Charlie Chan festival pulled for wrong reason
By Howard Rosenberg
Los Angeles Times
The Fox Movie Channel — citing protests about Asian stereotypes and white actors playing a Chinese sleuth — pulled its summer festival of antique Charlie Chan mysteries recently, for the wrong reasons.
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Black stereotyping is much more offensive than Charlie in some of the Chan movies that Fox Movie Channel had planned on beaming to the 20 million homes it reaches.
Peter Ustinov, left, was Charlie Chan, Richard Hatch, his grandson in the 1981 revival, "Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen."
Mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers created Chan as an all-knowing Honolulu detective who never met a homicide he couldn't unknot. There were more than three dozen movies, mainly in the 1930s and '40s, most famously with white actors Warren Oland and Sidney Toler playing the role in what detractors call "yellowface."
In some ways, Chan is every bit the Chinese caricature he's made out to be by activists and critics. He is inscrutable, spins relentless aphorisms in Confucianese, and speaks in a heavily accented, old-world idiom.
Yet Chan is much more than a facile stereotype. He doesn't do martial arts. He is suave, benevolent, resourceful, acutely observant and brilliant. Beyond his stunning infallibility as a detective, Chan also has a droll, self-effacing sense of humor. What's not to admire about the hero of these mysteries, most of which remain great fun despite being dated and simplistic?
Fox Movie Channel's playlist included a 1935 Chan film featuring Stepin Fetchit as an illiterate black called Snowshoes. Cut along the same lines is Birmingham Brown, the ever-terrified, google-eyed Chan chauffeur played by Mantan Moreland, a sort of Stepin Fetchit-lite who got big laughs in many of the 1940s-era Toler films for turning tail out of fear when a case turned scary. Sample line from Birmingham in panicky flight: "Feets, do your duty."
That's offensive — the gnarled grammar and tone of the character projecting inferiority and low intelligence based on race.
Why didn't Fox Movie Channel have someone with a modicum of sensitivity screen these potboilers before they were cleared for air?
Give the Fox people credit for responding swiftly to viewer concerns. Yet it proclaimed itself a doofus when announcing it canceled its TV festival after being "made aware" that Chan films "may contain situations or depictions that are sensitive to some viewers."
It was just "made aware"? It had no clue, despite past criticisms of these films? Duh. Welcome to the 21st century.
As for white actors with faux slanted eyes playing a Chinese character alongside Asian supporting actors in the Chan movies, the first choice should have been to hire Chinese Charlies. But these decisions were made in the 1930s and '40s. The point: How does rejecting the Chan movies because of casting choices made seven decades ago benefit Asian actors today?
It's hard to see the major harm in principle. Should Laurence Olivier have been banned from playing the coffee-skinned Moor in "Othello"? If it works, it works, the smart course being to make these judgments case by case. If a black or Asian Hamlet is credible, go for that too. But draw the line at Birmingham.
