It's a brief biography of Warner Oland, first of the talking-movie Charlie Chans, and it's interesting, partly because it is so concise.
Oland was born in a small town in Sweden and came to Boston as a child with his parents. (Baptists in a land of Lutherans.) English was his second language, learned in school. He grew up in Massachusetts and later maintained a farm there, where he and his family spent their happiest hours evidently. He traveled to Hollywood to make movies, beginning with "The Jazz Singer," where he had only one line -- "Stop!" He'd already established himself as an actor who could convincingly play Asians but his career was set in cement when he took on the role of Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers' Chinese detective on the Honolulu Police force. Oland took the role seriously. A lot of actors come to feel shackled by playing the same person repeatedly. (Basil Rathbone was pretty sick of Sherlock Holmes.) But Oland read up on the history of China and its philosophy, or rather philosophies. So the documentary tells us. I'm not sure how seriously such a claim should be taken. Studios had a tendency to blatantly lie in order to promote their products and contract players.
Oland never struck me as a convincing Chinese guy. None of them did. Sidney Toler, who followed Oland in the role at another studio, probably came closest. The problem with Toler is that his budgets were lower and it shows. The dozen or so Chans with Oland took the detective and (usually) one or another of his enumerated sons and a frightened African-American chauffeur all over the world, but the films were always shot in a studio anyway.
Oland appears to have been a nice enough man. If he had any particularly interesting quirks -- a closet full of ladies' shoes or something -- we don't learn about them. He played Chan from 1931 to 1937. "At Monte Carlo" was his last. Half-way through the series he began to drink a bit before some scenes to loosen him up and give him more spontaneity. By the time of "Monte Carlo" he was pounding a lot of booze and, as one of his admiring talking heads admits, "the director had to prop him up." The talking heads include Kay Linaker, one of the leads in "Monte Carlo." Shortly after his last movie, he made a visit to his home town in Sweden with his family, became ill, and died at 58 in Stockholm. The subtitle of the documentary isn't very exact. It's not about the last days of Warner Oland. It's about Warner Oland.
I said that the documentary was interesting partly because it was short and I sort of meant it. His life was just interesting enough to be covered briefly, but he was no Byron or Hemingway or Robert Louis Stevenson. He didn't really DO much that was exciting. Heavy drinking by a star of B features is prendre pour acquis. Nothing new there. But what we see on the screen is sufficiently focused that you're not likely to be bored by it. Fans of Chan will, of course, be enthralled.
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