Konterr Brilliant and touching

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS***Honolulu police detective Charlie Chan, Warner Oland, is on his way to the land of his humble ancestors China as a special agent for the League of Nations to crack a drug ring out of the port city of Shanghai run by the mysterious and always in the shadows drug kingpin Ivan Marloff ,Frederik Vogeding. Charlie's fellow drug agent British Sir Stanley Woodland, David Torrence, is killed at a banquet in Charlie's honor when he opened up what looked like a Chinese style crackerjack box that had a gun hidden in it blowing him away.With Charlie knowing, after the murder of Sir Stanley, that he'll be next he takes together with his #1 Son Lee, Keye Luke, precautions to prevent himself from being murdered by the drug gang that he and the late Sir. Stanley were investigating. Still that doesn't prevent Charlie and #1 Son Lee from getting kidnapped by the drug gang that ends with them escaping when police are about to come to rescue them. It soon turns out that young Phil Nash, Jon Hall, the assistant of US drug Agent James Andrews, Russell Hicks, is secretly working for Marloff and feeding him information in what Charlie & Co. are up too in taking him as his drug gang out of commission. That's until after being arrested Nash brakes out of jail with the help of his lover the late Sir Stanley's daughter Diana, Irene Harvey, where he heads straight to Marloff's hideout at the Versailles Cafe on the Shanghai waterfront.****SPOILERS**** It's at the Cafe that Charlie and the local police set a trap for Marloff and his drug gang in having Nash leading him straight to them. In fact Nash intentionally turned traitor to trick Marloff into thinking he was working with him instead of Charlie and the Shanghai police and Diana was also part of the sham. Wild shootout at the end of the movie with an even wilder surprise ending with Charlie, who knew the score right from the beginning, arresting the person really being the Marloff drug gang. It turned out that the head of the drug operation was impersonating a dead man, who was murdered in San Francisco three weeks earlier, who never got the news in time to know that he was dead!

Robert J. Maxwell Charlie Chan (Oland) and one of his enumerated sons travel to Shanghai to visit the home of their honorable ancestors. They immediately get mixed up in murder and an opium smuggling ring. Warner Oland provides the usual fortune-cookie proverbs -- "Sometimes eyes cannot see nose on own face" -- while Key Luke as the son provides a bit of humor, or tries to.The plot is what can be expected in a 1935 inexpensive mystery. There are a couple of Chinese characters here and there, a picture of a dragon, some rear-projected Shanghai, a trap door, a pistol projecting through a door that's ajar, and mostly bare bones studio sets of Westernized hotel rooms and offices. The opium is the MacGuffin but it's not important. We learn practically nothing about who's doing it or where it's going, except that "beautiful poppy has sting." They could have called it "Charlie Chan Goes to Spitzbergen" and made the move about smuggling lutefisk. Come to think of it, though, I'd rather visit Shanghai today than Spitzbergen. A chat buddy lives in Shanghai. It's probably the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated city in China. There's a KFC on every corner in case you get tired of snakes and turtles.That lutefisk might not have been too far off the mark, as far as that goes. Warner Oland was Swedish himself and is a less than convincing Asian. Key Luke is a much better impersonator of Asians, probably because he was born in China. As far as Chans go, I think I prefer Sidney Toler to either Oland or the awful Roland Winters, who came to the series both last and least. Support in the cast comes from players who aren't bad. Jon Hall as the misunderstood hero is handsome, I guess, and Lynn Bari is somewhere in there too.

dwpollar 1st watched 7/18/2009 - 6 out of 10 (Dir- James Tinling): Good mystery crime drama from the Charlie Chan vault. In this one he's in his homeland and a murder occurs at his reception of a British Intelligence man. Chan and his number one son are put on the case which eventually leads to an opium gang in the mother land. This is a good complex mystery that you have to pay really close attention to if you want to understand how it is solved. The main characters are also fun to watch as the son is always getting caught on the phone with a girl while he's supposed to be waiting for a phone call for his father. Warner Oland plays the Charlie Chan character well as we see the quiet smarts win over --as happens in all his cases. Otherwise, this is a pretty basic story but is done well and is effective.

JoeKarlosi CHARLIE CHAN IN SHANGHAI (1935) This is a decent if unremarkable Warner Oland Chan entry, though there are some good moments teaming up with Keye Luke as his Number One son. Here, the father and son team are in their native China where Charlie is being honored at a dinner. Things take a morbid turn when a good friend of Chan's gets killed while making a speech, and it may or may not be intentional. The detective then becomes a target as he investigates an opium smuggling ring.**1/2 out of four