Warner Oland — The Screen Chinaman Changes (1938)
The Achievement of Charlie Chan.
by Richard Carr
When Pearl White died last month the newspaper placards read "Pearl White Dead". But when, a few days later, Warner Oland died, the newspapers announced "Charlie Chan Dead". That is a very great difference indeed, if you think about it. Even Paul Muni wouldn't get a placard like that — it wouldn't be "Scarface Dead" or "Hi Nellie Dead", it would just be "Paul Muni Dead". Nor when Henry Irving died did the newspapers report "Mathias Dead" or "Hamlet Dead", at least I've never heard of such a thing.
Pearl White remained Pearl White, not Elaine, for example, of The Exploits of Elaine. She was the central figure in a series of exciting happenings, and the excitement was sufficiently great and sustained to over shadow the beautiful heroine that was Pearl White. To most of us nowadays her name conjures up the great, exciting, formative days of movies; thrills, escapes, chase, capture — the eternal, unchanging ingredients of all popular fiction and movies. Warner Oland appeared in some of the Pearl White serials, but nobody remembers him. In fact, few people care about Warner Oland, but a lot care about Charlie Chan.
Charlie Chan we all got to know very well. We knew him, we knew his wife and we knew his family. His wife hovered in the background of the films, quiet and uninterfering, with none of your Myrna Loy chatter to take the detective, and our minds, off the case. Charlie Chan had hordes of children — I never got to counting them, largely because their existence was never allowed to take attention from the film-story or impede its development — and his eldest son, an American Chinee, educated, formal, dignified, occasion ally helped his father in a case. We got to like and wait for the Oriental wisecracks of the sleuth, which we fancied were the fathom less, inscrutable wisdom of the East, condensed for film purposes.
Charlie Chan inspired confidence. When he took a case and refused to believe that the police had arrested the right person, we knew that the suspected man or woman was innocent and that the real culprit would be brought to book. He always had a trick up his sleeve, and went one better than the crooks. When we saw Charlie Chan drop to the floor, shot or stabbed, our anxiety was only momentary: we knew he was fooling them again, playing dead or it was not Charlie at all but a specially made dummy. By such means the crooks would be put off the guard and Chan would soon be catching them out.
If this sounds like laughing at Charlie Chan it isn't meant to. Many screen actors achieve stardom and gain a huge fan following. Few inspire the affection and worship that was given to Charlie Chan, with so few assets to work with. He wasn't handsome, nor an athlete. He did no jaw-socking, no acrobatics: a fat Chinaman is not the boy's idea of a hero by a long shot. Yet he was adored by millions of American and British boys, and had a large adult following too, among those whose hearts are always young and who, for all the sophistication and smart alecing of the last few years, like their films to end right.
Fiction has always had its detectives who have secured a reading public running into millions. They have never made good on the screen. Sherlock Holmes has made fitful screen appearances but failed to create a demand for more. Sexton Blake, whose following must be greater and more long-lived than anybody since Robin Hood, also does poorly in pictures. Even the modern, city-slicker, Perry Mason, who was given a long screen run, established nothing in the way of a regular public. Try to think of any screen detective who has equalled the public of these fiction-heroes — and the answer is that none have — except Charlie Chan.
What a metamorphosis was this! Metamor phosis is the word; change or transformation fail to convey the colossal thing that happened when Charlie Chan climbed out of a 'B' picture into world fame. Charlie Chan — for the benefit of those film society members who never go to the movies — was a Chinaman. A Chinaman could not be a hero, especially to the young. In popular fiction and in the great screen tradition of silent days it was axiomatic that the worst thing you could run up against in this world was a Chinaman. Certain races were long ago marked out by the English as fighting in the wrong way and on the wrong side. Mexicans — though their closeness to the cowboy gave them a chance which they presently took and made good were not to be trusted; a Red Indian would scalp your poor old crippled grandmother without batting an eye; a Frenchman was either screwy or after your wife and daughter; Italians were the same, though they also went in for rape and were masters at back-stabbing.
But worse than all these, worse even than meeting a cross-eyed man under a ladder, was a Chinaman, who was suave, treacherous, remorseless, kindless, handy with knife and wood-chopper. Chinamen were so bad that they were definitely unpopular, never getting anything like the tolerance and popularity of the gangster gunman. The Chinaman was without any human feelings whatever and he had a build up to death that was not only a defiance of all the canons of international law and outside the pale; it was beyond the reaches of the imagination of any human being, except script writers who, perhaps, don't come in that category.
Chinamen were popular with script writers: of that I am certain. The slow lingering death, with suitable music and settings, meted out to heroes by the heathen Chinee had great filmic advantages. If the gangster gave it to the hero in the back or in the belly the most the script writer could do was fix it so that he was only wounded and came round in hospital with his best girl — with whom he quarrelled throughout the film — sitting mon eyed on the bed. But the Chinese method gave time for the hero to undo the knots, or bluff and stall, or for a nick-of-time rescue. In fact it was a poor way of killing an enemy for in all my twenty years of screen going I never remember any of the fiendish deaths prepared for screen heroes coming off.
Yet all this has gone, from the screen at least, and gone with a completeness that calls for explanation. It is said that the Hays office was responsible: it wanted to placate foreign audiences who, unreasonably I think, resented being shown all the time as stools, crooks and heels. But I don't believe that the Hays office could have done it without ruining the film industry. No censors could. It was Charlie Chan who did it so far as the Chinese were concerned. He made the Chinaman public hero number one. He did more than that. He gave us the first screen detective with the following and popularity of the heroes of fiction, and he gave us a screen characterisation that inspired affection. And that is something.
The strength of his achievement was shown when Charlie Chan gave place to Fu Manchu or some such devilish Chinee. Warner Oland made fitful returns to the kind of parts he played in the Pearl White days. But they created no demand for more. No one believed in that kind of Chinaman any more. The silky voice, full of menace, the slant eyes, the pad-pad of the slippers-how could all this be true when we'd seen Charlie Chan?
And I wouldn't mind betting that Charlie is in heaven right now clearing up all the unsolved crimes of history. And a lot of guys who got past Peter at the gate by not telling all, are now busy slugging, poisoning, doping Charlie's mint-julep, and sending him warning notes to lay off, whereas they might just as well start packing their things and move down to the other place right away.
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Collection: World Film News Magazine, 1938
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