Mr Moto Goes to the Movies

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Creative Writing, Inter-ethnic relations, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture

The popularity of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chinese detective creation Charlie Chan triggered a demand for this kind of Asian–American mystery crime fiction, paving the way for a spinoff into a profitable movie series. Biggers’ early death in 1933 after publishing just five Chan books left a void in fiction that other writers were not slow to try to fill. Encouraged by the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, which had serialised the Charlie Chan books, author John P Marquand created his notion of an Asian “detective” hero who triumphs in white society, Mr Moto. Mr Moto is Japanese, quiet, small and seemingly meek of nature, like Charlie Chan he roams the globe solving crimes and exposing murderers. Unlike Chan he uses ju-jitsu as well as brains to overcome and apprehend the bad guys.

Marquand eventually completed six novels centring around the Japanese secret agent/sleuth – Your Turn, Mr. Moto, Thank You, Mr. Moto, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, Mr. Moto is So Sorry, Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (all in the 1930s) and Right You Are, Mr. Moto (1957). 20th Century Fox bought the films rights (as they had with the Charlie Chan novels), and casting Hungarian-American actor Peter Lorre as the Japanese spy Moto🅐, rapidly made eight publicly well-received B-features in two years – Think Fast, Mr. Moto, Thank You, Mr. Moto, Mr. Motor’s Gamble, Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, Mysterious Mr. Moto, Mr. Moto’s Last Warning, Mr. Moto in Danger Island and Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (the series was variously set in Hawaii, Mongolia, Peking, Cambodia/Siam, Egypt, Devil’s Island, Puerto Rico, at sea, San Francisco and other locations in the US).

Your Turn, Mr. Moto: Book and movie The film is only loosely based on the original novel, retaining only some of the key characters like American Tom Nelson and Prince Tung, introduces new characters and makes the quest for the ancient Chinese scrolls a more central element than in the novel where it is subordinated to the question of Japo–Chinese relations🅑.

Apart from some overlap of titles there are big differences between the books and the movies. One of the most conspicuous is Mr Moto’s presence in the stories. In Marquand’s novels, the character of Mr Moto goes missing for large parts of the books (though he’s always actively working towards his objectives “off-stage”)…meanwhile attention switches to the male (American) protagonist who finds himself in trouble of some kind or other🅒. Moto returns to intervene at a crucial moment, the American is saved and finds redemption (which is the key to the plot). In the films by contrast, Mr Moto tends to “fill the screen and animate the whole series”. In the books Moto is “I.A. Moto”, a secret agent working for the imperial Japanese government, but in the films he is presented as “Kentaro Moto” (as his printed business card states), an Interpol agent. Moreover the two mediums craft quite different types of crime stories, the novels were international espionage adventures which Hollywood turned into formulaic detective stories on the screen, [Schneider, Michael A. “Mr. Moto: Improbable International Man of Mystery.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015, pp. 7–16. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43898402. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024].

Marquand’s No Hero (1935)

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Mr Moto’s talents don’t stop at crime solving. He’s also a polymath, polyglot, art connoisseur, a graduate of Stanford University, amateur archaeologist and importer–exporter on the side. In some of these roles he demonstrates his special flair for effecting disguise, a ploy he uses to deflect suspicion from himself, blending in to exotic locales while undertaking dangerous spying assignments [‘Observations on Film Art: Charlie, Meet Kentaro’, Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell; David Bordwell’s website on cinema, 16-Mar-2007, www.davidbordwell.net; “‘Asian Detectives’. An Overview’, Philippa Gates, Crime Culture, www.crimeculture.com].

Mr Moto in clownface (“Mr. Moto’s Last Warning”)

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The Charlie Chan nexus: With two highly bankable screen detectives at its disposal Fox recognised the value of cross-promotion when the opportunity arose. The 1938 Moto movie Mr. Moto’s Gamble was originally meant to be a Warner Oland-starring Charlie Chan feature, however Oland’s ill-health and untimely death squashed those plans. Fox substituted Mr. Moto’s Gamble for the canned Chan movie and the producers kept Oland’s co-star Keye Luke in his No. 1 son role opposition Lorre this time, even allowing Mr Moto to politely inquire with Lee Chan (Luke) as to his honourable father’s health.

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Moto, genial but ruthless: Irrespective of the connexions and references between Charlie Chan and Kentaro Moto, Lorre’s off-centre sense of humour ensures that on screen Moto is “no Chan clone”. Although Moto, like Chan, employs logic and deduction in his policing methods and is quiet, meek exceedingly polite in public dealings (and a milk drinker no less!), he is also very much a man of action, disposing of physical threats to him with his uncompromising ju-jitsu prowess…in the case of the story’s murderer, once revealed, Moto customarily dispenses with the need for trial, having no qualms about liquidating him with 007-like utter ruthlessness, something Chan with his high moral code would never contemplate (Gates).

Moto’s alpha side (“Think Fast, Mr. Moto”)

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Mr Moto‘s personal side is as shadowy as his profession, to the audience it’s a blank slate. He has no family and no love life and his only companion is his cat. The only hint of a possible romance is his liaison with Lela (or Lotus) Liu (Lotus Long) in Think Fast, Mr. Moto and Mysterious Mr. Moto, but she turns out to be an agent like him and their attachment seems to be more a matter of working together to solve the case. Moto is a “lone wolf” when investigating cases, working solo without assistants. Occasionally he does ally with a self-appointed sidekick—usually a naive or gormless American or English idiot—who sometimes inadvertently unearths crucial evidence but as always it’s Mr Moto who unravels the mystery.

”Them Nipponese sure are peculiar birds”: Mr Moto, a Japanese man in 1930s America, is inevitably exposed in the stories to the casual racism of various people he meets, but the prejudice he cops seems more overt than the more subtle racist slurs DI Chan is subjected to. Possibly, this was a reflection of growing pro-Chinese feelings in America then in the wake of unremitting Japanese aggression against China in Manchuria. Moto, unfazed by the jibes, manages to turn the racism back on the perpetrators without their realising it…though he speaks perfectly fluent English he sometimes pretends to indulge their expectations of the stereotypical Asian: “Ah, so!!! Suiting you?”, he mocks in his singsong repartee manner 🅓 (Thompson & Bordwell).

Versatile Mr Moto turns his hand (and voice) to ventriloquism (Mr. Moto’s Last Warning)

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What makes Lorre’s star turn as the mysterious Japanese secret agent so good is that he plays the role absolutely tongue-in-cheek and with considerable charm [‘A Guide to the Mr Moto Films’, Charles P. Mitchell, Classic Images, www.webarchive.org]. Although I wonder if Moto’s ever-smiling, ultra-polite, insufferable smugness with gleaming teeth while correcting lesser mortals as to the error of the misconceptions didn’t start to grate with some movie-watchers after a while?

“Mr Moto…the foxiest detective of them all!!!“

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As the series continued the film storylines and situations predictably became more formulaic. After eight features Peter Lorre called it quits, seeking a release from his Mr Moto contract. The Moto sub-genre was still very popular at the box office but it’s probable that Lorre’s concern was that he was being typecast again as Moto (having previously been stereotyped as a psycho killer), which he felt was limiting his choices of different parts (Gates).

Footnote: Where did Marquand get his inspiration for the character of Mr Moto? Marquand undertook a research tour of the Orient in 1934 to gather material for his Asian detective project. While in Japan he aroused the suspicions of a short, exceedingly polite police detective who started shadowing the American author on his journeys. Eventually the Japanese detective, realising that Marquand was no threat to the country, stopped tailing him. This chance encounter provided Marquand with the spark for the character of Moto.

Pearl Harbour effectively killed off novels for the American market about Japanese spies but Marquand did write a final “Mr Moto” after a lapse of nearly 20 years: a Cold War espionage thriller “Right You Are” with American agents hunting down communist infiltrators in Tokyo 
🅐  leaving the series and Lorre open to retrospective criticism for engaging in “Yellowface”, although Moto hasn’t attracted the ire of modern critics to the same extent as the Charlie Chan series has for the steady stream of white actors who have portrayed the Chinese super-detective up until as recently as 1981 – see previous post ‘Charlie Chan, Murder Mystery-Buster Extraordinaire: A Positive Asian Stereotype or an Oriental “Uncle Tom”?’, (29 October 2024) 
 
🅑 Marquand’s focus in the books is on the clash of cultures, European/American vs Oriental (Japanese/Chinese), to a much greater degree that the films   

🅒 the first book, Your Turn, Mr. Moto, was originally titled No Hero, a reference to another character, not Moto

🅓 Mr. Moto Takes a Chance

Charlie Chan, Murder Mystery-Buster Extraordinaire: A Positive Asian Stereotype or an Oriental “Uncle Tom”?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Inter-ethnic relations, Memorabilia, Popular Culture

One of the favourite characters of the American moviegoing public in the 1930s and 1940s was the affable but inscrutable Chinese detective from Honolulu, Charlie Chan. Some 44 black and white (mostly B) movies were made by Fox Film Corp (20th Century Fox) and later Monogram Pictures spanning the years 1931 and 1949. Budgeted at $200,000 to $250,000 per film Chan pictures regularly returned a million dollars in profit for Fox (‘China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan: 9781350985681, 9781786730640’, (2017), www.dokumen.pub). Bargain-basement Monogram made their Chans for much less than this.

Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935): Warner Oland with a very young Rita Hayworth (billed under her original name, Rita Cansino)

The producers used three non-Chinese actors to fill the eponymous role over the course of the series – a Swede, Warner Oland and two Americans, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters. This recourse to non-Asian white actors presuming to play Asians fuelled vitriolic criticism much later (and rightly so), but back around circa 1940 this was what Hollywood got away with without discernible objection or diminution of the character’s popularity🅐. Before the Fox series started up in 1931 there had been three earlier (1920s) representations of Charlie Chan on screen, two of which were played by Japanese actors.

The House Without a Key ~ the first Charlie Chan novel

It all starts in Honolulu: The life of the literary “Charlie Chan” begins with a midwestern United States writer on holiday in 1920. Earl Derr Biggers, who had already had a measure of success as an author, was relaxing on a beach in Hawaii when he concocted the bare bones of a murder mystery. As for the character of “Chan” himself, Biggers stitched together composite attributes based on what he learned about a brace of real-life Chinese-Hawaiian detectives𖣓. The end-product was Biggers’ novel The House Without a Key, the first Charlie Chan detective fiction, published in 1925. The author explained how he envisaged the character of the brilliant fictional oriental master-sleuth: “I had seen movies depicting and read stories about Chinatown and wicked Chinese villains, and it struck me that a Chinese hero, trustworthy, benevolent, and philosophical, would come nearer to presenting a correct portrayal of the race” (Barbara Gregorich, ‘Earl Derr Biggers’, Harvard Magazine, 03-Jan-2000). Biggers’ intention was an anti-racist creation, an antidote to the villainous yellow peril persona commonly constructed for the screen (as typified by the archetypal Dr Fu Manchu).

Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936): Oland with Boris Karloff

The first four films of the Charlie Chan series including the first in the Fox franchise featuring Warner Oland, Charlie Chan Carries On, are all lost (destroyed in a vault fire), so of the remaining films in the sub-genre, critics generally rate these among the best: Charlie Chan at the Opera, Charlie Chan in London, Charlie Chan at the Circus,Charlie Chan in Shanghai, Charlie Chan at the Olympics, (all Oland); Charlie Chan in Honolulu, Castle in the Desert, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, Dead Men Tell (all Toler). The quality dropped off alarmingly the longer the series went, especially after Monogram, the “Poverty Row” studio, with its low-budget approach and inferior production values, took charge of the films🅑.

Sidney Toler as DI Chan in his trademark cream suit and matching Panama hat

Pseudo-Confucian wisdom: One of the standard tropes of the CC films is Charlie’s habitual indulgence in oriental fortune cookie-style aphorisms, intoned deadpan in his characteristically truncated syntax. Some of the more memorable ones include “Accidents can happen, if planned that way”; “A soft word does not scratch the tongue”; “Caution sometime mother of suspicion”; “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “Mind, like parachute, only function when open”; “Fish in sea like flea on dog – always present, but difficult to catch”; “Grain of sand in eye may hide mountain”; “If you want wild bird to sing, do not put him in cage”; “Innocent act without thinking, guilty always make plans”; “Motive like string, tied in many knots, end may be in sight but hard to unravel”; “Opinion like tea leaf in hot water – both need time for brewing”; “Optimist only see only doughnut, pessimist see hole”; ”Person who ask riddle should know answer”; “Talk cannot cook rice”; “Waiting for tomorrow is waste of today”; “When money talk, few are deaf”; “Bad alibi like dead fish – cannot stand test of time”. Another stock phrase of Chan’s, oft-repeated in every film, is “Contradiction, please!” Followed by observations such as “Case still open like swinging gate”.

Roland Winters, Keye Luke & Victor Sen Yung together in The Feathered Serpent (1948)

Sons No. 1, 2 and 3: The honourable Inspector Chan is a family man with multiple offspring (the Chan clan numbering 14 at the last count!), but it is his three eldest sons, #1, #2 and #3, that mostly get to share the spotlight with their father, and even play a role (sometimes inadvertently) in the solving of the particular case in question, whilst irritating the bejesus out of Chan. In most of the Warner Oland films Charlie is paired with Son #1, Lee Chan (played by Keye Luke). In the Sidney Toler films Chan is joined by Son #2, Jimmy (portrayed by Victor Sen Yung). By Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944) Son #3, Tommy (Benson Fong) is on board, opposite Toler in several of the Chan movies. After the CC baton is passed to Roland Winters in the late Forties, Keye Luke🅒 returns as Son #1 for the last few entries in the sequence. The favourite sons act as foils to Charlie, emphasising the generation gap between themselves and their “Pop” by demonstrating how thoroughly as Chinese-Americans they have assimilated into the dominant white culture (Tino Balio, “Balio on Charlie Chan ‘Grand Design’”, Some critical perspectives on Charlie Chan, (University of Missouri – St Louis) www.umsl.edu). African-American actor Mantan Moreland injected moments of comedy relief (usually working in unison with one of the numbered sons), appearing in 15 of the later mystery whodunnits in the 1940s as Chan’s jittery chauffeur Birmingham Brown.

The Chinese Cat (1944): Charlie Chan team # 2 – Toler, Fong and Moreland together

What made Charlie Chan so popular with Waspish America?🅓 Chan’s portrayal in a positive light (as intended by Biggers) made him something of a novelty for white audiences accustomed to negative depictions of Asians on the screen. Chan was different, it seemed incongruous, here was a rotund, humorous Chinese man who held the senior position of police inspector and the obvious respect of his peers. Endowed with Sherlock Holmes-like acute powers of observation, he solves baffling crimes that no one else can (Elaine Kim ‘Images of Asians in Anglo-American Literature’, Some critical perspectives on Charlie Chan, (University of Missouri – St Louis) www.umsl.edu). Another appealing factor was the movies’ variety of settings…though based in Honolulu, the usual format sees globe-trotting Charlie Chan following the murder trail to a host of exotic international locations—London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Río, Egypt, Shànghâi, Panama, Mexico, Berlin, etc—for a spot of outreach sleuth work. The regular changes of locale/scenery helped to maintain the interest of moviegoers.

Charlie Chan follows the crime trail everywhere, even to the Berlin Olympic Games

Is Chan a transitional figure bridging the divide in cultures?: The Charlie Chan persona has certainly polarised critics in America. Some see the character as having been a positive for changing the perception of Asian and specifically Chinese people. Hitherto American audiences were exposed to the notion of Orientals as “heathen Chinee”, denizens of the squalid opium den or as nondescript types who worked solely in damp, dingy laundries. Det. Inspector Chan is a very different Oriental, his attributes, intelligence, diligence, good humour and loyalty, are qualities much valued in the American cultural ethos. In this context the Chinese-Hawaiian shamus is seen as a good stereotype, countering the bad Oriental stereotype so long ingrained in US cinema. (Sandra Hawley, ‘The Importance of Being Charlie Chan’, www.enotes.com).

Still from Charlie Chan in Paris (1935) (photo: 20th Century Fox/Photofest)

Charlie Chan as “showcase” representative of a “model minority”: Other critics take a more trenchant view of why Americans of the day so readily accepted Charlie Chan. They see Chan as one-dimensional, subservient, kowtowing to white authority, merely a subject for satire. Even when he is demonstrating his superior intellectual powers, meek of demeanour Chan is self-effacing and apologetic (“so sorry to disagree”), he never challenges the power imbalance in the Caucasians’ favour🅔. Culturally assimilated, Chan knows his place in white American society as the “benevolent Other”…always stoical, he cheerfully accepts his assigned status (Shilpa Dave et al, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, and Jeffrey Crean, Fear of Chinese Power: An International History, (both cited in Wikipedia); Kim, ‘Images of Asians’). Some critiques see the Chan character as an emasculated figure, a pernicious racial stereotype blocking the articulation of “more credible, self-determined enunciations of Asian American identity” (‘The Hardboiled and the Haunted: Race, Masculinity and the Asian American Detective’, Calvin McMillin, (2012), www.academia.edu). Philippa Gates sees Chan as “existing in a liminal space between Chinese and American culture symbolized by his home: the mid-Pacific territory of Hawaii” (Philippa Gates, “‘Asian’ Detectives. An Overview”, Crime Culture, www.crimeculture.com).

Sky Dragon (1949): the final film in the Charlie Chan series

Resuscitating “Yellowface“ in a more racial diverse and inclusive era: The Charlie Chan films worked for their time and cultural context. Attempts to revive the Charlie Chan mystique in remakes a generation later with The Return of Charlie Chan (1973), and the lame Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981), still committing the sin of casting Caucasian actors in the title role, misfired badly and were called out for their cultural insensitivity and political incorrectness🅕. The Curse of the Dragon Queen provoked a vociferous backlash from Asian-Americans who labelled Chan “a yellow Uncle Tom” and organised protests against the film, beginning even before it into production (‘Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen’ (1981), AFI Catalog, www.catalog.afi.com).

Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938): Sidney Toler’s debut as the No 1 detective

Sceptical police inspector: Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? Chan: No, conclusions are jumping at me.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Charlie Chan in London)

𖣓 for more on this see ‘Chan and Chang: The Origin and Cultural Vicissitudes of the Most Famous Chinese-American Literary and Screen Detective’, posted July 2020 on this site

🅐 from the Forties right through to the Sixties Hollywood westerns dished up to the public Italians, Hungarians, Russian actors with three-day growths, passing them all off as American “Indians”, anyone it seemed was used other than actual native Americans

🅑 relating to the films in the later phase of Toler and his successor Winter

🅒 the popular Luke scored a solo turn in the Chinese-American detective whodunnit caper in Phantom of Chinatown (1940)

🅓 intriguingly Chan was also very popular in China during the 1930s, even seen as a Chinese hero. Warner Oland was feted like royalty when he visited the country. Homegrown versions of the Charlie Chan movies were made in Shànghâi and Hong Kong

🅔 although as Fletcher Chan notes, Charlie doesn’t always passively accept the doormat position. In The Chinese Parrot, confronted with egregious racism he reacts with discernible anger and displeasure towards the offending white person (Fletcher Chan, ‘Charlie Chan: A Hero of Sorts’, California Literary Review, 26-Mar-2007, www.calitreview.com)

🅕 Hollywood’s casting of a “yellowface” Charlie continued into television, a 1957 series, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, saw fit to feature an American of Irish heritage in the lead role

Chan and Chang: The Origin and Cultural Vicissitudes of the Most Famous Chinese-American Literary and Screen Detective

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Biographical, Cinema, Inter-ethnic relations, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Racial politics

The literary character Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers, is best remembered in numerous cinema representations from the 1930s and 1940s. While the obsequious but sagacious Chinese-American detective became one of the enduringly nostalgic fictional figures of US popular culture, his creator in fact based him on a real life-and-blood Hawaiian-Chinese policeman – Chang Apana (his name is Hawaiianised but he was born “Chang Ah Pang” of Chinese migrant parents).

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⍐ Downtown Honolulu, circa 1935
 (Source: www.reditt.com)

Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the diminutive and slightly-built Chang Apana, a paniola (Hawaiian cowboy) before entering the Honolulu police service, patrolled the dingy and dangerous Chinatown district of Honolulu armed only with a 1.5m-long bullwhip. Chang’s detective escapades were legendary, involving – audacious, single-handed arrests of members of gambling dins, mastery over disguises in working undercover and shrewd and meticulous powers of sleuthing on murder cases (a cornucopia of material for Biggers to drawn on). Biggers’s own account of Charlie Chan’s genesis, is that he happened upon the existence of the “real Charlie Chan” after reading about Chang’s exploits in a Honolulu newspaper one day in the New York Public LibraryA.

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⍐ ‘The House Without a Key’ (1925): the first Charlie Chan novel, although Chan appeared in it only as a minor character

A wellspring of a literary character
The portly Chinese detective with a penchant for “Confucius says”/fortune cookie-style aphorismsB appeared in six crime novels—initially serialised in the influential American magazine Saturday Evening Post—in the 1920s and ‘30’s. Biggers’ premature death in 1933 cut short the Chan literary sequence but not the film adaptations which continued to proliferate with a  series of extremely popular Fox mystery filmsC. Charlie Chan‘s first screen appearances were in obscure silent movies with Japanese and Korean actors playing the leads before Walter Oland, a US actor with Swedish-Russian parents, took over  and played Chan in 16 pictures. Upon Oland’s death American Sidney Toler assumed the mantle for 22 more CC movies,and lastly, Roland Winters, the son of German and Austrian parents, for a further six films.

⍗ ED Biggers

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Life inextricably entwined with art
There were some interesting connexions arising from ED Biggers’ magnum opus…firstly, Chang and Chan’s creator actually met – in 1928. By then, such was the fame of CC, people in Honolulu had started to call the real detective ‘Chan’. The local newspaper recorded their meeting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel as “AUTHOR MEETS ‘LIVE’ CHINESE DETECTIVE”. Three years later there was the even more improbable meeting of Chan and Chang when 20th Century Fox shot The Black Camel on location in Honolulu. The meeting between sleuth Chang and actor Walter Oland and obligatory photo op occurred during filming…Chang was invited to watch the action and ended up coming every day apparently totally engrossed in the unfolding film [‘Chan, the Man’, (Jill Lepore), The New Yorker, 02-Aug-2010, www.newyorker.com].

⍗ Chang and Oland (Chan) meet at Waikiki

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The dragon’s embrace of Chan
Charlie Chan’s international cinematic popularity extended, perhaps surprisingly to observers looking at it with the greater cultural sensitivity of the present time, to the Chinese themselves. Walter Oland, at the height of his CC fame, visited Shanghai in 1936 on a promotional tour – to widespread acclaim. Local Chinese newspapers even presented the event in terms that suggested that Biggers’ literary creation was in fact a real person: “Great Chinese Detective Arrives in Shanghai”D. And of course the Chan movies spawned home-grown imitators within China [‘Charlie Chan in China’, The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History, 08-Jul-2011, [http://web.archive.org]. Chinese-born American academic Yunte Huang’s hunch as to why people in China took so whole-heartedly to the clearly faux-Chinese film character is to do with a tradition you see in Chinese operas of performing “the other”. He explains, there’s an acceptance of this “kind of imitation (be it opera or cinema) as part of the artistic culture of China” [‘Investigating The Real Detective Charlie Chan’, NPR, 07-Sept-2010, www.npr.org].

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(Source: www.movieposters.ha.com)

Charlie Chan, detective at large
As the series progressed and the search for plots to accommodate the oriental ace detective widened, Charlie Chan took on a ”globe-trotting” role à la the “Road to“ series. Hence the public were served up increasingly formulaic offerings in a variety of exotic locales – Charlie Chan in Shanghai, Charlie Chan in Egypt, Charlie Chan in Panama, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Rio, Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, etc, etc.

Backlash against the honourable Mr Chan in an era of PC sensitivity
What passed—unchallenged in a ‘whitebread’ society—for innocuous humour in the 1930s and ‘40’s was viewed very differently in the more pluralistic and multicultural milieu of the 1980s and ‘90s and beyond. Many Asian-Americans looking back have found the Charlie Chan depiction objectionable, a Chinese racial stereotype of subservience and pidgin English, a relic of ‘yellowface’ (a kind of “Yellow Uncle Tom”, much akin to the contemporary view of ‘blackface’ minstrel entertainment in the US) [Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang (2010); Lepore].

⍗ Chan (Sidney Toler) with #1 son and #2 son

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Yunte Huang has sought to redress or balance this jaundiced perception of Charlie Chan, arguing that the fictional Asian-Honolulan super-sleuth is “as American as Jack Kerouac” – “precisely because of (Chan’s) theatrical implausibilities and mixed-up origins”. To Yunte Chan “epitomises (both) the racist heritage and the creative genius of (America’s) culture”, and he notes that while Chan himself is Chinese, “his methods and his milieu are American”, eg, the books and films’ settings are Hawaiian/American mainstream, not set in Chinatown [‘Watching the Detective’, (Pico Iyer), Time, 23-Aug-2010; Yunte].

Assuaging the perception of ‘Orientals’ in America
The dominant literary precedent to Charlie Chan in American (and Western) popular culture of Asians was the figure of Fu Manchu. The creation of English writer Sax Rohrer (Arthur Henry Ward), the Fu Manchu novels (1913-48), exploited the “Yellow Peril” conspiracy image prevalent in the West of an Asian stereotype of evil – Fu was depicted in literature and on-screen as a mad scientist–cum–archvillain hellbent on a mission to rule the world. Yunte points out that Charlie Chan fulfilled a purpose of refuting or challenging the negative Fu Manchu image in the minds of many Americans. In contrast to the iniquitous Fu Manchu wreaking havoc everywhere, Chan is a “man of logic” (as are his fellow detectives extraordinaire Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes), Chan’s personal qualities are that of moral rectitude, observation and logic (Yunte). Biggers himself derided the Fu Manchu portrayal as “sinister and wicked” and “old stuff”, compared to his creation, “an amiable Chinese on the side of the law (which) has never been used (before)” (1931) [‘Creating Charlie Chan’, Popular Culture, 1975].

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Other observers concur that the amiable Chinese detective was a departure from the old, more overtly racist stereotypes in US fiction at the time – supplanting the “heathen Chinee” with a more positive image of a Chinese person [‘The Importance of Being Charlie Chan’, (Sandra M Hawley), in Jonathan Goldstein, Jerry Israel & Hilary Conroy (Eds), America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now, (1991)]. Fletcher Chan notes that the books and movies “were a big factor in softening the attitude of white Americans towards Asians”, Charlie Chan as a sort of “goodwill ambassador” [‘Charlie Chan: A Hero of Sorts’, Fletcher Chan, Californian Literary Review, 26-Mar-2007, www.calitreview.com].

Where the Yellow Peril stereotype of Fu Manchu personifies the evil, scheming and immoral Asian in popular culture, the character of Charlie Chan presents—albeit with the retention of some truly cringeworthy ethnic stereotyping—an equal, at least intellectually, to the whites in the world he traverses [Yunte; ‘Charlie Chan’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
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⍐ Mr Wong: Charlie Chan rip-off with Boris Karloff

Endnote: Hollywood imitators, Moto and Wong
The success of Charlie Chan on the big screen led other filmmakers to try their hand at using European actors to portray Asian-American crime fighters, however these were pale imitations of the original and lacking the Chan series’ success and its longevity. Fox’s “Mr Moto” series had Hungarian-American Peter Lorre as a Japanese secret service agent with a Viennese accent. Monogram Pictures, a low-budget specialist, also tried to emulate the success of Chan with its copy/interpretation of a Chinese-American detective Mr Wong, with British horror specialist Boris Karloff in the title role. The last in the series of Mr Wong flicks, Phantom of Chinatown, was a first…in place of Karloff, Chinese-born Keye Luke (previously Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son”) featured in the role of Wong, avoiding the then standard ‘Yellowface’ casting for Asian-American roles.

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A Biggers’ story of reading about a slick piece of detective work by Sergeant Chang Apana and another Hawaiian-Chinese detective Lee Fook has been extensively investigated by Yunte Huang who could not confirm the said article appearing in the Honolulu media of the day. An alternative explanation is that Biggers discovered the local police celebrity on a holiday he took to Hawaii in 1919 or 1920
B eg., “Tongue often hang man quicker than rope”; “Mind like parachute – only function when open”; “Front seldom tell truth. To know occupants of house, always look in backyard”; “Truth is like football – must receive many kicks before reaching goal”; ad nauseam. This idiom or element of Chan’s persona is known today as a ‘flanderisation’ – where a single (often minor) trait or action of a character is increasingly exaggerated or accentuated until it becomes the character’s defining characteristic [www.allthetropes.fandom.com]
C as well as a regular stream of radio shows, comics and television series
D mind you, contestants on a 1980s US quiz show asked to name some historical or contemporary Chinese persons came up with “Charlie Chan” as their fifth response (‘The Chinese Mirror’)

The Emergence of Modern Mass Culture in the 1920s: (II) ‘Silents’ to ‘Talkies’, a Transition in Lento Time

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Media & Communications, Popular Culture

The 1920s was a decade for innovations in communications, as we saw in the earlier related blog “Modern Mass Culture in the 1920s I” which dealt with public radio, the emergence and popularisation of the medium in the US and world-wide. The 1920s also ushered in another form of mass media which would become the most momentous innovation in communications and public entertainment of the century – ‘talking’ motion pictures.

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For the last 80 years sound has been integral to world cinema, giving the hitherto silent film an added dimension, building depth into the structure of the storyline. As for its filmic predecessor the silent movie, where are we most likely to see it these days?❈ Commercial screenings of silent era films are rare birds indeed … if we seek them out, we might find them if we’re lucky in an old, suburban Art Deco picture theatre, the initiative of a handful of specialised film societies dedicated to preserving the memory of the lost art form. Or we might catch grainy, monotone snatches of an old silent pix as archaic footage on TV docos. When we do manage to view a silent movie we are often struck by how unrealistic, how stylised they appear today, how over-the-top and melodramatic the acting seems. In the decade-and-a-half up to the late 20s the truth however is that silent films and the star actors of the day had an appeal to their doting audiences that was real and totally captivating.

The Jazz Singer

The advent of talking motion pictures did not come about because of a growing dissatisfaction with silent pictures on the part of film-goers. On the contrary patrons of cinemas were completely happy with the ‘product’, the experience, as it was already. Actually, ‘silent’ movies were not really silent, they had accompanying mood or background music provided by an orchestra or a piano to set the tone of particular scenes. As well, title cards (sometimes called “inter-titles”) were interspersed between shots to advance the story, or to clarify what was happening for the audience. Screen-transfixed audiences would engross themselves in the story action, the emphasis on body language and facial expression by actors to convey strong emotion (emoting ‘feelings’) and meaning. Prior to The Jazz Singer (1927), audiences hadn’t wanted to hear actors talk (or at least they hadn’t expressed such a wish)[1].

The coming of sound
Specific technological challenges needed to be overcome to realise the successful application of sound to film. Amplification had been addressed with developments in the phonograph and the viability of radio transmission facilitating public radio. The hub of the problem was synchronising the action, the visual image, with the sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects.

Duelling sound systems
Enter Vitaphone … Vitaphone was an analogue sound-on-disc system developed by Western Electric (a subsidiary of IT & T) in competition with an alternate system devised by RCA/General Electric, which used a sound-on-film method. A number of companies experimented with sound-on-film methods (Fox Movietone, the German company Tri-Ergon, DeForest Phonofilm, RCA Photophone), this ultimately led to the development of a superior and more versatile analogue system to that of the more haphazard dual-processing Vitaphone[2].

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↗ Warner Bros Vitaphone production of ‘Don Juan’

Warner Brothers however were committed to the Vitaphone system and utilised it first on the 1926 film Don Juan which had synchronised music and sound effects, but wasn’t a ‘talkie’ (as it contained no spoken dialogue). The followed year they took it a step further with The Jazz Singer , the first (partly) talking movie, which audiences took an instant liking to, especially the presentation of Al Jonson’s songs¤.

Sound movies in, silent films out: an “overnight sensation” which took several years to happen
The Jazz Singer was a calculated gamble by Warner Bros which was in a financially precarious position at the time, but it turned out to be a ‘game-changer’ for the then minnow studio Warners and for cinema’s future as a whole … its positive reception signalled that audiences wanted sound. But this transformation from one type of feature film to another was no sudden event, the process away from profitable silents was a gradual process. First to emulate Warners was 20th Century Fox with its Movietone system, soon the other major studios followed the trail-blazers into sound. The big Hollywood companies tended to play it both ways at first, none of them stopped making silent films straight away. After all, how profitable talkies would become was still to be seen. In the two years following The Jazz Singer ‘s release, the major companies made a mixture of productions – some all-silent, some all-sound and some part-sound movies[3].

The major film companies’ decision to convert to sound, according to Donald Crafton, had mainly to do with power politics in the industry. Paramount and MGM held an oligarchic hold over the industry in the mid 20s, controlling not only the production of its films but the distribution and exhibition of them as well (vertical integration which was what Warners aspired to as well). Warners’ and Fox’s unilateral venture into the talkies was seen as a threat to the big boys’ hegemony and necessitated the majors’ eventual venture into talkies. The other minor studios including RCA and UA which didn’t immediately opt for sound pictures still survived as silent film-makers[4].

∝∝∝∝∝∝

Endnote: The “Big Five” and the “Little Three”
By the 1930s the Hollywood hierarchy, after a series of expansions, mergers and takeovers, had settled into an (unofficial) two-tier industry power structure:

⁍ The Big Five: MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros, RKO
⁍ The Little Three: Columbia, Universal, UA (United Artists)

∝∝∝∝∝∝

Sound at a price
Various factors acted as a speed bump in the transition to sound movies. There were new financial costs for the industry to take account of. Cinema theatres had to be wired for sound, the cost of which was almost prohibitive – in 1927 only 400 theatres in the US of the multiple thousands were thus connected … by the end of the decade over 40% of the country’s movie theatres had sound systems installed in them[5]. A background factor occurring concurrently with the studios’ efforts to sort out the wrinkles involved in sound pictures was that public radio in the US was still in the process of trying to establish a foothold of its own.

The international language of silent films
The silent cinema had a linguistic universality to it, exporting an American film to a non English-speaking country merely required translating of the credits and title cards. But with sound films this restricted markets for American and English films, and dubbing into the local language was an added expense[6].

↘ Clara Bow

D56FD8BC-4787-49DD-9D25-9661E9399560The ‘sound’ of silent stars
From the perspective of the actors, especially those who had established their niche in the silent era, there were formidable challenges to transitioning to the new, sound medium. Acting in sound movies and the whole dynamic was different, they discovered, sometimes to their cost. Actors now had to memorise their lines beforehand, and on set they had to not stray far from the microphones, basically stand still and recite their lines clearly. The voice became THE issue for many established silent stars … a number of Hollywood actors could not make the transition❉. Some with heavy foreign accents like Emil Jannings, Vilma Banky and Pola Negri had voices that sounded harsh, unmelodious and muffled on-screen. Other top silent stars were similarly hamstrung by their voices – John Gilbert sounded weak and squeaky on screen✾, and Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge had flat Brooklyn accents – which didn’t suit their romantic lead personas[7].

Other silent film heavyweights had an instant aversion to the idea of sound films and avoided them, eg, leading silent actress Mary Pickford simply retired from acting rather than change over to sound; Charlie Chaplin, whose craft relied heavily on mime, never really embraced talkies and proceeded to make films only irregularly into the sound era (his Modern Times in 1936 was a film without spoken dialogue). Myrna Loy, an actress who successfully made the transition to sound, has recollected how much silent movies were loved. Fans felt as though that they possessed an ‘intimacy’ with their favourite Hollywood stars. Like many contemporaries Loy believed that the art of pantomime was perfected in the silent film[8].

The new medium hamstrung by technological limitations
The new sound technology transformed how movies were made, the ambience on the set completely shifted in a manner directors found inhibiting. Directors, accustomed to shouting directions to actors whilst scenes were being filmed, were hushed up by sound technicians who now in effect called the shots, demanding silence on the set so that incidental noises didn’t interfere with the recording of dialogue❦. Not only did directors feel that sound imposed a break on their free rein over the set, but the movie studio heads felt a similar loss of the financial control of their pictures … sound film production required a huge capital outlay of studios which meant that producers and moguls couldn’t keep the same tight budgetary holds on film expenditure as they previously had[9].

Directors weren’t the only movie personnel affected by sound. Projectionists at the back of the theatre had their work doubled, now having also to operate phonographs as well as projectors during screenings … the projectionist needed to be ever alert as the equipment had a tendency to jump around and result in a loss of synchronicity between image and sound. Again technological breakthroughs eventually came to the rescue after a new type of film was invented allowing for the sound to be recorded directly onto the film itself[10].65C75B46-DBA9-447C-9CC4-32FAAA569334

Paramount Studios

The take-up of sound films spelled bad news for a myriad of theatre musicians … the silent era had been a fruitful source of employment for them, but once movie houses had installed sound systems their services were no longer needed. On the other side of the coin, talking pictures required fully fleshed-out screenplays and the coming of sound was a boon for scriptwriters![11]

The early sound equipment was an impediment to the filming of action scenes. To avoid the camera noise being picked up by the sound recorder, the cameraman had to be ‘quarantined’ off in a stationary box to the side. Bereft of the freedom of movement enjoyed in silent movie-making, talkies became just that, static scenes in which characters stood round talking to each other (derisively referred to by some as “tea cup dramas”). The lost spectacle of the silents’ scenes of fast-action adventure caused disquiet among the audiences of early talkies. Within a few years this problem was overcome with the creation of new, quiet cameras[12].

For a section of the viewing audience who had enjoyed silent movies, the coming of sound to the cinemas created a new, consequential problem. Talking films per se excluded movie-goers who were deaf or had hearing issues. Some theatres tried to compensate for this by providing special headphones, but these were not fully effective and were of no help to those people who were completely deaf[13].

In time all of the problems and obstacles that came with the emergence of talkies were more or less ironed out … by 1930 the film-going public had voted resoundingly in favour of sound movies at the box-office – audiences at US picture theatres by 1929 had hit 90 million per week, up from an average of 50 million per week in 1920[14].

PostScript 1: Silent film stars – the ‘superstar’ sui generis thesis
The prestige and kudos of Hollywood movie stars circa 1920 was at an unparalleled high in American society. The personas of silent movie stars often came to take on a “godlike” status. As Jeanine Bassinger describes it, the film star of the early 1920s had a “level of adulation that simply had not existed before movies were invented”[15]. The leading silent stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, Chaplin and Pickford, were uniquely celebrated and adored by the public to a level not achieved by later film stars even in the “Golden Age of Hollywood”. The silent stars of the screen were modern society’s first superstars, they did not have to compete for the public’s affections as the later sound film actors did. They were no pop or rock stars in the 1920s to share the limelight with … similarly, stars of spectator sports in America were very much still a phenomenon in the making[16].

And yes there were celebrities and high achievers in the performing arts prior to the advent of motion pictures – standout performers from theatre, vaudeville, opera and burlesque – but these stars were never remotely on anything like the (global) scale of silent film stars, who engendered mass adulation in their fans felt that they had an intimacy with their favourite screen stars.

Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ (1929): Britain’s 1st talkie

 

PostScript 2: The slow drift toward an international cinema of talkies
This blog has concentrated on the story of the evolution of sound pictures in America – elsewhere things took longer to evolve. Cinemas in Europe were not fully wired for talking pictures till the 1930s, and the USSR and Japan were still making silent films into the mid thirties. Once sound (belatedly) consolidated itself in these overseas film industries, it sparked a surge in the international production of talking pictures in native languages[17].

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❈ in the sound era only a very select few film-makers have maintained fidelity with the spirit of the silent movie, Jacques Tati is one such throwback whose cinema harks back nostalgically to the silent days of Chaplin and Keaton with its reliance on visual gags interspersed with a modicum of incidental and incoherent dialogue
¤ Warner Brothers’ 1927 sound picture triumph has been attributed to a greatly improved quality of sound in the Vitaphone system, (‘Bob Allen asks… Why the Jazz Singer? … and puts forward a personal theory’, www.web.archive.org)
❉ there were of course a number of established silent movie actors who did successfully make the switch to talkies, including Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Laurel and Hardy
✾ in Gilbert’s case new technology did him no favours – his high-pitched voice on film was perhaps made worse by sound adjusters giving his voice too much treble. A suspicion at the time was that the studio deliberately sabotaged the actor because his salary (highest in Hollywood) was costing them too much, (‘Talkie Terror’)
❦ the 1952 film Singing in the Rain accurately captures the shambolic disruption to the profession of film-making brought about by the advent of the talkies … the recent French film The Artist also concerns itself with this subject

[1] E Thompson, ‘A Very Short History of the Transition from Silent to Sound Movies’, (Wonderstruck), (2011), www.wonderstruckthebook.com; ‘Silent Film’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.Wikipedia.org. Two years after the first sound film there was still much negativity about talking pictures, even the premier industry magazine, Variety, opined in 1929 that “movie stars should be screened, not heard”, M Donnelly, ‘The Birth of the “talkies” sounded the death knell for many silent stars’, Daily Telegraph (Syd.), 02-Jul-2016, www.dailytelegraph.com.au
[2] D Hanson, ‘The History of Sound in the Cinema’, (1997), www.cinematechnologymagazine.com
[3] C Gallagher ‘Introduction’ in C Gallagher et al, ‘The Silence After Sound: Hollywood’s Last Silent Movies’, 08-Feb-2009, www.notcoming.com. It became standard practice at this time for production companies to make the same movie in both talking and silent versions
[4] a number of theatres in America did close after the changeover to talkies but Crafton attributes this more to other economic factors, such as increased radio listening and automobile driving, D Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931
[5] ‘The History of Film’ (The 1920s – Part 4) (Tim Dirks), (AMC Filmsite), www.filmsite.org
[6] ibid.
[7] the studios employed diction and voice coaches to aid those contract performers struggling with their voices and elocution, although some contemporaries opined that they could have done more to help the actors adjust, J Doyle, ‘Talkie Terror, 1928-1930’, (The Popular History), 19-Oct-2010, www.pophistorydig.com; Thompson, op.cit.
[8] cited in G Flatley interview, 1977, ibid.
[9] ‘Talkie Terror’, loc.cit.
[10] Thompson, op.cit.
[11] ibid.; ‘The Advent of Sound: 1927-1930’, www.cinecollage.net
[12] Thompson, ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] ‘The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture’, (Digital History), www.digitalhistory.uh.edu
[15] Excerpt from ‘Silent Stars’ (by J Basinger), New York Times (1999), www.nytimes.com
[16] although the 1920s did witness the beginnings of newspaper-‘created’ sports stars, eg, Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, ‘Digital History’, loc.cit.
[17] ‘The Advent of Sound: 1927-1930’, loc.cit.