Charlie Chan on Broadway review: Keye Luke steals the show (again)

If you want a cozy, fast-talking 1930s mystery to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, Charlie Chan on Broadway is absolutely worth an hour of your life. 🌧️

People who love classic detective tropes and snappy newspaper reporters will have a blast with this. But if you can't get past the obvious casting of a white Swedish actor playing a Chinese detective, you will want to skip it entirely.

Honestly, I watched this mostly for Keye Luke.

He plays Lee Chan, the "Number One Son," and his energy is just so fun to watch compared to Oland's slow, measured delivery. They have this great dynamic where Lee tries so hard to be a cool American detective but constantly trips over his own feet.

It reminds me a bit of those old silent shorts like The Lost Detective, where the sleuth is mostly just stumbling into clues.

The plot is your standard 1930s melodrama. A singer named Billie has a diary that can ruin half the criminals in New York, and surprise, surprise, she gets murdered in a nightclub.

The whole thing takes place in this highly stylized version of Broadway that only existed on a Hollywood backlot. Everyone is wearing tuxedos, drinking champagne, and talking at a million miles an hour.

The Little Details I Noticed

• The cop, Inspector Flaherty, is played by Harold Huber and he is just constantly shouting. Seriously, my ears were ringing by the end.
• There is a scene where a character hides a gun in a hollowed-out book, and the camera zoom is so dramatic it made me laugh out loud.
• Look closely at the newspaper headlines shown in the montage—one of them has a typo in the subheader, but it goes by so fast you will miss it if you blink.

The movie does drag a bit in the middle when they get into the nitty-gritty of the diary's contents. It feels like the writers realized they needed to stretch the runtime to 68 minutes, so they added a bunch of scenes of people staring at safes.

But then Donald Woods shows up as this cynical, fast-talking reporter and the energy spikes right back up.

Also, can we talk about how casual everyone is about crime scenes back then? People are just wandering in, touching the desk, picking up clues, and smoking cigarettes over the body. 🕵️‍♂️

It's amazing Charlie Chan ever solved anything with all these amateurs messing up his crime scenes. Its a miracle he found any fingerprints at all.

If you want a deep, mind-bending thriller, this isn't it. But for a quick dose of nostalgia and some genuinely funny banter, it's a cozy little ride.