In September of 1938, Adolf Hitler was feeling his oats. He was taking those first evil baby steps towards world domination, and if you ever want to conquer the world, at some point you’re gonna have to conquer Czechoslovakia – or at least part of it. This prompted the Munich Conference, with Britain’s thoroughly persuasive Chamberlain and Italy’s morally decent Mussolini debating a Czechoslovakian land division that would absolutely and without question sate Hitler of his need for warring. It’s like when the bill comes in a restaurant; everyone fighting over how to split the Czech. [Rim shot!]
Connected to all this was Germany’s modest Kill Every Jew policy, which was still in its uncircumcised early stages back in ze Motherland – artistic prosecution. Amongst the artists persecuted by all the SS shitheadedry was Jewish playwright and novelist Gina Kaus (“Dark Angel,” “Whiskey & Soda”), then living in pre-Third Man Vienna. Sensing, like some many intellectuals, a change in ze wind, in March of 1938 she emigrated to Paris, and continued her art there.
It was in Paris that Kaus experienced the great city-wide blackouts related to the Munich Crisis. War was inevitable, and the Germans were likely to bomb the city to rustic French rubble, provided Chamberlain couldn’t come to a Czech mate. (Sorry.) In the panic of this event, many people began the struggle to flee to the United States. Long before Rick and Elsa ever considered breaking apart, others were reenacting the entire plot of Casablanca ahead of schedule, with clearance papers the real world MacGuffin on the line.
Eventually Kaus would herself make it to the United States in 1939, where she teamed up with Ladislaus Fodor to write a play about her experiences in Paris: “City in Darkness.” This play was never produced, nor is it even listed on Kaus’ Wikipedia page, but it didn’t end there. The ‘30s were a heady time of Hollywood adapting unmade plays for about 85% of their movies – let us never say originality prospered more in Golden Age Hollywood than it does now in the Age of Remakes. Thus, for the same reason Michael Crichton wrote novels, Kaus’ play was really intended as an eventual movie – one that Fox was going to produce, after getting the rights from MGM. As proof the Fox of 1939 was entirely different than the TV show-canceling Fox of today, they wanted to adapt Kaus’ play as a public service. They felt there was a propagandistic reason in putting City in Darkness up on the screen – and this was before World War II broke out, and thus in anticipation of all those other topical war dramas to follow.
Here’s the problem: no one would want to see that, or at least not enough to satisfy Fox’s patriotic, anti-Nazi fervor. (Oh Lordie, I’m getting some faint Fox News parallels here!) They had to guarantee that City in Darkness would be a success. Let’s see, you could put an A-list star in the film…Better yet, it could be part of a highly successful line of B-movies (that enjoyed A success): the Charlie Chan franchise! And this is why, in 1939, Sidney Toler appeared in the first Chan picture of his series without "Charlie Chan" in the title.
This is easily the most interesting story behind any given Charlie Chan entry (for the rest, it’s simply “they just up and made it because”). Too bad the resulting City in Darkness is such a crappy Charlie Chan movie.
There are many reasons for this. The most obvious is that it is not a Charlie Chan story, in its truest form, but an impassioned, somewhat propagandistic plea for an American/French alliance. Chan’s character is artlessly tacked onto the film (screenplay having nothing to do with Kaus), and it shows. Here, ultimately, we have the same problem as in so many cinematic compromises: it’s a neither/nor. The Chan elements don’t wholly work, but the gritty tale of pre-wartime Europe is also rather lost in the scuffle. It’s a shame all this had to happen so soon after the tremendously good Charlie Chan at Treasure Island.
Of course Treasure Island had the advantage over City in Darkness of a good director in Norman Foster, who would go on to do some noir (Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, Woman on the Run), and no one who directs noir is totally worthless. Sadly, the director here is Chan newbie Herbert I. Leeds, who would go on to do…basically nothing else of note. (He has no Wikipedia page either – Nerds, get on that!) So even though we’ve been given the setting of Paris on curfew, lights out and warplanes flying overhead, it just comes across like the same stale drawing room curios so many of the earlier Chan films were.
That’d kill any good premise dead, and it usually takes a brilliant performance or Ray Harryhausen to salvage a traditionally-sucky movie. Sadly, in place we have Harold Huber. Seeing as Chan is a diminished, esoteric presence, the true lead of City in Darkness is Inspector Marcel Spivak. Now, Huber has been adequate enough in two previous Chan flicks (Charlie Chan on Broadway, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo), but here his role is a little different. In light of the sadly lacking Jimmy Chan (another of the film’s many detriments), Marcel is our comic relief, and a horrible, shrieking, hamming comic relief at that. Makes sense that he’s French, though, since Marcel rather anticipates Jerry Lewis – [Shiver!].
Marcel really is the Least Valuable Player in City in Darkness, and rather scuttles the whole enterprise. It doesn’t help that Huber was never a comic player – it’s a tremendously ugly thing to watch a dramatically trained actor try to be funny. It leads to mugging, bulged eyes, grotesque accents, screeching that rather tries the speaker system on my HDTV, and the weeping of newborns. And oddly, Marcel is at odds with the needs of both Kaus and Chan. For Chan he’s too much of a comic miscarriage (and this is a series that rather relies on its hokey comic sensibility!); for Kaus, this French inspector does nothing to inspire American confidence in the frogs. Quite the opposite, in fact, freaking Inspector Clousseau makes the French look better than Marcel does!
Ah hah! They knew that one, so technically Marcel ain’t French, he’s Romanian – ‘cause it’s totally okay to undermine the gypsies and vampires. This little ideological sidestep necessitates a really awkward bit of exposition, and Chan is already full to bursting with awkward exposition. But even with Marcel removed from the French fold, his grossly inept habit of eating clues and exploding fingerprints is still embarrassing. I mean, he remains a member of the same genus as I – he’s an onus to the rest of us Homo sapiens.
Despite all this, there’s one way in which City in Darkness is useful, and not simply as a historical curiosity: It is a concrete example of what Casablanca ought to have been like. Really, murder over letters of transit is the ball that gets both stories rolling (far more efficiently in Casablanca, natch), but City in Darkness isn’t able to get past that. And really, the preproduction tale of Casablanca makes it seem no less artful than any other tossed off entertainer of its era. We have the same tale of lovers forced to part over expatriation, opposed by both French officers and German sympathizers. Heck, both movies even end on an airfield. It just goes to show how important presentation is, in the same way that Halloween (not Zombie’s) bettered all the similar films that preceded it.
I’ve managed to say a fair amount about City in Darkness without directly addressing the plot – really, just go and watch Casablanca. If you haven’t, see it NOW. This means I shan’t employ as microscopic plot analysis as usual.
It’s even difficult to say which plot elements are original to the film, and which derive from Kaus’ play. I’d suspect the entire murder mystery thing is new, for I can find enough story here without it. In the form of the series lovebirds, we have the potentially interesting couple of Marie (Lynn Bari) and Tony (Richard Clarke) – Tony is wanted by Nazi high command, and thus must leave his beloved Marie and gain transit to America. These papers of transit, naturally, are wanted by everyone on the eve of the Munich Crisis, most notably by a ring of spies anxious to smuggle munitions out of France to ze Germans.
There’s more than enough there for an interesting drama, which is why it’s so disappointing when the holder of the papers, Petroff (Douglass Dumbrille, Chan semi-regular), is murdered, and the story refocuses upon the investigation. On the eve of a potential German invasion, it’s mighty difficult to build interest in something so inconsequential as a murder mystery – a good dramatist could create a microcosm thriller from this notion, telling the larger story through the small, but that’s beyond the capacity of City in Darkness. Oh no, get ready to watch freaking Marcel klutz his way through the mystery, Charlie Chan a mere background detail to act as Marcel’s occasional Yoda when the plot gets completely out of hand.
The cast, as Claude Rains would assess, if full of the usual suspects, recognizable as the stock types from every Charlie Chan mystery. There’s even a butler! Of some interest, one of these suspects (Pierre, thus presumably a Frenchman) is played by Lon Chaney Jr., future werewolf. (I knew it, Lugosi and Karloff under our belts, a Chaney had to show in this series at some stage!) Astoundingly, the master (er, mistress) spy Charlotte (Dorothy Tree) is never really a part of these proceedings, even while she’s the villain in the end (but not the killer, as we’ll see).
Naturally, the various plot threads and scenarios I refuse to recap climax in our standard Chanquest, assembly full of suspects – this is the indicator my Marcel-based suffering is near an end. Soon enough, at Marcel’s instigation, everyone is yelling at the top of their lungs, all lunging chaotically. This is surely a sign of poorly constructed comedy, ‘cause it’s exactly the same as the sketch routines drunken students improvised at my undergrad. Accusations are lobbied about in predictable fashion when the sound of planes is heard overhead. But wait, it’s merely the French patrol – Phew! Things were nearly exciting there for a minute! Then Marcel goes and does something that literally made me slap my forehead in disgust, as all the suspects escape police clutches to race willy nilly all over the streets of Paris like some sort of Blake Edwards farce.
God damn it! These Chanquests are where these movies are supposed to end! But noooo, City in Darkness has to pull a Return of the King on us (a truly impressive feat for a 72 minute programmer), as it has like three more endings to come. First up, Charlie Chan pulls a clue out of his ass and everyone races off to Charlotte’s hotel, where she goes ahead and confesses to her coconspirators how she killed Petroff – later events totally contradict this, so either she’s lying, or this movie has some egregiously bad continuity.
Nevertheless, just as it appears they’re about to arrest Charlotte, she races off and actually leads Chan and Marcel on a freaking car chase to the airfield. Just picture it, a car chase filmed by a low-budget movie in 1939. There’s no way this is gonna be good (the first decent car chase in film history, silent film slapstick aside, is in 1940’s The Bank Dick).
At the airfield, Charlotte teams up with her spy buddies, and they escape in a small prop plane, papers or no. “But not so fast!” say the watchdogs of narrative predictability at the Hays Office, “the bad guys cannot just escape, even if it’s the dramatic point Kaus originally wanted to make.” So instead, for no reason whatsoever, the airplane’s tire blows out (it was a Bridgestone), and the airplane explodes. Since this is 1939, here’s the hugest fireball the movies can give us:
Okay, so the bad guys are defeated, having absolutely nothing to do with Charlie Chan’s presence. But don’t start zipping up yet, for there’s still one more ending to go! Petroff’s butler, Antoine (Pedro de Cordoba), goes to the police and confesses that he killed Petroff – Chan corroborates this. So who knows what Charlotte was on about before?
The butler did it!
The Chan films have previously invoked the menial murderer motive, but still… Here’s something new! Since Petroff was German (or at least British), it’s good he was murdered; Antoine is given a medal rather than a trial. And in comes the closing telegram, bringing resolution to the whole sordid affair, stating that there shall be no war in Europe…I’m gonna go ahead and call B.S. on that.
Charlie Chan does likewise, a variation on the anti-Commie “Keep watching the skies” warning that concluded The Thing (From Another World). For as poorly presented as most of City of Darkness is, this may well be the best aphorism in Chan’s endless arsenal of truisms: “Beware of spider who invites fly into parlor.” (Psst, he’s talking about Hitler.)
While watching City in Darkness, it’s just boring and frustrating, which is nothing new for the lesser Chan entries. What’s really aggravating about it, unlike so many others (Charlie Chan at the Olympics, for example, which also dabbled in Nazi topicality), is that this one had potential. Of course that potential has nothing to do with Charlie Chan – had a real, Kausian City in Darkness been made, it wouldn’t be appearing here. It’d still be nothing more than a historical curio, for that’s all we have anyway, but it’d be a fully committed historical curio. But so be it. Thus marks the end of Chan’s great experiment in socially conscious propaganda. It’s time we went back to formula, unencumbered by niceties like self-importance. It’s for the better, really.
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. 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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