Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Memorable, crazy movie

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Sidney Toler is fine as always but the budget has noticeably shrunk in this first series entry produced by Monogram Pictures. It's not that the plot or the dialog are especially weak....it's just that many scenes and conversations do not really appear to have been rehearsed. Benson Fong and Marianne Quan are silly but fun as number three son Tommy and number two daughter Iris. Their famous father is now in Washington on a wartime assignment and the kids are visiting: "Secret service, huh?" Fong notes. "Bet Pop needs my help if he wants to keep this job." The plot concerns a scientist developing plans for some special bombs that he tests in a tub of water in his laboratory. He has dinner guests but never makes it from the lab down to the dining room—"He's dead and the plans are missing" about sums it up when Mr. Chan arrives on the scene, having been assigned to investigate. All of the guests are suspects…which of them are spies? The complicated murders are done using electrical and magnetic tricks, which Chan eventually works out with both assistance and interference from his kids. Mantan Moreland has a couple of good lines as a guest's employee; soon the series would find him in a larger role as Chan's chauffeur but here he merely gets a few scenes of comic relief. It does look hastily put together and includes some uncertain performances and odd pauses...but hey, it's not meant to be anything fancy. Enjoyable if unspectacular.

****SPOILERS**** Master detective Charlie Chan, Sidney Toler, lends his hand in helping the war effort against the Nazis by working part-time for the US Secret Service in solving the murder of inventor George Melton who was electrocuted and his plans for a anti-U-boat underwater bomb stolen. The bomb would wipe out the German U-Boat menace that's sinking millions of tons of allied shipping in the North Atlantic.Charlie checking out the guests that the late George Milton invited at his mansion feels that one of them is a Nazi spy and did the guy in as well as stole his secret plans to combat the Nazi U-Boats. There's also Charile's #3 son as well as daughter, he has a family of 14 children, Tommy & Iris who by trying to put in their two cent in makes Charlie's job of finding the killer even more difficult. As Charlie is about to crack the case wide open the person he uses to do it the escapee from fascism Louis Vega is shot dead by an electro magnetized activated gun before he can expose the killer.***SPOILERS*** Despite all the road blocks, like his kids as well as his man servant the eye popping and bumbling Birmingham Brown, Charlie gets to the bottom of what happened to both Melton & Vega that was at the bottom of a piano that the killer used to off one of his victims. Trying to play it real cool and escape his or her fate the killer tried to make a run or better yet walk from the scene but Charlie had all the escape routs blocked and had him brought to justice, in this being wartime, without as much as having him read his rights and have a lawyer present. P.S "Charlie Chan in the Secret Service" was the first Charlie Chan movie produced by Monogram Studios after 20th Century Fox dropped the series.

Charlie Chan (Sydney Toler) is an agent of the United States government assigned to investigate the mysterious death of an inventor.I have to wonder, how did they make dozens of these films without being called out as racist? I mean, there is nothing downright anti-Chinese in the picture, but having a white man play Chan... Why? This was the first film made by Monogram Pictures after the series was dropped by 20th Century Fox, and it marked the introduction of Number Three Son (Benson Fong) and taxi driver Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland). Moreland is incredible, from "King of the Zombies" up through "Spider Baby". I wish he had been more than a background character in most of his films.

A house full of guests is the setting for this mystery story, wherein a scientist is murdered. Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) investigates, along with his two irksome kids. The wonderful Mantan Moreland plays a bug-eyed Birmingham Brown, a role inserted presumably to add comic relief.This sixty-three minute film contains about fifty minutes of story. The rest is filler, mostly in the film's first half. The story, about a secret WWII torpedo plan, is simple and direct. It's the kind of film I can envision as being typical for a 1940's Saturday afternoon matinée. There's a stage play quality to it, in that most of the scenes take place in three or four rooms. As with other films in the Chan series, the production design here is minimal and cheap looking. The emphasis is on the whodunit puzzle, but that's what counts most for murder mystery fans.And the script does provide a good puzzle. The killer is camouflaged amid well thought out red herrings, in a way that makes solving the puzzle not real easy.For Charlie Chan fans, this is one of the better mysteries in the Monogram series. For everyone else, the film has little or nothing to offer.