THE POP CULTURE ARCHIVIST

20th century ephemera and possibly more

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SATURDAY EVENING POST, August 9, 1932

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SATURDAY EVENING POST, August 9, 1932

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MOTION PICTURE NEWS, August 7, 1926

More hype for one of 1926's lost films.

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MOTION PICTURE NEWS, August 7, 1926. Tunnel would win the heavyweight championship later that year. THE FIGHTING MARINE is a lost film.

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SATURDAY EVENING POST, August 6, 1932

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LIBERTY, August 5, 1933

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LIBERTY, August 5, 1933

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LIBERTY, July 29, 1933

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The Marlboro Baby. SATURDAY EVENING POST, July 28, 1951

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Further notes on Charlie Chan

Here's a curiosity: Earl Deer Biggers wrote only six Charlie Chan novels and Hollywood made Charlie Chan movies for about 16 years after Biggers died, but there has never been a movie version of Keeper of the Keys, the final novel in the series, though its setting and some story elements were used in the 1939 film Charlie Chan in Reno. Maybe it's because Fox would have had to pay more to Biggers or his estate, since Keys appeared after their series began. Maybe Fox didn't think it would adapt well to film -- before Technicolor was in wide use, the plot hinges on color-blindness, which would be hard to illustrate monochromatically. In any event, once Biggers died Fox began filming original Chan stories.

I watched one of the first of these, 1934's Charlie Chan in London. The formula we identify with Chan movies isn't yet in place; Keye Luke wouldn't debut as Lee Chan until the next film. I was mainly interested in how Chan talked. Unfortunately, Warner Oland's dialogue is as formulaically primitive as everyone remembers. There's no sign of the refinement we see by the end of Biggers' run. I'm pretty sure that Chan never says the in the entire picture, compared to his realistically erratic usage in Keeper. Chan may be the smartest man in the room in every scene (especially compared to E.E. Clive's obtuse policeman), but he talks like something out of vaudeville or a comic strip. It's exactly the sort of lazy simplistic dialogue that would inspire mockery, not just of Charlie Chan but of Chinese people generally. When you compare this stuff to late Biggers, you can understand the offense Asians feel.

Here's a coincidence: the two best-known Asian characters in early 20th century English-language pop fiction, Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, are commonly visualized with moustaches -- Sax Rohmer's villain even has a style named after him -- but are described by the creators or depicted by the original illustrators (recall the images of Chan from earlier posts) as clean-shaven. In both cases, Warner Oland is to blame. Oland or his employers must have thought a bare upper lip would have spoiled his yellowface act. As Biggers receded into history, Oland's became the falsely definitive image of Charlie Chan, while Fu Manchu is less identified with any one actor.

Morbid curiosity led me to the 1950s Chan TV series. The casting of J. Carroll Naish, perhaps the least convincing of classic Hollywood's all-purpose ethnic impersonators, did not inspire confidence. He looks much less like a Chinese man than Oland, who claimed partial Mongolian ancestry, and his slight frame is contrary to Biggers' descriptions of a heavyset but lightfooted man. On the other hand, while Naish's casting remains inexcusable, his English as Chan is letter-perfect. The cynic in me suspects that Naish neither looking nor sounding like Warner Oland (or even Sidney Toler) may explain why the show didn't last long. To my knowledge, a series hasn't been tried since, unless you count the 1970s cartoon that focused on Chan's kids but has Keye Luke voicing the great man.

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TIME, July 25, 1932

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MOTION PICTURE NEWS, July 24, 1926. SATAN TOWN reportedly survives, but not intact.

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MOTION PICTURE NEWS, July 24, 1926

Art by John Held Jr. Funny to see this called "The Biggest Comedy Of History" when you know what was up next for Buster....

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LIBERTY, July 22, 1933

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SATURDAY EVENING POST, July 21, 1951

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ESQUIRE, July 1951

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2026: A Cinematic Odyssey

In some accounts of the Trojan War, Odysseus tries to avoid military service by feigning madness. He plows a field with mismatched animals and presumably embellishes that display with other wackiness. This story ends with the Ithacan king for once outsmarted, as someone thinks to find baby Telemachus and put him in the plow's path. It's not a Homeric episode so Christopher Nolan isn't at fault for omitting it from his Homeric film. His is a rather free adaptation, of course, so he could have put it in, except that it doesn't fit his idea of Odysseus. Nolan's hero is responsible to a fault, while his villain uses trickery successfully to evade service. There's a suggestion at one point that Odysseus' sense of responsibility -- in both senses of duty and blame -- makes him something of a control freak, insofar as he lacks faith in the gods. Only when he puts himself completely at the gods' mercy, he's told -- and we're shown -- can he return home. I suspect that to some extent Nolan is telling us about a filmmaker's need to abandon doubt and the sense of responsibility one must feel when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, but you could miss that message and the film wouldn't suffer.

The film succeeds at making some of our most ancient cultural source material seem fresh. Nolan has a terrific visual imagination, however limited you might find him as a writer. When it was over, I felt I didn't get entirely his ultimate point about the crumbling of the much talked-of Law of Zeus. The climactic flashback to the sack of Troy -- strangely sanitized only in that the Greeks seem more interested in simply killing the Trojan women than in raping or enslaving them -- suggests that this cruel conquest marked the breaking of the moral compact. But the suitors who stayed at home are just as corrupt as those who invaded Troy, so presumably war didn't corrupt them. It seems that Ithaca is corrupt already before Odysseus sails for Troy, but what's the cause? If Odysseus feels too much responsibility sometimes, suitors like Antinous feel too little. Finding the golden mean would be a classically Greek solution. Is the problem simply greed? Or do we blame a larger failure of reciprocity? Maybe this is my confusion rather than Nolan's, but either way it doesn't really hurt the film, which I heartily recommend. If anything, it makes the film happily more difficult to align to current politics.

One thing more. Some insinuate that Nolan disrespects a great artifact of western civilization with inclusive casting. Perhaps it should be conceded that this 21st-century American dramatization is not true to the culture it came from. But if people want to condemn the film for this, they should be willing to endorse replacing Zendaya and Lupita Nyong'o -- and Anne Hathaway and Charlize Theron and Samantha Morton -- with men.