FANZINE

“I’m always asking myself the question, “Pop, Pop, Pop. Why does offspring imitate outboard motor?”

Lieutenant Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department was the creation of the novelist Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933), who wrote six novels featuring the fat, dapper sleuth between 1925 and his death. Biggers’ books were picked up for the movies from time to time, but the series proper really began in 1931, when Fox made films of Charlie Chan Carries On and The Black Camel, and hired the Swedish actor Warner Oland to play Charlie Chan. Why not hire a Chinese actor to play the role? Ay that’s the rub. —Especially because Fox did hire many actual Chinese-Americans for supporting parts in the Chan series (Keye Luke was Lee Chan, Number One Son; Victor Sen Yung played Jimmy Chan, Son #2, etc.) Who knows what was going through those moguls’ heads but the net effect has riled present day Asian American media watchdog groups, who have effectively kept Chan off the screen and off of DVD. Recently the young Canadian poet Aaron Peck spoke to me about the Golden Age of Hollywood, its penchant for casting Scandinavian and Nordic actors in Asian parts. He mentioned Luise Rainer persevering as O-Lan in The Good Earth (1937), and what on earth was Gale Sondergaard, the sinister Eurasian who stabs Bette Davis in The Letter (1940)? She wasn’t Asian, was she? Sondergaard’s some kind of Northern name, isn’t it? Where was Kierkegaard from I’d like to know? OK, so it was some kind of convention of Hollywood—Nils Asther, the Dane, played Javanese in Wild Orchids opposite Garbo, and he was the lover/warrior in Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). It shows something of what they thought—I don’t know, the perfect vacancy of the Swede a visual match to the blank flavor of the fortune cookie?

Of the earliest Charlie Chan films, four are lost, including the first (Charlie Chan Carries On); only a Portuguese version exists of Carries On, it’s called “Eran Trece.” For in the early days of sound films, studios instantly attempted to compensate for the revenue that had gone south for good. A silent film would play in every market—with a change in the title cards, the story could be told in French, Russian, Arabic, what have you. When sound came in, and films had to be made in a particular language, usually English, some studios attempted to play it safe and made simultaneous versions with different languages. Same sets, same costumes, sometimes the original actors (Garbo warbles in German in the alternate Anna Christie) but usually not. The foreign language crew would move in and work all night, while the English language actors slept. People say that if you watch Eran Trece you would probably have a fair idea of its English language counterpart, Charlie Chan Carries On, though I have my doubts. I’ve seen the Spanish version of Dracula and if that’s all you had, you would never know how stilted and boring the English language version is.

In the Fox years the studio stuffed the Chan movies with actors on contract, some they didn’t seem to know what to do with. In these so-called “programmers” an actor could show his range. In the 1930s, many actors, not only stars but featured players, made five, six, seven films a year, something that today only Samuel L Jackson and Parker Posey manage. Also Jude Law, Ben Stiller, Gerald Depardieu, Chris Walken. Hmm, maybe we are repeating the 1930s. I’ll have to think about this some more in a future column for Fanzine.

The Chan films are filled with people you sort of recognize from other contexts. There’s Rita Hayworth, two years before Only Angels Have Wings. There’s Ray Milland, eleven years before The Lost Weekend, Robert Young 23 years before Father Knows Best. It’s like a race of babies populating the screen. And then to turn the telescope the other way around, the series lasted so long that we see the final appearances of once-young stars. Evelyn Brent, in silent days the queen of Paramount and Josef Von Sternberg’s luminous leading lady in The Last Command and Underworld, shows up in The Golden Eye as an elderly nursing nun. What I get from this constant “spot ‘em” game is an immense buzz, a chance to see time in action, laterally, and this puts paid to the way we usually experience time, as a blur of aging, the foreshortening of the carousel. The series spans serious eras of film history, and itself seems to morph from the earliest days of sound, the glory of the pre-Code era, into, finally, the triumph of film noir and the dawning of Cold War cynicism. And in between literally dozens of films, dozens of corpses, thousands of aphorisms, and so many cute guys, Asian and otherwise, that it’s just a crime you can’t see any of these films, legally. I was watching bootleg DVDs, thinking very French about my position on the “unseeable.”

As a boy, I watched the Charlie Chan movies on a flickering black and white TV screen, my mind a boggle of sense impressions: horror, disbelief, pleasure in the jokey puns, and an intense interest in the construction of Charlie’s sentences. I couldn’t keep the movies straight. Like dreams each has a beginning, middle and end, but like dreams they replicate the same experience over and over, and the dreamer gets mixed up, inflated. Even at ten or twelve I knew dimly that the movies, purportedly equal, varied widely in budget—as did my other favorites—the Stooges, Abbott & Costello, Tarzan. Some had the sumptuous design of a “real movie,” while others looked as though I could have directed them myself in my dad’s basement or garden shed. And even then I knew there was something amiss, in their casting of white actors in Asian roles. Filmed between 1931 and 1949, the Charlie Chan movies were over before I was born, so I looked to them for clues on how my parents and grandparents had lived their lives while killing the time it took me to get born. The series lasted so long that one actor (Warner Oland) died, then his replacement (Sidney Toler) died, and a third one, Roland Winters, took over after World War II. The odd thing is that the names of these white actors all sounded something similar, as many commentators have noticed: “Oland-Toler-Roland,” a rhyming sort of echo that seems as though it should mean something, but does it? Check out www.charliechanfamily.com in which the commentator claims that “this name-sound business helped to identify the actors with their parts.” Huh?

The series ended abruptly, in 1949. Had the mass public smarted up at that point, grown tired of Hollywood foisting us with talk-funny imitations? Hard to say, for this was a whole generation before the worst example of so-called “yellow-face” acting (Mickey Rooney going Japanese with Bugs Bunny buck teeth in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) hit us where we live. Maybe my anxiety floated free because I was a boy and the strange allure of the Charlie Chan movies made me feel, uh-oh, that I was having unmanly feelings towards the personnel. Mom and Dad were always, “Kevin, why do you watch so many murder mysteries?” I couldn’t really explain, there weren’t enough words, I just grimly held on for dear life and put my money where my mouth was. TVs didn’t have remotes back then so I just sat very close to the box and guarded the dial by which someone in my family might have tried to change the channel. Out of the speaker I heard the voice of Charlie Chan with his archaic, dry way of speaking. “Alibi have habit of disappearing, like hole in water.” “Always happen—when conscience tries to speak, telephone out of order.” The disappearing articles; the resolute avoidance of the first person; the metaphor as emblem—Chan screenwriters did to English what ruthless killer did to band of suspects—staged a murder among the various parts of the ego I had yet to sort out and sublimate. I had the eerie excitement that Ezra Pound must have felt when he first opened dusty volume of Fenellosa. “Glad you’re here, Mr. Chan.” “Humble presence of no more importance than one drop of rain in cloudburst.”

I mean, you really had to wrap your mind around these sayings. “Very difficult to explain hole in doughnut,” Charlie said, “but hole always there.” I guess it was a bit reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and getting caught up in all the paradox. And the horse sense that lurks underneath. “When looking for needle in haystack, most sensible location is haystack.” I’d do a double take with these flips. I felt like a griddle cake. No, one of those pizzas that stretches out in mid air while the pizza guy who flung it at the ceiling does something else with his hands (grabs a smoke). “Not always wise to accept simplest solution. Mind like parachute—only function when open.” When I met John Cage, I had one of those gestalt perceptions that descend on you with the rapidity and force of lightning, that Cage’s whole persona was but a variation on the Charlie Chan I knew. Wish I had asked him, “Mr. Cage, you were nineteen when the first Charlie Chan picture came out. How many did you manage to see before adopting his ‘open mind” concept wholesale?” I turn to Musicage, Joan Retallack’s invaluable transcript of John Cage’s table talk, and find not a single entry for Charlie Chan or Earl Derr Biggers. I should have known that “Cannot tell where path lead until reach end of road.”

Chan loved all his children (there were eleven or fourteen, hard to keep count). He’d pretend to be upset with #1 son, but secretly he’d be proud as punch, even when sonny boy went more American than you’d think possible, resorting to college slang and joining a frat at USC. Meanwhile my Dad was telling me I watched too many murder shows and read too much Agatha Christie. Still I couldn’t give up watching Charlie. These shows had all of the fun of the Alice books, but with murder and sex attached! No contest! Dad wanted me to join the Boy Scouts, but that was just sex, no thanks Dad. When he gave me money I complied, that’s always been my metier. But I never forgot Charlie Chan and his number one son. Jimmy would jump up and expostulate, trying to get his dad’s attention. “Pop!” “Pop!” (Lots of Finnegans Wake punning about the name of the father.) Charlie Chan scowls, suspicious of Jimmy’s Americanism. “’Pop, pop, pop. Why does offspring imitate outboard motor?”

Alice tea party: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” “I haven’t the slightest idea.” “Because Poe wrote on both.” “Why does offspring imitate outboard motor?” But I should get specific before my time runs out here.

Charlie Chan at Treasure Island’s a favorite of mine for it incorporates some beautiful footage shot here in San Francisco during the 1939 Worlds Fair. Cesar Romero—the Joker!—plays Rhadini, a magician specializing in exposing fake mediums, and he gets tangled up with spooky Dr. Zodiac, who wears an enormous turban and a set of armored robes that give him an menacing appearance, like Oz. Pauline Moore is Eve Cairo, a name you could deconstruct for pages, and her acting is just as improbable as her monicker. Eve wears a black pageboy wig with frizzy bangs and kohl smeared all around her eyes, which burn with lunacy, twin lamps of fright. She’s freakish looking especially because you don’t believe her for a minute, she’s a little girl playing dress up in her mother’s old clothes, if her mother was Anne Sexton. Pauline Moore was Ann Rutledge in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda, and she was Mary Whitman in Charlie Chan in Reno, an ingenue divorcee in a city of sin. The faces float around like specks in your eye, aimless and relaxed. Not only the same actors but the same situation prevails in every film. The scenario zeroes in on one character for twenty minutes, showing how he or she is so hateful that every other character has a reason to kill him. Then the murder happens in darkness and luckily Charlie Chan is visiting from Honolulu and can be right there on the spot with his eager beaver son. It’s never the person you think it’s going to be. Aficionados say you can spot the murderer by means of billing, the killer will be the third actor billed. I haven’t tested this out yet. I wanted to have a marathon and watch all 42 films, but time ran out and, I suppose, my patience did too.

“Please explain absence of pants,” Charlie says to Jimmy—his so-called “Number Two Son.” The producers loved to reduce Jimmy to his underwear, they think of any excuse to show off his legs. In Reno hitchhikers throw Jimmy off a mountain pass after stripping him of his college boy frat clothes, and he runs down the highway shaking his fist in the old-style boxer shorts that fastened with clips at the waist. Later, the police put him in a lineup in a blanket, and his garters poke out underneath. “Pop, the police think I’m nuts. Tell ‘em I’m not nuts, won’t you?” In Treasure Island Jimmy slides down a magician’s ramp and rips out the entire seat of his pants, revealing startling boxers of dove gray. “Please explain absence of pants,” demands his dad. Jimmy is often photographed with his back to the camera, often bent over—to shoot craps, to hunt for clues under a table, to tie his shoe. Not until the British “Carry On” films, and then the heyday of porn star Joey Stefano, would there be a cinema so ass-centric. Father is always doing a double take as he recognizes Jimmy’s butt. “Frequent spankings have made favorite son’s anatomy most familiar.” (Charlie Chan In Panama; cf almost identical line in Charlie Chan at the Race Track, where it is Keye Luke’s backside on display.) The suggestion is that son’s ass is more distinctive than his face. Sen Yung lacks Keye Luke’s classic, androgynous beauty, but he’s got a pleasant, manic, rascally youth to him and hormones galore. The kiss he gives the victim’s maid in Rio leaves her weak in the knees, though she gives as good as she gets. Their mouths collide like they’re eating each other, it’s sensationally erotic. You can read their interaction as follows: son gets the erections, but father participates vicariously. Son feels it, dad knows it and, to a certain extent, controls it. “Number two son behave about hot music like corn over hot fire.” [Pause.} “Pops.” In the last reel of Castle on the Desert Jimmy Chan parodies Charlie’s gnomic speech and his anal fixation: “Man who sits on tack, better off.”

At a certain point in my marathon I realized, I was watching these shows because of my dad, who died in January 2005, in New Jersey, the coldest snowiest day of the year. We got into Newark, the last plane in, before the FAA called off all flights for days. Dad had been ailing for some time and maybe this was some kind of blessed release for him, I don’t know. It was a mess. But I thought I was over it. I stabbed the “open/close” button on the remote, tossed in one of my 42 films on fourteen discs. It didn’t really matter which one popped onto the screen, not to me. I could watch any of them without complaining.

“Father who depends on son is happy or foolish depending on the son.” Did you know that? You would if you could watch Charlie Chan. “Puzzle always deepest near the center.” (The Trap.) “Smart fly keep out of gravy.” (At the Race Track.) Long slick length of life between his legs gooses son. Father surveys catastrophe.