The Feathered Serpent

As most of you probably know, throughout the Warner Oland Charlie Chan films at Fox, his sidekick was "Number One Son" Lee, played by Keye Luke. Lee was the best of all the Chan children and sidekicks. He was charming and funny but you could also take him seriously as a potential detective, unlike son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung), who was pretty much always played for laughs. After Oland died, Luke left the series and returned here many years later. But the Charlie Chan series was in the sewer by this time. The series was at Monogram and on its last legs with the worst of all Charlie Chans, Roland Winters, as the star. Since Monogram's answer to every problem with the Charlie Chan series was to add more sidekicks, that's exactly what they do here. Welcome back, Lee Chan.

The plot sees Charlie and his sons Lee and Tommy investigating a kidnapping in Mexico. There's also some stuff about an Aztec treasure but that never goes anywhere interesting. This is the penultimate Charlie Chan film at Monogram. It's crap, of course, as all of the Winters Chans were. It seems likely to me they took some sort of jungle adventure script and shoehorned Chan into it to make it a mystery. Still, it's probably the best of the Winters Chan films because of the return of Keye Luke as well as seeing him team up with Victor Sen Yung as the erroneously-named Tommy. Unfortunately, there's also Roland Winters and Mantan Moreland. You take the good, you take the bad I guess.