‘Tis time to say something generic about movie franchises from the ‘30s and ‘40s. This gargantuan throng, of which Charlie Chan is but a mere blip overall [sigh!], is where we start to see the first inklings of a phenomena which further film franchises (Star Wars) would completely solidify – media franchises! And here we have a nice example of franchise evolution. While now we’re accustomed to a sequel being accompanied by toys, video games, and innumerable other tie-ins I haven’t the wherewithal to consider right now, in the ‘40s they were only beginning to test these waters.
In the case of Chan, his magnificent media “empire” begins with the half dozen Earl Derr Biggers novels – not a huge phenomenon, but popular enough to jumpstart a Fox movie series. Still, nothing further came of Charlie Chan novelling following Derr Biggers’ passing.
To fill this gap, starting in 1938 there were Charlie Chan comic strips, by Reuben winner Alfred Andriola. This strip continued until the Pearl Harbor bombings of 1942, at which point Americans promptly began intentionally confusing China and Japan (Chan is a Chinaman, but don’t tell them that). Assorted non-starting comic bookery followed in spurts and starts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with DC Comics having a brief go at it – but Chan was never really the purview of this medium.
There were parlor games, the closest the ‘30s could come to video games, in The Great Charlie Chan Detective Mystery Game (1937) and The Charlie Chan Card Game (1939). No more info on these things exists, but isn’t their existence kinda depressing anyway?
Then there was the greatest non-movie form of mer-Chan-dise – radio programs! Here’s another arena that’s rather too expansive for a one-paragraph consideration, but suffice it to say there were Chan radio serials regularly acted out (by many different stations over time, through some uncertain rights agreement with Fox). Considering how non-cinematic the Chan movies can be, surely a scripted radio show, simply read with live sound effects accompanying it could be just as exciting (if not more so) than the flicks. Still, throughout all this, the Chan movies remained king!
(There were also scant Chinese Chan films, done with complete disregard for copyright law, as is China’s wont. These are totally outside of the scope of my concerns – and they’re lost anyway.)
That macro-franchise hagiography now under my belt, may I finally pull us out of Chan’s most prolific year of all, 1940, and into 1941. From my current perspective, losing the Chan forest for the Chan trees, this seems a major milestone!
Leaving aside for one entry all the spies and pre-identified killers, Dead Men Tell returns us yet again to my favorite subset of Chan films: the horror pastiche. They must’ve been running out of unique new horror angles, for the subject here is pirates! That’s wholly welcome, because who doesn’t love a story of zombie pirates, only…here is where the horror pastiches start to tire me, not due to anything directly offensive (like the oft-despised Charlie Chan in Egypt), but simply because it’s a little tiresome, and doesn’t try too hard.
In fact, while I’ve compared the horror entries to “Scooby Doo” in the past, this is the surest case of that. Hell, the plot is a “Scooby Doo” episode: someone’s creeping around dressed as a ghost-pirate in order to scary several suspects into revealing buried pirate treasure. A team of travelling detectives takes the case absent anyone’s request, the ghost pirate is unmasked after many goofy chases, and [gasp!] it’s Old Man So-and-So, and blah blah blah that meddling Chan! There’s also a ridiculous amount of padding, and incredibly unsuccessful humor. There is not, however, any of that wonderful camp value or veiled cannabis usage.
At one hour and 3 seconds, Dead Men Tell is 3 seconds over the bare minimum of what should qualify as a feature length film for this blog’s franchise requirements – it’s the shortest Chan so far. And with a plot so arbitrary and nonexistent that 1941 audiences must’ve pegged it as “Scooby Doo,” a full 29 years before “Scooby Doo” was a thing, there’s call for a huge amount of padding. And Sidney Toler’s Charlie Chan is unable to respond to that call; this is well and truly the Victor Sen Yung hour – not to the movie’s benefit. “Number Two Son” Jimmy Chan is surely unable to carry an honest-to-goodness mystery, but he’s good at inoffensive and unfunny comic bungling. That’s basically what we have to tide us over with for 55 minutes until Charlie rips the mask off of the ghost pirate, and a Great Dane makes an incomprehensible joke (Great Dane event may not have happened).
Sort of hilariously, in an only partly-intentional way, this movie is just about the greatest assembly of pirate clichés you could squeeze into an hour – it must’ve been boggling in 1941. It’s almost wholly set upon a docked pirate ship which is actually about to set out on a quest for buried pirate treasure, a mass of duped tourists along with separate pieces of a map. It’s like the piratical equivalent of those silly murder mystery dinners they sometimes hold down at the Freemasons’ Temple; it’s stupid.
Head of this Suva Star is Captain Kane (Truman Bradley), a salty old seaman (ew!) who is actually taken to wearing a parrot on his shoulder at all times – you didn’t need me to point that out, but it totally needed to be said. The first time I heard the parrot’s barely comprehensible dialogue, I was deathly afraid we had another “humorous” racist caricature on our hands – I swear a parrot’s speech sounds like how Hollywood thought black people spoke in the ‘40s (like The Twins in Revenge of the Fallen).
(And on that incomprehensible dialogue…Previous entries have been barely watchable due to poor casting or an excess of French or severely under-lit sets. This is the first one where the audio track itself is too corroded to understand – it all often comes across like the adults on “Peanuts.” The only consistently enunciated person is Sidney Toler, which is good since he’s our franchise star. Boy, I do love how the Chan films keep finding new ways to be painful.)
Anyway, lengthy sidetracks aside, Kane chats up cruise passenger Steve Daniels, who is played by Robert Weldon – in the first of only two credited performances ever. His other acting work was in something from 1942 incredibly called Sex Hygiene – directed by John Ford no less! Someone call the Hayes Office goody-two-shoes, I think we got us a sex counterpoint to Reefer Madness here! Actually, no, this was a training film for out good WWII men in uniform, a horribly graphic documentary on the horrors of syphilis and the clap awaiting our infantrymen inside the vaginas of Frenchwomen. You’re damn right I watched it!
Oh boy, this is gonna be one of those entries where I barely get around to discussing the movie, isn’t it? Well, guys, it’s a free blog.
Moving on…Jimmy sneaks onto the pirate ship, drawn by the eternal human desire to see a parrot. I’m dead damned serious! Chan arrives seeking Jimmy, and instead encounters spinsterly old beast Miss Patience Nodbury (Ethel Griffies) – all those names tell you all you need to know about her. She says lengthy stuff about the evil ghost of Black Hook, I think, ‘cause she’s the hardest to understand out of this entire peanut butter-mouthed lot.
Chan is off wasting his time awaiting Patience’s murder, patiently, chatting up reporter Bill Lydig (George “Superman” Reeves – Superman!). Meanwhile, along comes the long-awaited zombie ghost pirate wannabe, the dread Black Hook. (He has a peg leg and a hook hand and an eye patch, but you guessed all that, right?) Patience takes one Hook look, then goes right ahead and dies of a heart attack – which I’m okay with, ‘cause I originally thought it was the least exciting throat slitting in cinema history, and I’ve seen Jason Takes Manhattan!
Okay, there’s our murder, one quarter through. There’s a bunch of suspects that are suddenly farted our way, including a lovebird set (Steve Daniels is one half of that). Only one of these guys is worth mentioning – Jed Thomasson (Don Douglas of Gilda, Sergeant York, and also a bunch of crap), whom I bring up only because he turns out to be the ghost pirate ninja zombie dinosaur. This is pretty much just an arbitrary decision at the film’s end, as the writers simply bring out the old Wheel o’ Suspects to determine an ending. I’ve really spoiled nothing.
Chan bides his time until the necessary demasking, following the one scant clue the writers could come up with – at the time of Patience’s death, an ocarina was heard. Ah, ocarinas, the favored instrument of ancient pirates and Princess Zelda! And here it stands for…nothing. The viewer has to stand for a lot, though. The specific form of detection Chan practices this time, a special “puttering around” method, is boring. Still, series cinematography is getting generally better and better as technology improves, as even the lamest film of 1941 could afford a really nice set of shadows.
But really, Jimmy Chan is our focus here, our proto Shaggy (minus the munchies). As an example of this film’s unfunny comedy, there is one joke, repeated five times, with minutes of setup each and every time, which still somehow makes this five-joke movie primarily a comedy. And that joke? Jimmy falls in the water. Oh…Oh!...Oh my sides! I – no, wait, it’s no funnier here than in those slobs vs. snobs movies, where somehow water-drenching is a fine substitute for a proper comeuppance. And it doesn’t help that I’d written “Jimmy falls in water” in my notes a full two minutes before he finally does fall in – and nothing else happens in between.
But we have some variety in the gag. First, Jimmy falls into the water from a pub. Then he falls in from the fo’c’sle, or whatever. Then from below decks. Then the fo’c’sle again. Then back to the pub. The end.
Back on the mystery side of things, the second de rigueur murder is of George Reeves. Presumably the ghost pirate robot albino mutant lizard alien ninja zombie manages to take him out with Kryptonite – nothing else could do the trick!
And then a pretty lame Chanquest comes and goes, barely worth mentioning, followed by Chan setting a trap to bait the pirate. And that bait – is to just stand there. Charlie Chan, master of elaborate (oft needless) schemes to hoist the killer by his own petard (Charlie Chan’s a master baiter), is now standing around. And it works!, ‘cause it’s Chan! And, yeah yeah, I already revealed this one, it’s Old Man Thomasson.
The motive for murder, by the way, was to find pirate treasure. It also had something to do with marooning, in a roundabout way, because that was so far unticked on the Great Pirate Cliché Checklist. Chan gets the final word, a strange aphorism I like for some reason: “Law will maroon him death cell San Quentin.”
Then Jimmy falls in the water again.
Of course I cannot complain. It’s got pirates, it’s short, and the eerie atmosphere works hard to counteract the lack of plot and the bad jokery. And really, in final assessment, we all know how we feel about “Scooby Doo” episodes. They were never any good in an absolute sense, but they’re enjoyable enough, I guess. This Chan hits that silly “Scooby Doo” sweet spot, making it disposable in a good way. It’s still rather on the lower end of the Charlie Chan spectrum, and within the same semi-Scooby realm, there are far superior horror pastiche Chans to choose from – At the Circus, At the Opera, At the Wax Museum, Treasure Island, Charlie Chan’s Secret. Take your pick, Dead Men Tell is at the bottom of this grog barrel.
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. 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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