Sub-Gumshoe

If strength were all, tiger would not fear scorpion.

With proper lever, baby's fingers can move mountain.

In darkness sometimes difficult to distinquish hawk from vulture.

Long journey always start with one short step.

Analects of Confucius? Maxims of Mao?

Actually, the sayings are those of that less celebrated but no less sage Oriental, Charlie Chan. To the world's most renowned Chinese detective, life was just a bowl of fortune cookies, to be cracked continually like homicide cases. Created in the late '20s by Earl Diggers as the hero of a whodunit series, Charlie had the shortcoming of his country's cooking--two hours after he solved a case, audiences were hungry for another sleuthing. Hollywood tried to oblige: between 1926 and 1949, it turned out 47 Charlie Chan features and serials. There were also such spin-offs as a comic strip, a radio show and a short-lived TV series. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which is more accustomed to honoring film giants such as Jean-Luc Godard, Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, opened a Charlie Chan festival that will exhume 23 of his movies, most of which are familiar to late-show devotees.

In his long film career as a supersleuth, Charlie was portrayed by six actors, none of them Chinese.* Best remembered are Warner Oland, a Swede, who appeared in 16 features, and Sidney Toler, a Missourian, who lumbered woodenly through 22 pictures portraying Charlie as the still life of the party. Made on B-picture budgets, the Chan films show their age with simple-minded mysteries solvable in the second reel by any post-Bond youngster of eight. They also rely heavily on antique comic relief as subtle as a pig bladder. Charlie's No. 1 and No. 2 sons incessantly glue up the clues, and a procession of Negro buffoons (Mantan Moreland, Stepin Fetchit, Willie Best) pop their eyes at every corpse. But bad as the films were, they were also an undergraduate school through which passed some able and attractive players, among them Rita Hayworth, Ray Milland and William Holden. For Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), Oscar Levant actually composed an original opera.

Clearly, what brought audiences back to the Bijou time and again was not the thrill of solving the mystery before Chan did but the homely wisdom of the sub-gumshoe, a man who always had an axiom to grind. With articles and conjunctions thrown to the wind, Charlie's observations usually made up in specific gravity what they lacked in grammar:

To describe bitter medicine will not improve flavor.

Door of opportunity swing both ways.

Intuitions are keys to door of truth.

Friends, like fiddlestrings, should not be stretched too tight.

Mind like parachute--only function when open.

Mao Tse-tung pamphlets are still a hot item, and Quotations from Chairman LBJ sold out two weeks before publication. Packed between cloth covers, Charlie's chantings might well provide college campuses with a new pop-cult bestseller.

*Although two--George Kuwa and Kamiyama Sojin--were Japanese.

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