Charlie Chan at the Opera Review: Karloff and Chan Make a Great Team

If you want some old-school spooky vibes with a side of loud singing, Charlie Chan at the Opera is absolutely worth an hour of your life tonight. Mystery nerds and classic horror fans will eat this up, mostly because Boris Karloff is in it. Anyone who hates old-fashioned stagey acting or gets annoyed by 1930s yellowface casting should probably skip this one. 🎭

Honestly, I put this on expecting a cheap B-movie. But it actually has some real style to it, even if the sets look like they were borrowed from three other movies.

The story is simple. Boris Karloff plays Gravelle, a guy who lost his memory and got locked in an asylum for over a decade.

He escapes, naturally. And he heads straight to the opera house where his old wife is singing, probably because he wants some good old revenge.

Warner Oland plays Charlie Chan, and he's as calm as ever. He just wanders around the opera house, looking at things through his little magnifying glass while everyone else is screaming.

I love Keye Luke as his son, Lee. He is just so excited to be helping, like a golden retriever who got into the coffee grounds. ☕

There is this one bit where Lee tries to sneak into the theater and gets caught immediately. It is hilarious because he is not stealthy at all.

Fox was having a wild year in 1936, pumping out sweet family films like Captain January while also making these weird, moody murder mysteries.

The opera itself is pretty funny. They hired Oscar Levant to write a fake opera called "Carnival" just for this movie, and it sounds incredibly dramatic.

Karloff doesn't even sing his own parts, but he mimes it with so much intensity. You can see his neck veins popping.

The cop in this movie is played by William Demarest. He is basically just screaming his lines the entire time. 🤬

Every time Demarest is on screen, the noise level doubles. I think he was trying to act for the back row of a completely different theater.

Some of the pacing gets a bit weird in the middle. Like, we stop the mystery for about five minutes just to watch a lady sing a solo.

It is a bit of a drag, but then Karloff sneaks around in the shadows and the vibe gets instantly better.

The ending is pretty rushed. I think the writers just run out of time, and Chan basically explains everything in two minutes while everyone stands around looking confused.

But hey, for a movie that is less than seventy minutes long, you get a lot of bang for your buck.

A few random thoughts before I go:

• That makeup on Karloff is genuinely creepy when he first escapes.
• The dressing rooms in this opera house are bigger than my entire apartment.
• I am pretty sure one of the extras in the crowd scene is asleep.
• Chan's proverbs are extra fortune-cookie this time around, but Oland delivers them with such nice warmth.

It is not a masterpiece, but its a great late-night watch with the lights turned down.