Charlie Chan at Treasure Island *** (1939, Sidney Toler, Cesar Romero, Pauline Moore) – Classic Movie Review 9051

Director Norman Foster’s 1939 comedy crime mystery thriller Charlie Chan at Treasure Island is a gripping series episode with a useful guest star turn from Cesar Romero as a conjurer called Rhadini helping Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) to show that Charlie’s writer buddy’s ‘suicide’ was actually murder at the San Francisco Bay’s Treasure Island Golden Gate International Exposition show.

John Francis Larkin’s original story and screenplay and Foster’s handling are above average, there are several usual pearls of wisdom aphorisms (‘favourite pastime of man is fooling himself’), and there is a fine clutch of crazy characters with the ideal actors to play them.

Also in the cast are Pauline Moore, Victor Sen Yung, Douglas Fowley, June Gale, Sally Blane, Wally Vernon, Donald MacBride, Douglass Dumbrille, Louis Jean Heydt, Trevor Bardette, Billie Seward and Charles Halton, with Gerald Mohr in his film debut as blackmailing phony mystic Dr Zodiac (uncredited), who may have been a part inspiration for the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco in the late Sixties.

The 22nd of 47 Charlie Chan movies, it follows Charlie Chan in Reno (1939) and is followed by City in Darkness (1939).

The film’s Treasure Island is a man-made island in the San Francisco Bay built in 1936-37 for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40. Later, the US Navy used the site, and from the Eighties it has been used by film and TV companies with two aircraft hangars converted to sound stages.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 9051

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com