Charlie Chan lovers will be in heaven with Fox Home Entertainment's new Charlie Chan Collection Vol. 3, which brings to DVD four more Chan films starring Warner Oland. All twelve of his existing Chan films are now available in fine-quality transfers; the remaining four are unfortunately presumed lost.

Among the four in this set is The Black Camel (1931), Oland's second Chan film and the earliest to survive. (His first, Charlie Chan Carries On [1931], as well as his third, fourth and fifth, are the lost ones.) The Black Camel may also be the best in this enjoyable, popular series. Why? Because it has a particularly good, serious story, is tremendously visually striking, and presents a more human Chan than most of the other titles.

You won't find any camels, black or otherwise, in The Black Camel. The story is set in Chan's hometown of Honolulu and takes its title from one of Chan's many aphorisms: "Death is a black camel that kneels unbidden at every gate," he intones ominously. One murder - that of a beautiful movie star on location in Hawaii - sets the plot in motion, but another murder eventually follows, and Chan quickly discovers a connection to still another murder: a famous unsolved case of a Hollywood star from years earlier.

The intriguing whodunit is based on an Earl Biggers novel of the same name (Biggers invented the Charlie Chan character), but it also bears some resemblances to the scandal surrounding the real-life Hollywood murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, a case which is still unsolved.

The director of this movie is Hamilton MacFadden, a talented veteran of Broadway who came to Hollywood one year earlier. While The Black Camel has an occasionally stagy feel, for the most part it's exceptionally fluid and beautifully shot - especially for such an early talkie. It was filmed almost entirely on location in Hawaii, and the feel of the place leaps off the screen. The cinematographer for the exteriors was the great Joseph August, and MacFadden himself can be seen in a bit role as the director of the movie-within-the-movie.

As for Charlie Chan himself, he's given a chance to be quite human here. There's an amazing little sequence of him presiding over a family dinner with his wife and ten children; he also makes fun of his own driving and even loses his temper at one point. And of course, he's got aphorisms galore. "Always harder to keep murder secret than for egg to bounce on sidewalk," he says. At another point, someone tells him, "Your theory's full of holes. It doesn't hold water." Chan's reply: "Sponge is full of holes. Sponge holds water." You can't argue with that!

Elsewhere in the cast is Robert Young, making his screen debut portraying an actor. It's not much of a part, but he definitely shows some presence. And Bela Lugosi is on hand as a shady psychic. To realize just how huge Legosi was at this time, consider that Dracula (1931) opened in theaters just two months before shooting on The Black Camel began. Lugosi and Oland display excellent chemistry in their scenes together and it's a shame they were never paired again.

Fox Home Entertainment has spent a lot of time and effort on this box set. It's an outstanding package, with featurettes, stills, restoration comparisons, commentaries and liner notes accompanying the various titles, which for the record also include Charlie Chan's Secret (1936), Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937) and Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1937). There's even an entire extra film included: Behind That Curtain (1929), a mediocre picture which nonetheless boasts the first talkie appearance by Charlie Chan, albeit only in the last few minutes. (E.L. Park plays the role.)

The Black Camel itself comes with a good commentary track by John Cork and Ken Hanke which mixes historical fact with formal analysis, as well as an audio version of Charlie Chan's Chance (1932), one of the lost films, recreated with a spoken screenplay set to production stills of the picture.

For more information about The Black Camel, visit Fox Home Entertainment. To order The Black Camel, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold