CASTLE IN THE DESERT

US, 1942, 62 minutes, Black-and-white.
Sydney Toler, Arlene Whelan, Richard Derr, Douglass Dumbrille, Henry Daniell, Edmund Mac Donald, Sen Yung, Ethel Griffies, Steven Geray.
Directed by Harry Lachmann.

This is quite an enjoyable Charlie Chan adventure from the early 1940s, an acknowledgement of World War II with Chan’s son, Jimmy, talking about military training.

The situation involves murder in an elaborate Castle out in the Mojave Desert. There are some poisonings in the house of an eccentric scholar who keeps half of his face masked. He is married to a descendant of the Borgia family and her brother was tried in court for a poisoning but, allegedly, died in the Spanish Civil War.

Charlie Chan receives a letter from the wife inviting him to come to investigate. The townspeople nearby want nothing to do with the Castle but, eventually, a taxi driver agrees to take him. Later, Jimmy will try to get to the Castle along with an entertainingly sinister woman who takes her guidance from the stars (and whom the screenplay puts in the right all the time).

It seems the wife did not write the letter, the scholar’s doctor and his lawyer and his wife are present, an investigator turns up, a history expert is also present – plenty of suspects. Henry Daniell, always sinister no matter what role he took, turns up as a sculptor and claims to be a detective undercover.

Lots of complications although the previous poisonings are explained as fake improvisations in a scheme to get custody of the rich man’s fortune and sending his wife to a mental institution. However, the lawyer is actually murdered, all kinds of investigations and dangers, Jimmy spending his time in a suit of armour, visits to a dungeon re-creating the world of Cesare Borgia.

It was the sculptor was really the long lost brother in disguise who did it!

The film was directed by Harry Lachmann who directed Warner Oland in Charlie Chan at the Circus and directed for Chan films with Sydney Toler from 1940 to 1942.