Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) takes his time as he investigates the case of an eggheaded inventor murdered for devising a way to protect U.S forces from German U-boats. Charlie is backed by wide-eyed assistant Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland), Benson Fong as the over-eager Number Three Son and Marianne Quon as his smart and pretty daughter.
In this well-crafted Chan outing, Number Three Son Tommy comes to the aid of a damsel in distress -- by offering Charlie's services! Leah Manning (Joan Woodbury) has never stopped searching for her father's murderer, although the police and the D.A. gave up long ago. Now she's being further humiliated by an "expert criminologist" who's written a thinly fictionalized book accusing her mother of the crime! Charlie is intrigued enough to start asking around -- and that's when the fun starts.
Some families have reunions -- this one has alibis! In this adventure, Charlie finds himself at odds with an entire family, all of whom detested recently murdered Harper (Frank Reicher), a brilliant, loathsome scientist who invented a gas which makes wood as strong as steel. Assisted by his expensively educated, pseudo-intellectual Number Four Son Eddie (Edwin Luke), panicky partner Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland), a lazy, hayseed sheriff (Alan Bridge) and a houseful of maddening gadgets, Charlie must sleuth his way through the family feud.
Chan is called in to investigate a strange and complicated series of murders by cobra venom, which center around a bank whose vault holds large stores of Government radium. Director Phil Karlson does a remarkable job of making this Chan endeavor into a film noir piece whose foreboding opening sequence has been compared to Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour.
Originally released under the title Black Magic, this unusual film has been a feature on the revival circuit for years. When Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland) gets himself a job as a butler for the Bonner family, he doesnt know that they're con artists who specialize in trick séances. Things get ticklish when Charlie's daughter Frances turns up at one -- making her a suspect when a murder occurs!
The inscrutable Charlie Chan takes on a group of fast-track media types in this Forties sendup of the radio industry. A fatal mistake made by an impatient detective in Chan's employ leads the master sleuth to a New York radio studio, which is somehow connected to a rader operation in the same building.
