For the third volume of its Charlie Chan releases, FoxVideo has plunged more deeply into the history and background of the character and the actor behind the role as it was made famous -- Warner Oland -- than ever before, and with most impressive results. Indeed, the special feature accompanying Charlie Chan In Monte Carlo, entitled Charlie Chan Is Missing: The Last Days Of Warner Oland, is almost worth the price of the set -- forget the disc -- by itself, for the biography that it presents on Oland. The movies themselves -- The Black Camel (which, otherwise, has never been seen in a home viewing format, including television, until now), Charlie Chan On Broadway, Charlie Chan In Monte Carlo, and Charlie Chan's Secret -- look sensational, within the limits of the surviving materials. It's something of a mystery as to why Fox waited until the third volume of the series to issue The Black Camel, the earliest surviving one of the Oland Chan films -- but it has some of the most severe material problems (mostly overcome, within limits, here), and one supposes that they wanted to establish the high quality of the best transfers as a benchmark before aiming for the hisitorically essential material. Charlie Chan In Monte Carlo appears on a double-sided DVD -- the last of Oland's films, it is accompanined by the biographical documentary on him, while the opposite side contains Behind The Curtain, the first of the Fox films to include the Chan character. The Black Camel comes accompanied by a sterling commentary track by Ken Hanke and John Cork, who range freely across the many and varies aspects of the movie, the character, and the unusual nature of the movie itself, among the most unusual of the Chan movies. This disc also contains a featurette, Charlie Chan's Chance: The Recreation of a Lost Chan Film, which is a fascinating effort to represent in audio terms a now-lost film in the series -- the 2007 audio performance is accompanied by stills from the original production, whichj exist in the 20th Century-Fox archives. If the commentary on The Black Camel is worth the price of admission -- and it is -- then the recreation is a phenomenally enlighting and entertaining bonus, and makes this an especially rewarding disc. (One of the actors sounds an awful lot like Lloyd Nolan who, of course, did his own detective films for Fox a few years after the Chan movies.
