by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I a “B”
movie I’d recently downloaded from archive.org, The Golden Eye, one of the last Monogram Charlie Chans featuring
Roland Winters — who didn’t have the natural slant to his eyes that had helped
Warner Oland and Sidney Toler be at least somewhat credible as a Chinese detective,
and who rejected the various attempts to slap tape on the sides of his face and
cover it up with makeup to look “Asian.” Instead, Winters simply squinted while
he was on camera, and the directors of these things (the director of this one
is William Beaudine, who made a few good movies — mostly when he got a
legendary star to work with, like Mary Pickford in the 1925 Little Annie
Rooney, Jean Harlow in Three
Wise Girls and W. C. Fields in The
Old-Fashioned Way — but for the most part
was a more effective sleep-inducer than Sominex) had to remind him, just before
they called “Action!,” to do so: he recalled the directors saying, “Remember
the eyes!” This was the second-from-last in the Chan series (though the very
last, Sky Dragon — the title refers to an
airliner — I remember as surprisingly good, a tale about murder on an airplane
that welcomely returned Keye Luke to the series) and it was pretty clear that
the old crew — Winters, Beaudine, screenwriter W. Scott Darling and supporting
players Mantan Moreland and Victor Sen Yung (too old for this sort of nonsense
and just as annoying as he was in the later Fox Chans with Toler) — were
getting tired. The title refers to a played-out gold mine in Arizona, adjacent
to a dude ranch; both properties are owned by Mr. Manning (Forrest Taylor), who
in the opening scene — which, like the openings of a lot of these movies, is
the best thing in the film — is fleeing through the streets of Chinatown while
being chased by a baddie who’s trying to kill him. Said baddie actually shoots
Manning while he’s visiting his friend, a Chinese antiques dealer named Woo
Fat, but because he shot through the antique store’s closed front window, the shot misses. (I’ve noted before
how many murder victims in Chan movies get theirs by being shot through open windows — and wondered why Chan didn’t just keep
his damned windows closed when he had visitors who were being targeted by the
bad guys!)
Manning wants Fat to contact Charlie Chan for him, and he does so,
though later on Manning is killed after all — he’s pushed down a mineshaft and
is supposedly brought back to his home, merely injured instead of killed, but he’s wearing an Invisible
Man-style hood of bandages and the patient in the bed at the Manning home,
where Manning’s daughter Evelyn (the always personable Wanda McKay) is living,
is actually a woman in disguise. Of course, we don’t learn all this until the movie is nearly
over; until then we get a lot of shots of reasonably attractive people of both
(major) genders around the dude ranch’s swimming pool, and a lot of shots of
women being cruised by obnoxious drunken playboy Vincent O’Brien (Tim Ryan),
who’s really undercover police officer Lt. Mike Ruark (that’s what it says in
the cast list, though it sounded to me like Roland Winters was calling him
“Pike”!). The two incognito lawmen are after a criminal conspiracy that appears
to be using the Golden Eye mine as a front for gold smuggling, since after
years during which it produced almost nothing is spewing out gold like crazy, only
geological analysis of the ore samples proves that they came from somewhere
else. Actually, they would prove that if they were being analyzed by an honest assayer instead of
Talbot Bartlett (Bruce Kellogg), who’s handsome and personable enough to be a credible
boyfriend for Evelyn Manning but who turns out to be the villain, a crook in
league with the mine’s foreman, Jim Driscoll (Ralph Dunn), to use the mine to
smuggle stolen gold from Mexico into the U.S. At least that’s what I think was happening, since W. Scott Darling wasn’t all
that big on plot consistency and it wasn’t easy to figure out just what the crooks were after. (Hitchcock may have said
the “MacGuffin” was the least important part of a thriller story, but at least
he made sure his writers were clear about what it was!)
It was also nice to see
Evelyn Brent in the cast list — she was the female lead in Josef von
Sternberg’s big gangster movies at Paramount in the late 1920’s but soon got
lost in the Hollywood shuffle after Sternberg stopped working with her in favor
of his 1930 German discovery, Marlene Dietrich, though Monogram saved her and
allowed her to make a living in minor parts for years — but she’s playing a
sinister nurse, Sister Theresa, who’s supposedly there to minister to Mr. Manning
but is in fact part of the criminal conspiracy, and she’s so well hidden in
that nun’s habit I thought the big switcheroo at the end wasn’t going to be
that the supposed “Manning” was a woman but that “Sister Theresa” was a man!
Though he doesn’t get much interesting comic dialogue and he doesn’t have a
Black sidekick to do one of his great double-talk routines with, Mantan
Moreland is still the most entertaining element of this show — and Beaudine and
Darling seem to have realized that, because they end the movie with Moreland
facing the camera and addressing the audience directly with a few lines that
sum up the film. The Golden Eye has a lot of the deficiencies of later Monogram — cheap sets that look
like a junior-high drama class made them out of canvas and scrap wood, dull
stock music (the print we were watching was from an archive.org contributor who
said he did major rehab work on the soundtrack and at one point erased the
music from the soundtrack and replaced it with a better-sounding copy of the
same stock cue from another Monogram Chan) and Beaudine’s usual soporific
pacing of what could have
been an exciting story — but it also has a sort of familiar charm that makes it
an unoppressive way to spend an hour even though it isn’t particularly entertaining.
