by Huang, Yunte
In the beginning, the producers had found it useful to give Oland a drink so that he would slur his dialogue, but now they recognized that his drinking problem had worsened, to the point that it hampered the production of the film. He would often disappear for days, only to be found somewhere in a useless alcoholic stupor. When he did show up, he would forget his lines or doze off. In the shooting of one scene in Race Track, Oland was supposed to play Chan watching a horse race, but he kept nodding off. Director H. Bruce Humberstone had to place a few extras around Oland to bolster him up. “I know you can’t see anything,” he told Oland. “But just turn your head with the sound.”2
A nurse was even assigned to Oland to make sure he did not drink, but he managed to sneak booze into his lunch boxes or secrete it in a closet. Keye Luke, who played Charlie Chan’s Number One son in the films, recalled the lunches he used to have with “Pop” at the production studio, where the latter would take out two thermos bottles. “For Number One son,” Oland would say, “good split pea soup.” Then, “looking over his shoulder to see if the coast was clear, he poured out a martini from the second thermos. ‘For honorable father, tiger tea.’”3
The situation deteriorated so markedly that Oland’s marriage collapsed in mid-1937, and he suffered a nervous breakdown, worsening his alcoholism. At the studio, he would repeatedly blow his lines and complain that the set was too drafty. The production team tried to change the number of the stage, but it did not fool Oland. At night, like a down-and-out character in a Pat Hobby story, he would wander off aimlessly into the streets and even forget who he was. On January 17, 1938, during the production of Charlie Chan at the Ringside, Oland walked off the set and simply disappeared. When he was found again, he made national headlines with a compromising photograph showing him sitting on the running board of his limousine and throwing away his shoes. Twentieth Century-Fox put Oland on suspension and threatened to sue him for the cost of the film, which had to be abandoned. After a month of hospitalization, he recovered slightly and appeared well enough for Darryl F. Zanuck, the president of the company, to sign a deal with him for three new Chan pictures at $30,000 apiece for the 1938–39 season. But Zanuck felt that Oland first needed a break, and that an ocean voyage might do him some good before resuming work. Therefore, in the spring of 1938, Oland sailed for Europe—more than anything to repair his nerves. Before departure, Oland told Keye Luke, “Honorable father have appointment to see blossoming trees in Florence,” yet he was in fact bound for his native Sweden, which he had left as a boy of thirteen.4
While traveling in Europe during that politically toxic summer of 1938, Oland sent a postcard on July 10 to a friend in California. “Still climbing upwards. Two more days and I shall be home,” he wrote. By “home” he meant his birthplace, a small Swedish village near the Gulf of Bothnia. No sooner had Oland arrived than he fell ill with bronchial pneumonia. On August 6, reposing in his mother’s old bed, Warner Oland passed away, giving the lie to a Confucian aphorism that Oland had quoted in Charlie Chan in Egypt, “From life to death is reach of man.” He was only fifty-seven years old.
In the obituary the next day, the New York Times paid homage to Oland’s major achievement of impersonating a Chinese. Noting the crucial shift in Oland’s career from evil Oriental characters to the honorable Detective Chan, the paper stated, “To a growing number of enthusiasts, he became closely identified with Earl Derr Biggers’s philosophical super-sleuth. The hisses and grimaces of his long-nailed villainy were swiftly forgotten as Chan’s traditional ‘So sor-ry’ and related politenesses, through Oland’s reformed lips, became now box-office magic.”5 Other newspapers and journals, including the Los Angeles Times, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and Variety, also carried the news of Oland’s death.
At the Fox studio, preproduction of Charlie Chan in Honolulu had already started. The director, Sol Wurtzel, had cabled Oland to return at once. When word of his death reached Hollywood, Wurtzel called a halt for the day. But Oland’s death, in the words of film historian Jon Tuska, “did not kill Charlie Chan.”6 The Chan series had become a huge moneymaker during the bleakest Depression years. With Oland, the studio had been making an average of three Chan films a year. Each was shot in four weeks, with an extra week for reshoots; it took only three month from the commencement of shooting to the release of the film. At a cost of about $250,000, each Chan number could gross more than $1 million in profit.7 Charlie Chan, therefore, had no choice but to continue.
The company soon auditioned thirty-four actors, including J. Edward Bromberg and Noah Beery, Sr. On October 18, 1938, Fox announced its final choice of Sidney Toler, a Missouri native, as the new Chan. By this time, Toler had been knocking around Hollywood for about two decades, cameoing in movies that featured such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and Clark Gable. Difficult as it was to replace Warner Oland, Toler brought updated interpretations of the Chan character in a world that soon would be thrown into the cauldron of war. Whereas Oland’s Chan was polite and soft-spoken, Toler’s character, in Ken Hanke’s words, was “less humble” and “more irascible,” carrying more acidity on the tip of his tongue.8 Toler’s makeup was also more pronounced, with his eyes pulled back to an exaggerated degree. To further improve the characterization, the producers resorted to the same trick they had used on Oland: letting Toler take a few “stiff belts” before the shooting so as to induce the friendly grin and slow his speech. It was as if dipsomania had become a prerequisite for playing Charlie Chan. As one of the crew members later recalled, “All those Chans were drunk while making those pictures. You’d have to be drunk just to talk that pidgin English.”9 It is worth noting, in all fairness, that the portrayers of Hawaii’s most celebrated detective were hardly the only actors encouraged or even induced to use alcohol or drugs; the amphetamine-ridden, sedative-popping culture of Hollywood in this era caused the breakdown and emotional collapse of dozens of pressured and overworked stars—most notably, perhaps, Judy Garland.
Between 1938 and 1942, Toler made eleven Chan films, until the outbreak of war and a new set of federal regulations prompted Twentieth Century-Fox to discontinue the series. The Chan films owed a large percentage of their profits to the worldwide market, and the wars in Europe and Asia had truncated the foreign revenue. In addition, the federal government had filed an antitrust suit against film-producing companies that also owned theater chains. As a result, all the major companies, including Twentieth Century-Fox, began to cut back on their “B” movies, emphasizing instead their “A” products.10
When Toler heard the news of the series’ cancellation, he immediately negotiated with Eleanor Biggers Cole, now remarried, and secured the rights to the character.11 After looking for financial backers for more than a year, Toler resumed the series in May 1943 with Monogram Pictures, at the time still a low-budget studio.
One new addition to Monogram’s Chan series was Mantan Moreland, who played Charlie’s round-faced, wide-eyed, and superstitious chauffeur, Birmingham Brown. Along with Willie Best and Louis Armstrong, Moreland was widely regarded in black film history as one of “Stepin’s Step-Chillun”—black actors who came of age in the wake of Stepin Fetchit’s spectacular, though short-lived, career in Hollywood. With the diminution of the overseas market for Charlie Chan, Moreland’s entrance, according to Ken Hanke, was Monogram’s insurance policy, because “giving the talented black comic a major role in the films meant that they, like earlier Monogram horror films such as King of the Zombies, could be assured of a major release in Harlem and other primarily black areas on their strength as Mantan Moreland pictures.” As Hanke further comments, “It was a shrewd move. With one swipe Monogram could garner both the Charlie Chan and the black audience.”12 Harking back to Fetchit’s Snowshoes, Moreland’s guest appearance with Chan also foreshadowed the future Hollywood practice of casting two racial-minority characters head-to-head, as we’ve seen more recently with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour series. The double dosage of ethnic humor
does, it would seem, kill two birds with one stone.
In some of the weaker Chan films, Moreland’s cherubic Birmingham character, who is constantly “terr’fied of de ghosts,” certainly brought some much-needed comic relief to the movies and the audience. In The Scarlet Clue, for instance, an otherwise-mediocre entry among the Chan films, the audience was treated to a hilarious nightclub routine performed flawlessly by Moreland and his offscreen partner, Ben Carter. Known as the “infinite conversation,” the routine involved Moreland and Carter carrying on “an entire dialogue without ever finishing a sentence.”13
After eleven new Chan films at Monogram, Sidney Toler died of cancer in February 1947. Even then, the Charlie Chan character persisted. He soon found another incarnation in Roland Winters, a professional actor who also moonlighted as a radio sports announcer. Born Roland Winternitz in Boston on November 22, 1904, Winters worked on a cargo ship when he was a teenager and later joined theater groups in his hometown. After a couple of bit parts in silent films, in 1931 he got a job announcing Braves and Red Sox baseball games on radio station WNAC, and he continued to work at the station until he was chosen as the new Charlie Chan.14 Altogether, Winters would make six Chan numbers, beginning with The Chinese Ring in 1947 and ending with The Sky Dragon in 1949. Although his characterization, as Hanke points out, was closest to Biggers’s original (he spoke some of Biggers’s brightest original aphorisms from the novels), Winters was the least successful yellowfacer when compared with Oland and Toler. For one thing, his tall nose simply could not be made to look Chinese, and, at the age of forty-four, he also looked too young to resemble a seasoned Chinese sage.15 Perhaps he was not enticed to take a nip of brandy while on the set, but for whatever reason, his Chan characterization was far less memorable.
While Mantan Moreland’s comic antics continued to provide life support for the series, one unexpected bonus was the return of Keye Luke as Lee Chan, Charlie’s Number One son. Like the fictional Charlie Chan, Keye Luke was born in Canton, China, in 1904 and had come to America when he was four months old. After growing up in Seattle and studying architecture at the University of Washington, he began his career painting murals at the shrine of Hollywood’s Orientalism—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Before becoming Warner Oland’s Number One sidekick in 1935, Luke had played a few supporting roles in films, including Greta Garbo’s The Painted Veil (1934). The collaboration between Oland and Luke was one of the most successful on-screen relationships in the Chan series. In their interaction one can feel a genuine affection and love, as we might expect between a father and a son. Lee’s signature “Gee, Pop!” would become an heirloom handed down to his sibling after Luke dropped out of the series upon Oland’s death in 1938. Luke also participated in the making of Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto’s Gamble, which salvaged material from the unfinished Charlie Chan at the Ringside. Luke’s resurrection in the last two Chan films, The Feathered Serpent and The Sky Dragon, though failing to breathe new life into a doomed series, at least gave it a nice closure. In the ensuing decades, Luke would make a name for himself as a Chinese actor both on-screen and off. He would play blind Master Po in David Carradine’s Kung Fu, and he supplied the voice of Charlie Chan in the Hanna-Barbera animation series The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan much later in the 1970s. Significantly, it was Keye Luke who would become the most vocal defender of Charlie Chan against his detractors: “There are a lot of things about the Chan character that these people don’t understand,” he once said in an interview. “They think it demeans the race…. Demeans! My God! You’ve got a Chinese hero!”16
The Charlie Chan series, which had had a strong run for two decades beginning in the late 1920s, finally concluded with the release of The Sky Dragon in May 1949. By this time, the chubby, wisecracking Chinese detective had already become a ubiquitous icon in American culture. The character had spawned radio dramas, comic strips, children’s books, and even board games. As early as December 1932, the NBC Blue Network had premiered a Friday-night radio drama starring Walter Connolly as Charlie Chan, while Earl Biggers that same year had received offers from at least three radio networks for dramatization rights. The NBC series lasted only six months, but it was revived by the Mutual Network in October 1937 and by ABC in 1944. The last was a radio program called The Adventures of Charlie Chan, starring Ed Begley (who would later win the Academy Award for his supporting role in the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth) as Chan and Leon Janney as Number One son.17 Walter Benjamin once said, “The radio listener welcomes the human voice into his house like a visitor.” In the acoustic milieu of the pre-television age, the Chinaman’s singsong voice would frequent American households like a charming visitor from an exotic, faraway land.
Chan’s presence was hardly prescribed by only film and radio. From October 1938 to May 1942, the Charlie Chan comic strip, drawn by noted artist Alfred Andriola, appeared in Sunday newspapers across the nation. At the same time, publishers such as Whitman in Racine, Wisconsin, brought out comic books featuring the friendly detective. With their garish covers and fast-paced adventures, these books catered to curious children as well as adult aficionados. According to the noted mystery authority Otto Penzler, these tiny, fat, hardbound volumes, known as Big Little Books, “sometimes featured small drawings in the upper corners of the right-hand pages which could be flipped rapidly with the thumb to provide the illusion of figures moving a bit at a time, motion-picture-like.”18 To complete the picture, a board game called The Great Charlie Chan Detective Mystery Game (a forerunner to Milton Bradley’s Clue) and a Charlie Chan Card Game were produced in 1937 and 1939, respectively.
This merchandise and paraphernalia extended Chan’s life and influence beyond the novels and films, perpetuating his presence in the American imagination. Two decades after his debut as a minor character in 1925, Charlie Chan had become the nation’s most recognizable Chinese folk hero. His career, however, was far from over. In the postwar years, Chan continued to enjoy some popularity, but, as we will see, his reputation would take strange turns, giving credence to a time-honored Chanism, “Wheel of fate has many spokes.”
28
The Fu Manchurian Candidate
WARNER OLAND IN THE MYSTERIOUS DR. FU-MANCHU, 1929 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)
I can see that Chinese cat standing there smiling like Fu Manchu.
—Ben Marco, in the film The Manchurian Candidate, 1962
AS THE CHARLIE Chan finale, The Sky Dragon, toured theaters across the United States in the summer of 1949, Americans, already apprehensive about the mounting dangers of the cold war, were mourning the loss of China. After a four-year civil war, Mao Zedong’s Red Army had soundly defeated the Nationalists, whom the United States had vigorously supported. On October 1, 1949, when Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it seemed as if the whole continent of Asia had just been swallowed up by a Red Sea. Within a year, the Korean War broke out, pitting the United States against the Communists from the North. At the same time, and as the 1950s progressed, millions of baby boomers, growing up in a decade of affluence and suburban sprawl, became familiar with a quaint Chinaman spouting aphorisms on the screen. Even though the Charlie Chan film series had concluded its production, Fox and major networks kept the reruns on TV and at movie theaters.
It was during this period that Charlie Chan’s influence reached deeply into the American cultural psyche. His legacy as the first lovable Chinaman would also take an unexpected turn. Especially in the heyday of the cold war, his image became strangely and unfortunately intertwined with the fate of his evil twin, Dr. Fu Manchu. In the hard-boiled world of film noir, dubious characters with singsong Chinese names loomed ominously in the eerie background. China or Chinatown came to symbolize a villainous underworld, one that was synonymous with all that was rotten in midcentury urban America, the opposite of clean, white suburbia.
In this mix of symbols, Charlie Chan no longer simply represented the good cop in a whodunit mystery. The dark and evil atmosphe
re that the Charlie Chan movies invariably evoke—the mean alleys of Chinatown, foggy docks where fishy characters hover, slimy streets of Shanghai where criminals look like deadly cobras—all these exotic and often ersatz-Oriental milieus seemed to have stained the archetypal Chinaman, Charlie Chan. “The field,” as Marshall McLuhan might put it, “has become the figure.” Chan’s stereotypical Chinese inscrutability had unwittingly made him what I would label a “Fu Manchurian Candidate.”
I deliberately pun on The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 film directed by John Frankenheimer, because it aptly captures the kind of Red-scare paranoia and xenophobia prevalent in the postwar period. Such sentiments, fanned by cold-war propaganda and McCarthyism, indeed tarnished the image of Charlie Chan and made him guilty by association. In some quarters of American culture today, “Charlie Chan” and “Fu Manchu” remain interchangeable epithets for the Chinaman, just as the Charlie Chan mustache and the Fu Manchu goatee are often as inseparable as peas and carrots—or, if you prefer, as ping and pong.
The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, was a film adaptation of Richard Condon’s eponymous 1959 best-seller. The movie reached cult status after Sinatra took it out of circulation in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. Its plot involves Raymond Shaw, a decorated Korean War hero, who is brainwashed by Chinese Communists in Manchuria. During a combat mission, Shaw’s platoon is ambushed and captured by the Red Army. Under the direction of evil doctor/spymaster Yen Lo, a Chinese psychiatric team brainwashes the POWs into believing that Shaw has saved their lives. Returning to the United States, Shaw receives a Presidential Medal of Honor for his alleged bravery, although he is in fact a sleeper agent still under the posthypnotic control of his handlers. With the queen of diamonds in a deck of playing cards as his subconscious trigger, Shaw is compelled to follow orders and commit murders and other subversive acts, which he cannot remember afterward.
