TCM Spotlight: Charlie Chan Collection (Dark Alibi / Dangerous Money / The Trap / The Chinese Ring)

Four Films great value

I've read many of the comments made on different sets of these classics and I find that I must answer to some of the comments I see. First off for all the hi-tech geeks, these films are very old, ancient by todays' standards. Forget about the quality because even the best revitalization efforts are not going to compare to a new movie. The fact that these are classics actually makes it ok for the quality to not be grade "A". Look at the quality rather of the acting (yes they are flawed) but consider the fact that these were made around the early stages of film making one must just accept it and move on. I personally watched all the reruns that WGN did in the 70's of these movies along with the Sherlock Holmes, and even Flash Gordon series which I have collected. Even with the many flaws with acting and props and quality, it brings me back to my youth. The fact that even then I appreciated these classics was an awesome experience for me then and now. Stop worrying about the quality issues and start appreciating the fact that they are still around for other generations to see. Can you imagine if these no longer existed. What a loss that would be. My only complaint is that it has taken the studios far too long to just make a complete set of all the Chan movies and stop trying to gouge the people for wanting them. I have seen actual bootleg full collection of these moveis and it is a shame that the studios did not heed the warning that people want them all. They did it with the Sherlock Holmes and many others so whats the problem. I currently have all the sets out and am anxious to see the rest myself. You watch because here is the real deal. Once the last movies are out, they will release them all in one set. That my friends is the cost we must pay for demanding or better yet expecting the studios to fork out lots of money to restore their products before we intend on bying them. That is all for now folks.

Had not known these were available, and even though made a the C or D studio, Monogram, the first four offerings are better than the first 6 Toler made after leaving 20th Century Fox Movies beginning with Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, the next four present one with Benson Fong (he was in approximately 5 Perry Mason episodes with Ray Burr), these are actually better productions than those first 6. Victor Sen Yeung has adultified, Mantan Moreland has calmed down and these final three (one still not made and may be lost-The Red Dragon) are are far more fun to watch. Much of this change has to do with the quality of the scripts and acting, and maybe our knowledge that Sidner Toler will soon be dead--"He's just bound to die, he's just bound to." The fourth disk and final set just released were made with Roland Winters, who shows very accurately that Charlie Chan cannot run forever. The only thing I deeply regret about any of the Chan movies is that when I watch CC in Monte Carlo, that there will never another made with Warner Oland. When he waved goodby goodbye to Jules Etienne Joubert aka Harold Huber, he was waving goodbye to the world, to 20th Centuro Fox Studios and to the millions of fans around the world. So with the exception of I believe f CC's made before and one after The Black Camel, and The Red Dragon, not yet on DVD with Roland Winters, we now have as complete set of probably the best made and largest cash cow "B" movie set ever made. And thank you, 20th Century Fox and John Cork for working so hard to getting all these together and TCM/MGM for the beautiful restoration. And a special thanks TCM for to colorizing these and may it never happen again.

Everything is in great condition! TYVM!

After Fox's excellent boxed sets of their Warner Oland and Sidney Toler films and MGM/UA's six-film Charlie Chan - Chanthology [DVD], TCM's set of four later Monogram Chan films is a slightly curious compilation, including three Sidney Toler films and Roland Winters' debut in the role, but skipping over two more Toler films, The Red Dragon and Shadows Over Chinatown, which - like Winters last five films in the series - remain unreleased on home video, making a chronological boxed set (or even a single boxed set for the seven remaining films) highly unlikely. The films themselves are typical of the latter days at Monogram, more product to be churned out fast and cheap than inspired, though it does get off to a good start..."Being a detective is an ugly trade.""Ugliest trade sometimes have moment of joy. Even gravedigger know some for whom he would do his work with extreme pleasure."Dark Alibi seems like everyone at Monogram made a conscious decision to try to get the Charlie Chan series back on track rather than just churning them out. After his largely anonymous and confused earlier Chan film The Shanghai Cobra, director Phil Karlson suddenly raises his game with some excellent visuals, aided by decent production values and a much more memorable array of suspects and dodgy characters than the usual undistinguished bunch that was the usual stock in trade at the studio. The plot's not bad either, with Charlie having only nine days to prove an ex-con who has gone straight for years is not guilty of a murder and bank robbery. The trail takes him to a boarding house whose prim and puritanical landlady takes in ex-offenders to reform and to state prison where either the warden or a trustee may be putting the fingerprint records to ill use and Mantan Moreland runs into his old nightclub partner Ben Carter again for more of their trademark patter, with Charlie even getting in on the act. The return of Moreland is particularly welcome after Willie Best's awkward turn standing in for him in The Red Dragon, and there's a real easygoing warmth between him and Benson Fong's Tommy Chan and even Sidney Toler's ever-critical Charlie ("Son Tommy is noisy woodpecker in family tree") that was much missed in the previous entry. It's not all good - there's a tiresomely drawn out bit of comedy with Moreland in a theatrical warehouse and the mastermind's motivation is thrown in as a bit of clumsy last-minute out-of-nowhere exposition - but it's one Monogram Chan that zips along enjoyably without overstaying its welcome."This cruise has been a nightmare!""But not dull one, Captain!"Shame on you for fibbing, Charlie! At 66 minutes, Dangerous Money is one of the longest Monogram Chans, but it's not the extra three or four minutes that makes it seem so slow but Terry Morse's lethargic direction and Sidney Toler's bored performance. It's professional enough on a purely technical level, but there's just no spark there despite decent production values and a pool of shipboard suspects who almost all zealously vouch for each other after a secret service agent investigating some hot money in Samoa is murdered en route. Miriam Kissinger's script does manage to give a few of its supporting cast some distinguishing characteristics but really struggles with the aphorisms ("Hasty man could also drink tea with fork") and falls prey to a particularly silly final revelation that makes you wonder just what a couple of the villains got up to in the cabin they shared on their long ocean crossing.With the exception of a couple of minutes when he's dancing with Amira Moustafa, Toler seems particularly disinterested, hitting his marks, saying his lines with the lack of enthusiasm most of them deserve and waiting to walk off, not bothering to hide his boredom when he finally, slowly does so. And a lot of the film happens slowly - not very slowly, but slowly enough for pauses to feel more like padding to spin it out to a contractually obligated running time than dramatic devices. It works slightly in the film's favor in the scenes with Victor Sen Yung and Willie Best, who aren't as brashly juvenile as in their previous pairing, but you can't help wondering if they're being directed to tone it down or they're just not that interested in their lazy and dragged out antics either. It doesn't help that the script at times leaves their tiresome attempts to work their way into Charlie's investigation disjointed and half-hearted: one would-be comic setpiece with Best faking illness falls completely flat because it's only at the very end of the scene that we discover just why he's doing it, or even that he IS faking it, which turns what should be a punchline into mere exposition. And we never find out just what the significance of the tortoise with a torch on its back is..."Mr. Chan doesn't want dramatics.""Excuse, please. On contrary, dramatics highly valuable now."The Trap was not just Toler's final Chan film but also the last he ever made, but he manages to do a decent job of hiding just how seriously ill he was while making it. Would that he had a better film to go out on. Infamous as the one where someone walks in front of the camera in the title sequence and the ever penny-pinching Monogram still used the take, the film itself is certainly better directed than its predecessor but suffers from another bad Miriam Kissinger screenplay that manages to be both obvious and ultimately a bit nonsensical. And, as was increasingly the case in the Monogram Chans, Charlie doesn't do a great deal of sleuthing, uncovering the odd hidden secret by the expedient of being sent telegrams from his sources to speed up the exposition. It actually takes him a good quarter of an hour to even turn up in this one, the film kicking off with a group of variety girls taking a Malibu beach house with their promoter and his seedy press agent and setting up the most conniving member of the troupe as the film's obvious corpse du jour. The biggest surprise is that when the body turns up garrotted, everybody but Charlie naturally assumes she committed suicide...Some spectacularly contrived bad writing sends Charlie rushing to the scene after the silly fillies panic on the phone and somehow convince Birmingham Brown that Jimmy is dead, which might provoke a reaction from the audience (though not necessarily the one the filmmakers intended) but doesn't seem to bother them all that much. From then on it's the usual run of additional murder attempts, unmasking of suspects so obvious they can't be guilty and the inevitable trap to catch the killer, who turns out to be pretty obvious after all even if the motive is suddenly thrown in at their dying moments. Future movie serial Superman Kirk Alyn is along as an unflatteringly moustached Highway Patrolman, while for once Jimmy and Birmingham's scenes don't seem too dragged out and irrelevant, but Kissinger has a tin ear for dramatic confrontations, with scenes where the various suspects turn on each other and throw accusations as a result of Charlie's `Oriental tricks' proving just as painful as the misfired comic padding in most of the Monogram films. She's not much better at preventing her female ensemble from slipping into hysterical stereotyping and occasional verbal catfighting, and can't even come up with a single decent epigram for Charlie ("Best laid plans of mice and men sometimes, uh, go a little bit haywire, huh?"). At 68 minutes it does start to outstay its welcome long before the slowest car chase until Enigma even though Howard Bretherton's helming is steadier than Morse's on Dangerous Money, but somehow still remains strangely watchable in a late late night and too tired to turn it off kind of way."Murder in the house of Charlie Chan! Now I've seen everything."Most audiences had seen everything The Chinese Ring had to offer too, at least if they'd seen Monogram's Mr Wong in Chinatown [DVD] [1939] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC], produced as a direct rival to the Chan series only eight years earlier in the days when Charlie was still a fixture on the Fox lot. What they hadn't seen was the new Charlie Chan, with Roland Winters making his rather tepid debut in the role after Toler's death. Underwhelming is the world that immediately springs to mind, with Winters underplaying the part and going for naturalism that he only occasionally achieves but fatally lacking the screen presence he needs to carry the movie. The kind of actor who could do a very decent job of a supporting role that didn't require anything showy, he has his moments but is miscast in a role that needs either star power or more of a personality than he brings it. There clearly has been some rethinking of the part to meet the new actor halfway, with Chan no longer working for the US government or even living in Honolulu with his large family but living in San Francisco with only Number Three Son Jimmy - now renamed Tommy for some inexplicable reason despite still being played by Victor Sen Yung - and Birmingham Brown, both of whom are much more tightly reined in.The production values are better in some scenes and William Beaudine's unambitious direction decent enough, but without a Boris Karloff or a Sidney Toler in the lead it lacks a compelling centre and it's a more sober affair than previous entries. To a degree you could almost see Winters as the Timothy Dalton of screen Chans, taking the character back to his literary roots and a darker tone, although even Dalton's Bond has a sense of humour that's lacking here. There's no sly mischief or enjoyment in his work here. Any attempt at a joke is met with a stern "Humorous dialogue not very humorous" (not that it's hard to disagree with him) while even a villain's offer of a 100 mile swim in international waters just elicits a flat "Not very funny." While dispensing with the comic relief is a welcome move, it does mean that Jimmy - sorry, Tommy - and Birmingham have next to nothing to do in the film, with Warren Douglas' and Louise Currie's bickering cop and reporter romantic double-act getting their screen time to no real effect instead. Scott Darling only does a fairly minor job of revising his screenplay for the earlier Mr. Wong film, losing Wong's morally ambiguous trip to Chinatown to elicit information from the Tongs but carrying over not just characters and plot developments but swathes of word-for-word dialogue as well, and at times it feels like Beaudine has carried over the same camera angles from Bill Nigh's film as well. Perhaps if Winters had had stronger material and the kind of values Fox gave their Sidney Toler Chan films he might have made a more comfortable impression in the role, but you're left feeling he's trying to give an interesting interpretation without much support in a not that interesting film.The picture quality on WHV/TCM's DVD compilation is excellent, with each film on a separate disc, though there are no extras or chapter menus (though each film is chaptered).

As I love all of the Chan films I eagerly awaited this box set. I was not let down as it was excellent and a very welcome addition to my collection.

This TCM set provides access to a number of Charlie Chan films not available in other collections. They are well restored copies and have been chosen well as some of the later films done very cheaply under a different studio are not very good.Good value and a welcome addition to complete my collection. As an aside the original Charlie Chan novels are well written if you like a classic mystery story with some beautiful descriptions of setting.

Another four good Charlie Chan movies, with Mantan Moreland,. Benson Fong, Victor Sen Young and Philip Ahn. Dark Alibi, Dangerous Money and The Trap with Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan and The Chinese Ring with Roland Winters as Charlie Chan. (1946-47, B&W, with subtitles)

We love Charlie Chan movies, they are great!

Dear Amazon, I just had to write you all and tell you, I have never had such great service in a very long time. I ordered this yesterday and received it the next day! I'm quite impressed! I will surely mention it to others!!As far as the product, it's me and one of my favorite movies to night with pop corn and a coke! Lori Giesbrecht.