One of the better early Charlie Chan entries, with some spooky atmospherics (even if you know immediately that the psychics are fakes), some twists, and an outcome that may be surprising precisely because it names as the guilty party one of the most suspicious characters! Major debit: the butler's unsuccessful comic relief. My favorite Chan line: "Best place for skeleton is in family closet". **1/2 out of 4.

I really enjoyed this. Our irrepressible detective finds himself at the home of an old friend who is trying to locate her son who disappeared years ago. While it is unlikely he is alive, her connections to the spirit world through a couple Mystics and her ouija board tell her otherwise. Charlie, respecting the workings of the occult from his Oriental heritage, isn't sure the young man is dead. Well, interestingly enough, he turns up one day, only to be killed at a seance. This throws the whole issue of inheritance into a tizzy. The old lady would be disinherited and her children affected. There are four or five suspects but no evidence. Charlie must set some kind of trap to draw out the culprit. While I pretty much had this figured out way ahead, I still enjoyed it. Mainly, because I wanted to see how he played his cards. By the way, there is some pretty good CSI work done here.

Charlie Chan's Secret reminds me a bit of Random Harvest in that it dealt with a man who disappeared and then reappeared to claim the family title and fortune. There was a bit of grumbling when Ronald Colman reappeared in that film, but the Rainer family accepted him soon enough.That was hardly the case for the heir in this film. Warner Oland first gets involved in the case when the heir is reported lost at sea off Honolulu. Oland then flies to San Francisco to make his report and the heir reappears only to be knifed to death.His reappearance upset a lot of people or at the very least caused them great inconvenience. Mother Henriette Crossman was a believer in psychics and a pair of them Gloria Roy and Arthur Carew have been operating a con game at her expense. But there's also a daughter and husband, a disgruntled family caretaker, a lawyer and a business manager whose lives would also be upset by a reappearance of the heir. The usual stew of suspects.Who is not a suspect is Herbert Mundin who was a delightful British music hall performer who played a variety of milquetoast like characters in many Hollywood films. He's the butler and in this film, one where none of Charlie Chan's sons appear, he plays the comic foil for Warner Oland and Mundin is his usual funny self.A clever Chan ruse unmasks the killer. This is one of the best of Charlie Chan features.

I've worked my way recently through about 10 of the films in the Chan series and this is one of the most compelling I've seen yet -- largely due to the good chemistry between Warner Oland and Henrietta Crosman, who is one of the more memorable of the leading ladies in the series. True, the Chan family is missing -- except when viewed briefly in a photograph at the film's very end -- and the San Francisco location isn't very convincing; it is hard to place the "ancient" house where much of the action takes place in a city where most everything was burnt to the ground in 1906. Nevertheless many of the typically alluring elements of the Chan films are present in full force -- society ladies in long dresses, a shady pair of mediums, séances that come to a screaming end, pitch black scenes in secret rooms, and odd applications of 1930s technology. Jonathan Hale is a welcome presence and the comic relief supplied by Herbert Mundin as the butler stops short of being annoying, which is more than one can say for some of the later entries in the series. All in all quite satisfying.