CITY IN DARKNESS
US, 1939, 75 minutes, Black-and-white.
Sidney Toler, Lynn Barry, Richard Clarke, Harold Huber, Pedro De Cordoba, Dorothy Tree, C.Henry Gordon, Douglass Dumbrille, Leo Carroll, Lon Chaney Jr.
Directed by Herbert I. Leeds.
City in Darkness is one of the earliest Charlie Chan films with Sidney Toler taking up the rule from Warner Öland.
The film is surprisingly topical, incorporating at the beginning quite an amount of contemporary newsreel footage, of Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, raising the issues of the Czechoslovakian problems of 1938 and the possibility of the beginnings of World War II. Chamberlain goes to Munich and there is a respite for one year. In many ways, the screenplay is quite prescient, indicating the effect of the war.
Charlie Chan is being celebrated in Paris while there are preparations for war, flights over the city, blackouts, gas masks. Chan is supposed to leave for the United States but a dealer, Leo Carroll, sells a ticket to an agitated woman, Lynn Barry. The audience, in the meantime, has seen criminals involved in illicit arms deals.
There are several strands in the mystery including locals doing a robbery, the agent of the arms deal for the perpetrators is a financier who is in on the deals; and there is his butler whose son is going to war.
The drama is quite interesting but there is comic relief in the character of the police inspector from Romania, training in Paris, played by Harold Huber who was in many of the Charlie Chan films portraying a variety of nationalities. He is the equivalent in this film of Charlie Chan’s sons who are eager, rushing to conclusions.
The shady financier is murdered, there is suspicion on one of his workers who is to expose him and is being framed, his wife trying to get the tickets for him to get out of Paris. The smugglers are exposed – and the person who killed the financier turns out to be the butler who had overheard the plot and confronted him, self defence in a patriotic confrontation.
All the Charlie Chan ingredients but very topical in preparation for the experience of World War II.
