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Charlie Chan's Secret
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by 20th Century Fox
Sales Rank: 14117
Price: $19.98
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Charlie Chan's Secret opens with Charlie (played by the original Chan, Warner Oland) aboard a diving vessel checking the ocean bottom for unrecovered bodies. They find two corpses, but neither is the missing heir, Alan Colby. But a passenger is still missing. Among the effects of Colby, Charlie finds that two murder attempts have preceded the sinking. <br /> <br />Charlie takes the clipper plane from Honolulu to San Francisco to report on his findings to Mrs. Lowell, his client. Meanwhile Colby shows up at the Colby mansion in San Francisco where he's attracted by a grandfather clock whose time is off. <br /> <br />Mrs. Lowell invites Charlie to attend a séance that night to try to get information about Colby. Those at the séance get more than they bargained for. <br /> <br />Everyone involved has some reason to have it in for Colby, and Charlie finds that protecting life is one of his big challenges. <br /> <br />Unlike many other stories in the series, this one has none of his children in the story for comic effect . . . nor any African-American comics for the same purpose. The humor instead is drawn from a cowardly butler who is intended to be vaguely British. I thought this was a big improvement over the more negative stereotypes played on for humor in the other movies. <br /> <br />The main character in this story is the mansion which houses secret passages, panels, and lots of trickery that Charlie must penetrate. There's a strong sense of its gloomy, dangerous presence that gives the movie lots of emotional depth. <br /> <br />At 73 minutes, the film moves right along and you'll find yourself having to pay close attention to the plot-packed details which involve some of the more inventive scientific curve balls of any of the Chan movies. <br />
Viewer Reviews
1936's "Charlie Chan's Secret" is another better-than-average episode for the Honolulu Police Detective, here played by Warner Oland. This episode concerns a long missing heir, a house seemingly haunted by ghosts, and a mysterious murder.
The movie opens at sea, as divers in deep sea diving helmets search the wreckage of the S.S. Nestor for the body of one Alan Colby. Colby, the heir to a substantial fortune, has been missing for seven years before recently recontacting his family. When his ship goes down off Hawaii, Charlie Chan is asked to verify his death. Chan finds evidence that Colby was onboard and feared for his life, but not Colby himself.
Chan travels to San Francisco aboard the "new" Pan Am clipper aircraft (one for history buffs) to update Colby's mother, Mrs. Henrietta Lowell, only to find that Colby has preceeded him. Colby's corpse comes to light during a seance run for his mother in a suitably creepy old cottage. Charlie has a houseful of suspects, as the Lowell family, the family lawyer, and the seance expert all stood to lose money if Alan Colby had reclaimed his patrimony. Charlie will have to dodge more than one assassination attempt to uncover the real killer in this atmospheric thriller. None of the Chan sons figure in this episode; comic relief is provided by Herbert Mundin as a very nervous and bumbling English butler.
"Charlie Chan's Secret" is very highly recommended to fans of the Charlie Chan series of movies as an entertaining and suspenseful entry.
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