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In a medium founded on action, Charlie Chan remains one of the few heroic figures in American film
to function proudly as an intellectual. Chan's adventures in ratiocination were first recounted by Earl Derr Biggers in a
series of six successful novels and eventually in 47 films made from 1926 to 1949 (as well as in a few parodies and semi-parodies
that came after). This courtly detective — an employee of the Honolulu Police Department on seemingly permanent
leave — stands as one of the best-loved characters in American movies, a tribute above all to the warmth and gentle
humor that the Swedish-born actor Warner Oland brought to the role during his 1931-to-1938 tenure as Chan. (Sidney Toler,
who stepped into the role after Mr. Oland's early death, continued very much in the Oland tradition.) Twentieth Century Fox Home Video has released four of the first Oland films on DVD in the first volume
of what you hope will be a complete set of that studio's Chan films. (After World War II, the franchise moved with much-reduced
budgets to the poverty-row studio Monogram; six of those films were released by MGM last year.) The decision represents a
reversal for Fox, which had once removed the films from Fox Movie Channel, apparently embarrassed by the European Oland's
"yellowface" portrayal of an Asian character. Are the Chan films racist? Not, I think, by the standards of their time. Mr. Biggers is said to have
created Chan (based on a real detective, Chang Apana, who worked for the Honolulu police) to counter the negative images of
Asians being fueled by the Hearst papers' "yellow peril" campaigns and embodied most repellently by Sax Rohmer's sadistic
"Oriental" villain, Dr. Fu Manchu. Mr. Oland, a popular heavy of the silent era who played practically every ethnicity available
(including, on occasion, a Swede), was the screen's first Fu Manchu, in the 1929 "Mysterious Doctor Fu Manchu" and three subsequent
films for Paramount. Recruited by Fox in 1931 for In addition to "Paris" (long believed lost) and "London," the Fox box contains The films have been restored from their once-familiar television syndication versions, and sound and
picture quality is excellent, given the rarity and fragility of the original materials. The box set lists for $59.98; none
of the films have been rated by the M.P.A.A. |
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