Charlie Chan Carries On (film) Charlie Chan Carries On (film) Charlie Chan Carries On is a 1931 American pre-Code mystery film directed by Hamilton MacFadden and starring Warner Oland, John Garrick and Marguerite Churchill. It is the very first appearance of Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. Part of the long-running Charlie Chan series, it was based on the 1930 novel of the same title by Earl Derr Biggers. It is now considered a lost film; however, Fox simultaneously filmed a Spanish-language version which was released under the title "Eran Trece"—"There Were Thirteen"—and this version survives. Charlie Chan tries to solve the murder of a wealthy
Charlie Chan Biggers's sympathetic treatment of the Chinese reflected and contributed to the greater acceptance of Chinese-Americans in the first third of [the twentieth] century." S. T. Karnick writes in the "National Review" that Chan is "a brilliant detective with understandably limited facility in the English language [whose] powers of observation, logic, and personal rectitude and humility made him an exemplary, entirely honorable character." Ellery Queen called Biggers's characterization of Charlie Chan "a service to humanity and to inter-racial relations." Dave Kehr of "The New York Times" said Chan "might have been a stereotype, but he was a stereotype on the side