Ordering the World: The Uncompromising Logic of Charlie Chan and Mr Moto

Abstract

Detective series involving Asian detectives were very popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, the most prolific of the Hollywood detective crime series in this period was the ‘Charlie Chan’ series, which produced 44 films between 1931 and 1949, after two early silent films and then one sound film, Behind That Curtain (1929), in which Chan, played by E. L. Park, an actor of Korean extraction, appeared as a minor character. The series starred three different non-Asian actors in the main role, Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters, initially at Fox (Twentieth Century Fox from the end of 1935) and then at the Poverty Row studio Monogram after Toler acquired the rights to the character. The first ‘Charlie Chan’ films preceded the creation of B-units and were made as ‘A-class productions’ (Hardy, 1997: 76), with only one film being made each year until they entered B-production in 1934 when the output was increased to three or four films a year. The ‘Mr Moto’ and ‘Mr Wong’ films were both produced as Bs, the former at Twentieth Century Fox alongside Charlie Chan and the latter at Monogram where Mr Wong helped to provide the later ‘Charlie Chan’ films with some of its stories. All three detectives are coded in terms of Asian values, but they also enunciate Western values to control or contain their ‘otherness’ and this, along with their portrayal by Western actors, produces tensions with regard to both ethnicity and cultural representation.