(1947)1.5Bruce EderThe final Charlie Chan movie to star Sidney Toler is mostly a disappointment, owing to Toler's obvious ill-health (he passed away one month after the movie premiered) and the technique -- or lack of it -- of director Howard P. Bretherton. A major chunk of the movie, including several key scenes, take place on the beach at Malibu, and Bretherton -- whose expertise was as an "outdoor" director (mostly of westerns) -- probably seemed like a practical choice to handle the movie. The mystery at the center of the story isn't bad, but Bretherton's notoriously rapid approach to shooting made it impossible for this supporting cast to do more than stumble around the threadbare sets and hope for the best with their line-readings. Indeed, from the look of the movie, most of the scenes involving the female supporting players look like first takes, and not terribly good ones, either -- for the low-budget westerns that Bretherton usually made, that probably would have been sufficient, but for a mystery in which mood, and tone, and some semblance of atmosphere, with a cast who sometimes seem like they were working together for the first time on the day of shooting (which, at Monogram Pictures, may well have been the case), it was lethal. Only Toler, Victor Sen Yung and Mantan Moreland, who were old hands at the Chan pictures, give anything like the performances required, and Toler's physical weakness is all-too-obvious. He seems gaunt and weak, hardly moves in many of the scenes in which he appears, and the blocking is set up to allow him to sit in as many scenes as possible. Despite these flaws, the movie is worth a look, not only as Toler's final screen appearance, but also for its sheer oddity -- in place of the typically claustrophobic old dark house setting, the characters are stranded on an isolated beach, and in a small house, yet there is a sense of danger and suspense (alas, broken by much of the poorest acting in this cast).
In this mystery, Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) helps out an actress justly terrified for her own life after her fellow actors slowly begin to die horrible deaths. The homicides transpire at a Malibu beach house; Chan gathers all of the clues into one location and hones in on the killer. This marked Toler's last film appearance; Roland Winters inherited the role from him.
