are connected through a bizarre series of marriages, divorces, and affairs. Got all that? Good. Moving on…

Jeanne is murdered! Good riddance, too; they did a good job of ensuring they killed off the least likeable member of this rather despicable bunch. The most likeable member, divorcee-to-be Mary, is found standing over Jeanne’s beauty mask-wearing corpse, so naturally she’s arrested…and naturally she’s innocent. Hence it is up to her husband-for-now Curtis to seek out Charlie Chan – because of course one of these people would be Charlie Chan’s close personal friend, whom we’ve never heard of before in twenty films.

Charlie won’t be the only Chan on this case, because of course “Number Two Son” Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung, our off-brand Keye Luke) has his formula function to satisfy as well. So while Charlie is flying to Reno from Honolulu (non-stop, surely), Jimmy sets to drive there from USC, where he is suddenly enrolled. (I fully expect to hear nothing more of USC in any more entries.) Jimmy, being the comic relief, cannot simply make it out to Reno. No, he has to have a tremendously unpleasant run-in with two hitchhikers (far less unpleasant than the 1980s variety), and thus only be reunited with father Charlie when he appears in a suspect lineup at the Reno police station – the biggest little police station in the world.

Also, for no particular reason, scant details reveal this is all taking place over the Easter holiday weekend, for whatever difference it makes…There’s a reason Die Hard took place on Christmas Eve.

Amongst the Reno PD, naturally Charlie is long term personal friends with Police Chief King (Charles D. Brown) – it’s like how every hotel James Bond ever stays in, he’s already stayed at…Okay, no more Bond references, I promise. The detective in charge of the Bentley killing is the fantastically-named Sheriff Tombstone Fletcher (the even more fantastically-named Slim Summerville), a chaw-spittin’ man more at home catchin’ them cattle rustlers than he is in rustlin’ up them there clues ‘n’ mo-tives. Naturally, he distrusts Chan, and serves as comic relief when Jimmy’s not around.

Chan’s first step is to meet with Mary in police custody. She tells tale of the murder, how she heard a scream in the nearby hotel room and arrived to find Jeanne stabbed to death, no murder weapon present. Under Chan’s usual, per-entry pretence that “bird not sing in cage,” Mary is released under her husband’s custody to stay at the hotel, where Chan shall conduct his investigation of the multitudinous other suspects. Chan, for his part, shall bed in the murder room (Jimmy too).

Even though, like in so many other Charlie Chan pictures, the police ought to have done a thorough crime scene investigation already, Chan is able to find new evidence mere seconds after arriving in the hotel room. This is a certain scrapbook of Jeanne’s, with the entries from 1935 through 1936 removed. And that missing murder weapon, the one the Reno PD couldn’t give two farts about? Through clever deductive reasoning (that is, whatever Chan says is never wrong), Chan learns it was scissors…surgical, perhaps…Dr. Ainsley, perhaps.

Jimmy, in his subplot, develops an immediate attraction for a lovely Asian lass – Choy Wong (Iris Wong). This is a scenario brother Lee went through in several entries, but Jimmy goes about it differently – this time, it’s mutual. I don’t have much else to add.


Chan has found another major clue that eluded the Reno PD, a pair of knee-high, stinky riding boots (jeepers, Reno PD did a crappy job). Through a forensic analysis of the boot’s dirty detritus that really ought not to be this precise, Chan is able to pinpoint a specific abandoned copper mine that Jeanne must’ve visited the day before her awesome murder. Quick, to Dead Man’s Canyon! Cool!


As seen above, this setting afford the filmmakers a chance for some nifty black and white cinematography, which the brightly-lit Hotel Sierra is sorely lacking in. Considering the sort of beauty even lesser B-movies could come up with, I sometimes rather lament the passing of B&W. Someday, I’ll say the same thing about 2-D…God, I hope not. At any rate, for all of Dead Man’s Canyon’s cinematic value, it offers up very little plot value (except for a brief run-in with George the Useless), so Chan must to the hotel.

[Brief pause while I take care of my laundry…Man, that dryer is pathetic!]

Coy Choy and boy-toy Jimmy have planted each of the suspects’ hotel rooms with scissors, in the hopes of drawing out the guilty party, Charlie Chan style. Jimmy, more than Lee, is actually trying to influence the plot the way his father does, rather than merely acting as an audience surrogate. The net result of all this subterfuge, sadly, is to the reveal that the murder scissors, ones Jimmy didn’t plant, were in Mary’s room all this time (way to go, Reno PD). So this means someone’s trying to frame Mary…or she really did do the deed, which…Nah, they’d never use a face-slapping twist like that!...Would they? Nah!

Then Chan discovers a further bit of evidence in Jeanne’s hotel room, never before seen – a cigarette burn in the rug. Well, Jimmy thinks it’s a burn he made, until Chan instantly understands it was made from nitric acid. (No need to break out the chemistry sets or anything, he simply knows.) How Jimmy thought he was responsible for a burn that was already there, I cannot say. Anyway, the search is on for a bottle of nitric acid that is only half-full (or half-empty, if you prefer sorrow in your life). This particular bottle shows up in Dr. Ainsley’s clinic, but there’s altogether too much evidence pointing towards Ainsley at this point in the plot for him to be the culprit.

What’s up on the formula checklist? Ah, the second murder!...Well, in this case, it’s only attempted murder. Mrs. Russell is found strangulated with a scarf. Ainsley is about to treat her with a hypodermic (You could say “hypodermic” in the Hayes era?) when Chan puts a stop to it. Despite how obviously suspicious Ainsley is, Chan still suspects him – perhaps they’re going for a twist via non-twist here. Further corroborating…something, they find a bit of gauze in Russell’s room that matches that missing from Ainsley’s evil bottle.


We’ve gotten to that point in the running time where Chan amasses all the suspects together – These never come about organically; they simply happen. And at long last I’ve come up with something to call these traditional inquests – Chanquests! Yeah, I’m calling this a “Chanquest,” even if it does sound like a lame online MMRPG, or a web-based map. So now, with all the jerks assembled, Chan feels the need to run through everyone’s potential motive, just because this entry’s that complicated. I shall do the same:

- Mrs. Russell: Jeanne stole, possibly murdered, her former husband.

- Burke: Jeanne largely spurned his tactless romantic advances…that’s a pretty dumb reason for murder.

- Vivian: Pretty much just because she said she would have. Yeah, why not?

- George: Because she was his wife, damn it!

- Dr. Ainsley: Because Jeanne was apparently blackmailing him over aiding her in the murder of Mr. Russell way back when, hence the missing pages from the scrapbook. This rather depends upon a wild set of assumptions…which are all correct, because they’re Chan’s.

- Curtis: Ah to hell with it!

This out of the way, it’s time to finger that murderer, as they say, or pinch the murderer, if you prefer! So Chan breaks out the old Wheel o’ Suspects (at least in my mind), and spins it around and around until it randomly settles upon…

Vivian. This is proved further when she has acid burns hidden all over her arm, ‘cause that’s something Chan couldn’t have found in some much-less-roundabout way.

What just what’s the big deal with that acid? Well, it turns out Mrs. Russell was the first to visit Jeanne that evening, and she also intended violence upon her. Not murder, mind you, merely lifelong scarring. Hence she hurled the acid all over Jeanne’s face, as you do, only Jeanne was protected by her Michael Myers-esque beauty mask. Her attempt to disfigure Jeanne foiled, Mrs. Russell just sort of sauntered off while Jeanne lounged around in her room some more.

Then in comes Vivian, no violence on her mind, simply wishing to ask Jeanne of her affair with the good Dr. Ainsley. Jeanne was the aggressive bitch, and all Vivian could do was defend herself with Jeanne’s nearby scissors – which were slathered in Russell’s erstwhile nitric acid. So this “murder” was all just self-defense, which is precisely why Vivian then went and framed her best friend Mary by planting the scissors there. Rrrright…

So Vivian’s only sorta guilty, but what of Mrs. Russell’s attempted killing? Oh, Ainsley did that one. See, Chan now knows (‘cause he’s Chan) that Ainsley’s hypodermic is full of delicious poison. Alright, then, Ainsley’s guilty of attempted murder…and also of Mr. Russell’s murder back in the day, though no one seems to particularly care about that one. And dear, sweet Mary is exonerated of all these goings on. Suddenly it appears that she and husband Curtis are the lovebirds this time, as the movie fades out on them smooching hungrily. Yes, there’s nothing that patches a marriage quite like having all your friends killed or arrested!

You know, it’s complicated, but I like this mystery! Actually, that’s why I like it.

To end this, I’ll simply say my final word on Sidney Toler’s performance as Chan. As noted in Honolulu, Toler is far more sarcastic and rough than Oland’s Chan ever was. Some may feel this betrays the “original” Chan, but let’s look into that. Oland’s original performances were intentionally watered-down, reducing Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan to a house chink. Toler’s interpretation, in my mind, brings Chan closer to his true literary ideal. At this point, with the movies really their own set-in-stone thing, it’s nice to see this little evolution. I have a feeling I’m gonna prefer Toler.



Related posts:
• No. 3 Behind That Curtain (1929)
• No. 4 Charlie Chan Carries On (1931)
• No. 5 The Black Camel (1931)
• No. 9 Charlie Chan in London (1934)
• No. 10 Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)
• No. 11 Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)
• No. 12 Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935)
• No. 13 Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936)
• No. 14 Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
• No. 15 Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936)
• No. 16 Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936)
• No. 17 Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)
• No. 18 Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937)
• No. 19 Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1938)
• No. 20 Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)
• No. 21 Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)
• No. 22 Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939)
• No. 23 City in Darkness (1939)
• No. 24 Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)
• No. 25 Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940)
• No. 26 Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940)
• No. 27 Murder Over New York (1940)
• No. 28 Dead Men tell (1941)
• No. 29 Charlie Chan in Rio (1941)
• No. 30 Castle in the Desert (1942)
• No. 31 Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944)
• No. 32 The Chinese Cat (1944)
• No. 33 Meeting at Midnight (1944)
• No. 34 The Shanghai Cobra (1945)
• No. 35 The Red Dragon (1945)
• No. 36 The Scarlet Clue (1945)
• No. 37 The Jade Mask (1945)
• No. 38 Dark Alibi (1946)
• No. 40 Dangerous Money (1946)
• No. 41 The Trap (1946)
• No. 42 The Chinese Ring (1947)

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