Charlie Chan Collection, Vol. 1 (Charlie Chan in London / Charlie Chan in Paris / Charlie Chan in Egypt / Charlie Chan in Shanghai / Eran Trece) | 
| Directors: David Howard, Eugene Forde, Hamilton Macfadden, James Tinling, Lewis Seiler
Actors: Juan Torena, Ana Maria Custodio, Rafael Calvo, Raul Roulien, Blanca De Castejon
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Category: DVD
List Price: $49.98
Buy New: $25.99
You Save: $23.99 (48%)
New (42) Used (11) from $24.09
Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 5959
Format: Box Set, Color, Dolby, Dvd, Full Screen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 4
Running Time: 372 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.5 x 2.5
MPN: FOXD2234490D
UPC: 024543244899
EAN: 0024543244899
ASIN: B000EXDSAW
Theatrical Release Date: January 21, 1935
Release Date: June 20, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Studio: Tcfhe Release Date: 08/14/2007 Run time: 373 minutes
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
 LONG LIVE INSPECTOR CHAN OF THE HONOLULU P.D! March 15, 2006
Ghoulchick (Bronx, New York United States)
173 out of 181 found this review helpful
It's been 3 years since Charlie Chan films were knocked off the Fox Movie channel thanks to the meddling of the P.C. special interest groups. Well, the wait has paid off as these films are coming to dvd. This first collection will not only consist of four great films: Charlie Chan In London (1934), Charlie Chan In Paris (1935), Charlie Chan In Egypt(1935) and Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935). But among the bonuses, we get Eran Trece, a Spanish Language Charlie Chan film made in (1931) Here's a list of all the extras in this set:
The Legacy of Charlie Chan Featurette - 15mins
In Search of Charlie Chan Featurette - 20 mins
The Real Charlie Chan Featurette - 20 mins
Eran Trece Fullscreen Feature (1931) - 79 mins
Charlie Chan In London Theatrical Trailer
Eran Trece Theatrical Trailer
Kudos to Fox Home Video for having the backbone to finally release these films to us mystery lovers. Hopefully, Mr. Moto will soon follow.
Fox comes through! March 18, 2006
Steve Owens (United States)
151 out of 161 found this review helpful
The Charlie Chan series was one of the most successful in Hollywood history and remains very popular today.
Several years ago, Fox spent over $2 million restoring all of their Chan and Mr. Moto films. Based on the limited TV airings they received, these films look and sound the best they have in years. Given Fox's stellar reputation for high quality transfers and their recent conversion to using original poster art for covers, these DVDs will be a wonderful addition to a classic film library.
Although all the Fox Chans benefited from strong writing and high production values, these early films were clearly "A" level productions with elaborate sets and strong supporting casts including Ray Milland and (in an early role) Rita Hayworth.
Kudos to Fox to recognizing the high demand for these films. Let's hope the remaining Chans and Motos will be fast tracked.
Urgent plea to Amazon - please remove the numerous listings of bootleg Chans. If this set is to succeed, consumers can't be confused by illegal wannabees.
Inscutable May 17, 2006
Bennet Pomerantz (Seabrook, Maryland)
55 out of 56 found this review helpful
AMEN THE GREAT CHARLIE CHAN IN A DVD BOX SET
Charlie Chan has always been a mystery hero of mine. This box set has four of the best Charlie Chan in a box. Included in the collection is Charlie Chan In London (1934), Charlie Chan In Paris (1935), Charlie Chan In Egypt(1935) and Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935). Eran Trece, a only Spanish Language Charlie Chan film made (1931) is a bonus to this collection.
I bought some of the loose Chans that MGM released a few years ago. Films titles like Meeting at Midnight, Jade Mask, and Chinese Cat were good, but the masters transfers to DVD didn't seen clean enough copies.
My history with Charlie Chan began about thirty years ago. I remember seeing all the Chan in late 1970's on WDCA channel 20 on sundays. They would run an marathon afternoon of entertainment which started with a Chan film , then a Blondie movie (which are not a DVD yet), and then finally either a Ma and Pa Kettle or a Francis the Talking Mule or a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes.
From those sundays, I was hooked on the Hawaii detective with his children-especially his number one or two sons. The mysteries were classic whodunits, the audience were playing along with the Amazing Chan
So Charlie, welcome to DVD-so when is the other 38 films to be released on DVD in a box sets
Bennet Pomerantz, AUDIOWORLD
Confucius Meets Sherlock Holmes November 16, 2006
Dave Clayton (San Diego, CA USA)
28 out of 28 found this review helpful
Confucius Meets Sherlock Holmes
One of the cultural icons of the 1930s, in print and on screen, was Charlie Chan. As is well known, Chan's creator, Earl Derr Biggers, based the figure upon a real Hawaiian detective,Chang Apana. But underneath the disguise we have no difficulty in detecting the features of Sherlock Holmes. At a moment when Asian characters frequently appeared in Western novels or stage plays as kowtowing houseboys or opium smoking fiends, Biggers showed real audacity in coming up with his sleuth.
But he was tapping into another stereotype, that of China as a land of ancient wisdom populated by oracular mandarins, from whose golden tongues aphorisms from Confucius or Lao Tzu flew like plum blossoms in the spring wind. Charlie Chan is Sherlock Holmes as an Eastern sage. Chan is a man of impeccable dignity and aplomb, who has no bottles hidden in his desk drawers and no blondes lurking in his closet, and who solves crimes by superior skull skills, in the words of Churchy La Femme.
There had been a couple of attempts at transferring Chan to celluloid in the 1920s, but the series really geared up when Fox cast Warner Oland in the role in 1931. Oland, who had previously played Jackie Robin's father in The Jazz Singer and the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu in some early sound pictures at Paramount, was no great actor, but he made the role of Chan incontestably his own. It is just as impossible for anyone who has ever seen Oland as Chan to imagine another actor in the role as it is to imagine anyone other than Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes.
A number of the Oland-Chan pictures have been previously available in VHS format, but this DVD set is an absolute treat, indispensable for Chan fans and for devotees of studio filmmaking in the heyday of Hollywood. The set consists of four pictures starring Oland made from 1934-35, along with Eran Trece (They Were Thirteen), the 1931 Spanish language version of the no longer extant Charlie Chan Carries On. In addition, there are three quite informative and well-made short documentaries dealing with the origin of the Chan figure and its development, the production of the films, etc.
One mystery that might have baffled Chan himself is the omission of The Black Camel (1931) from the set. Photographed partly on location at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and its environs, the movie boasts a cast that includes Bela Lugosi, Robert Young--in his first screen appearance--and Dwight Frye, albeit uncredited. I appreciate the inclusion of EranTrece, but it is mainly a curiosity, and inferior to The Black Camel. Fortunately, the latter film is not lost, and converts to the Chan cult can obtain an acceptable DVD copy of it from Sinister Cinema, which they will want to add to their collections.
All of the pictures in the set are quite entertaining if conventional thrillers set in foreign locales, Eran Trece being the weakest of the lot, mainly owing to Oland's absence. Eran Trece uses a global cruise as background for a murder mystery, while Charlie Chan in London--with a very young Ray Milland--recounts Chan's efforts to free an innocent man facing execution. In Charlie Chan in Paris, the detective visits the City of Lights to clear up a bank fraud, and supplies one of the series' more memorable lines, when he says to a companion, "Many strange crimes committed in the sewers of Paris," while gazing into some impenetrably murky subterranean waters.
Charlie Chan in Egypt centers upon the theft of relics from an Egyptian tomb, and Charlie Chan in Shanghai shows Chan breaking up a ring of opium dealers. Although these are all B productions, usually lacking well-known performers apart from Oland, Fox was a major studio, and the cinematography--honor to your memory, Joseph August, Ernest Palmer, Daniel Clark, and Barney McGill!--and set design are generally outstanding. The opening of the tomb at the beginning of Charlie Chan in Egypt, to cite one example, utterly puts to shame a comparable scene in The Mummy, when archaeologists unearth the tomb of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.
Serious critics at the time would have dismissed the Chan movies as escapism; present day partisans of political correctness would have far harsher things to say. More than anything else, they are relics of a pre-World War II, pre-Cold War America that viewed the outside world with suspicion, if not necessarily hostility. They are not racist but outdated, so outdated that they have acquired the etiolated charm of a once stylish table lamp found moldering in the shadows of an antique store. To use a felicitous phrase of James Joyce's from Finnegan's Wake, they are "Only the fadograph of a yestern scene,"
Most importantly, one of the motives that first brought paying customers into movie theaters burns brightly in all of these films: to transport viewers to hitherto unrevealed lands of excitement and mystery. In the old days, the dimming of the house lights and the opening of the curtains was always the promise of a revelation. For this reason, my favorite of the set is Charlie Chan in Egypt which plunged me into an Egypt of the 1930s hardly less fabulous than that of the pharaohs, mesmerized me with its luminous procession of black and white images, and entrapped me in a silver nitrate labyrinth cleverly fabricated by the Fox studio. On the veranda, I sipped a gin and tonic, while an overpowering odor of ancient incense filled my nostrils. Could it be the same incense Ardath Bey burns for Helen Grosvenor in The Mummy?
Hey Fox, it's about time!! March 26, 2006
The Purple Heart (USA)
51 out of 57 found this review helpful
The Fox studios finally decided to tell the P C folks to go take a ---- and please the mystery movie buffs who see nothing but pure, wholesome mystery entertainment in these great, old, films. I must make you aware that the pics of the litter will be the ones from 1931 to 1938. In this release " The Black Camel ", you will see Bela in a small supporting role and appearing very non - Drac. The studio did put more cash into each of those efforts in that period when Warner Oland potrayed Chan.
The following years when Sidney Toler took over the reins as Chan the budget was smaller, the story lines not quite as good, and the rating for the Chan of 1939 - 46 should actually be 4 stars. So this rating is a mixed bag by circumstance.
I do have all the Chan movies ( taped off TV ) and seldom watch the Roland Winters / Chan efforts. Jimmy Chan and "Birmingham" Brown do lend a hand but the plots and productions show a lesser effort. Just buy the groups that make you happy and "light up a mystery" for the whole family.
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