Customer Reviews

Charlie Chan At The Race Track

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Charlie Chan at the Racetrack is one of the most exciting in this great series based on Earl Derr Biggers' Honolulu based sleuth. Warner Oland seemed to enjoy the lightning pace set by director H. Bruce Humberstone in this entry, as he and Keye Luke are obviously having a good time. Charlie actually slugs a guy in this one, vowing to apologise after same awakes from sleep! And Lee sets off a truck filled with fireworks while Charlie rectifies a wrong.

Charlie is revealing how to read blood spatter to other members of law enforcement when son Lee (Keye Luke) bursts in with a hot tip regarding a horse running in The Melbourne Cup in Australia. Even Charlie places a bet because he knows the owner. A jockey paid to throw the race lightens Lee's pockets, however, and soon leads to murder. Charlie hops onboard a Matson oceanliner and heads for the next race with a ship full of suspects and Lee, who has finagled a job onboard. Moving at a nice clip, a lot happens on the way to Santa Juanita, and even more once they arrive.

Charlie takes one in the leg onboard, and has Lee thrown in the brig to protect his foolish son! Keye Luke has a lot to do in this one, however, and the screenplay by Robert Ellis, Helen Logan, and Edward T. Lowe keeps us guessing till the end. Switched horses, a monkey, and a stylish 1930's look fashion this entry into a real winner. A nice little romance between Alice (Helen Wood) and Bruce (Thomas Beck) augment a tight and fast moving Charlie Chan fun for classic movie fans. Also available as part of a boxed set, Chan fans will be delighted watching this one.

This 1936 black and white film stars Warner Oland, a non-Oriental, as Charlie Chan. A friend of Chan asks him to investigate a gambling ring that is fixing races by using quite a few devious means. The friend is then murdered. Chan decides to take the case and discover the gambling ring and the murderer. Chan discovers what the gamblers do to win. At one point he is kidnapped. Humor is added to the film by the stereotype antics of a black man who is unable to speak correctly and who is afraid of everything, a small monkey, and Chan's number one son who fumbles frequently as he tries to help his "pop." He also disguises himself as a stereotype Chinese man who speaks poor English.

The film includes quite a few Can-ian witty epigrams, such as: Train of thought so broken, need wrecking crew to fix. Suspicion is often father of truth. Easy to criticize, more difficult to be correct. All forgotten like last year's bird nest. Hasty conclusion like toy balloon, easy to blow up and easy to pop. Man who plays with dynamite sometime fly with angels. Man with gun like lightning, never strike twice in same place. Baseless talk like boat without oar, gets no place. Good wife best household furniture.

I always enjoy the byplay between Charlie Chan and his kids. Warner Oland was more loving to them in the early Chans while Sidney Toler was more insulting (but not in a mean-spirited way.)

In this episode, Oland lets Keye Luke get very involved in the case and Luke provides a number of laughs along the way.

This was an interesting script and had a decent number of action scenes along with it during the 70 minutes. There are some inventive twists to the story, regarding the crooks, too.

This is another Charlie Chan winner, and I am pleased to see is finally out on DVD. It's part of the Charlie Chan Collection Volume 2 set.

Most of the Charlie Chan films are notable for the dignity and respect that are shown to the Chinese-American ancestry of Charlie Chan. Only the missing articles in front of nouns, missing verbs, and tense slips mark the fictional Charlie as someone who isn't a native speaker of English. The accent is itself is not noticeably Chinese. Although Warner Oland was not of Chinese ancestry, his appearance is sufficiently oriental not to seem like "black face" makeup.

Those circumstances change, however, for the worse in Charlie Chan at the Race Track. Charlie doesn't change, but his son Lee (played by Keye Luke, who is a Chinese-American in reality) plays negative stereotype "just off the boat" roles (including Pidgin English) in undercover assignments for Charlie in this film. The story didn't need him to do this, so I felt it was gratuitous stereotyping.

That perception is reinforced by one of the most servile, cringing African-American stereotype Stepin-Fetchit roles I've ever seen by John H. Allen playing "Streamline" Jones. I felt disgusted to see this exploitation of an actor into reinforcing racial prejudices about laziness, drinking too much, and being a coward.

The story itself isn't much. A great race horse, Avalanche, has been born, bred, and trained in Australia. An American buys Avalanche to bring him to the U.S. to race at Santa Juanita (think Santa Anita). An international gang of crooked gamblers is involved in sabotaging Avalanche so that they can collect on long shots.

Aboard a ship going to Honolulu, the horse's trainer is killed and mysterious notes float around making threats. It's obvious that Avalanche is switched with another horse, and Charlie sets out to reverse the switch while staying out of the gang's deadly clutches.

If you pay attention to the clues, you won't have any trouble identifying the murderer. The rest is mostly Keystone Kops imitations involving Lee Chan.

As usual, the best parts of the movie come in Charlie's aphorisms: "Record indicate most murder result from violence, and murder without bloodstain like Amos without Andy -- most unusual." That little gem leads into a lesson in how to interpret blood stains which turns out to be relevant to solving this mystery.

Unless you feel compelled to watch all the old Charlie Chan movies featuring Warner Oland, you can skip this one.