IF SHERLOCK HOLMES CAN COME BACK, WHY NOT CHARLIE CHAN?

DECEMBER 19, 2011, 1:01 PM ET

The next new “Sherlock Holmes” movie is out, and if you loved the first film, it’s more of what you loved — more slam-bang Victorian action, more whimsically anachronistic dialogue, more sly homoerotic innuendo and of course, more Robert Downey Jr. doing what he does best, which is to say, upend every convention of the action hero with Thorazine-smacked mania and tightrope-dancing wit. Also, Jude Law’s in it, doing his Jude Law thing, neither objectionable nor memorable — and rather eclipsed by more interesting turns from Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace and Stephen Fry (Stephen Fry!).

Of course, this isn’t a movie review column, so that’s as far as I’ll go in talking about the film, its plot and whether or not you should see it. (Maybe try Joe Morgenstern?) Instead, let me share a quick spoiler synopsis of the scene from “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” that precipitated my musings this week.

About ten minutes into the film, our hero Holmes, per his usual modus operandi, dons a disguise in order to freely observe and tail the object of his investigations, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, briefly returning from the first film).

What’s startling here is the masquerade Holmes chooses — that of a pipe-puffing Chinese layabout, complete with long queue, Fu Manchu facial hair and pronounced squint. Though the costume isn’t presented as broad ethnic caricature, it’s still a bit of a blink-and-gulp moment for viewers aware of the long and uncomfortable tradition of racial mimicry in movies. Especially detective movies.

Because the most famous Asian gumshoe in the grand canon of Hollywood cinema is also the one most famously played by non-Asian actors: Charlie Chan, the rotund spouter of fortune-cookie wisdom portrayed onscreen in forty-odd feature films by the likes of Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters, all of them white guys wearing makeup very similar to Downey’s “Chinaman” outfit.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think the passing yellowface moment in “A Game of Shadows” is particularly offensive; there’s a context for it in the plot, and even if it’s played for laughs, well, so are all of Holmes’s fanciful disguises.

The reason I bring this up is because it actually raises an interesting question: If Sherlock Holmes can be resurrected and refreshed for a brand new generation…why not Charlie Chan?

You might think the comparison is laughable; Sherlock Holmes is a classic character, rooted in stories that stood the test of generations. Hollywood has produced dozens of film and television adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales. He’s a known quantity.

But Dan Lin, producer of the new Sherlock Holmes franchise, says that his idea to do a new take on the chronicles of 221-B Baker Street’s celebrated tenant initially met with broad skepticism. “We were pitching a period action film with actors speaking in British accents,” says Lin. “People didn’t think it would play with contemporary audiences.” Until, of course, they found out otherwise. The first Holmes film made half a billion dollars worldwide.

And believe it or not, Charlie Chan’s track record in Hollywood stands toe-to-toe with that of his British counterpart: Most of the 46 movies made in the ’30s and ’40s featuring the mild-mannered Hawaiian detective were huge box office successes. (According to New Yorker writer Jill Lepore, they were the primary engine keeping 20th Century Fox alive during the Great Depression.) Though Chan faded from the spotlight in the ’50s, two decades later, he was revived in the oddest of contexts: An animated Hanna-Barbera kids’ series called “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan,” featuring a cartoon version of the detective and his ten crime-solving kids, which ran for two seasons on CBS in the early ’70s, and can still be seen in reruns today on the cable channel Boomerang.

So there’s no commercial reason to believe that Chan couldn’t make a comeback, given the right cast, director and revisionist reboot. The forces that have stopped prior attempts to reclaim this piece of Hollywood history aren’t economic, but political.

“There’s just one reason why Charlie Chan is still dead today, and that’s the history of yellowface,” says Yunte Huang, whose book “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective” is a fascinating investigation into the history and real-life inspiration behind Earl Derr Biggers’s character. “Anyone who wants to bring him back hits that taboo. And that’s something that I argue with. I think we need an honest reckoning with America’s racist past, which is also very rich with creativity. Instead of suppressing it, you have to come to terms with it. How can we take these stories and do them in a better way today?”

The reinvention of Holmes offers a fascinating example of how that could happen.

“The thing we saw was that the original stories were really classic buddy-cop adventures that happened to be told in a period setting,” says Lin. “Holmes and Watson, [Lethal Weapon’s] Riggs and Murtaugh, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That’s a classic setup for any generation — yin meets yang.”

Lin’s invocation of yin and yang calls out another interesting dimension in the new Holmes franchise: Its embrace of action choreography, visuals and even humor that have, well, a distinctively Asian flavor.

For example, Holmes is presented as an expert martial artist — and not in the quintessentially English “sweet science” of boxing, but in a distinctively Asian-inspired discipline, full of chops, kicks, throws and holds that wouldn’t be out of place in a dojo or octagon. There’s even a running device in the franchise that’s a direct homage to classic martial arts concepts, an artifice Lin refers to as “Holmes Vision,” in which Holmes imagines all of the options and consequences of a fight prior to it actually happening, mentally beating his opponent before the first move is made.

The antecedent to Holmes Vision can be seen onscreen in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film “Hero,” in the incredible fight sequence between Jet Li’s Nameless and Donnie Yen’s Sky: The two masters stand motionless as they play out the eventual combat in their minds again and again, knowing that the first person forced to move has lost.

When these elements are called out, Lin is initially surprised. “I wouldn’t say that there’s been a conscious inspiration from Asian sources in the Holmes films,” he says. But then, on further consideration, he warms to the idea: “With [director] Guy Ritchie you have someone who’s immersed in pop culture, in graphic novels and in world cinema. And all of that is what shapes his work. The particular type of big action you see, the fighting styles he uses, you can definitely see that influence. And then there’s the theme behind the franchise, which is really brotherhood. That’s a fundamentally Asian theme: Fealty, fraternal loyalty, doing whatever you can to get your guy’s back. That’s right out of John Woo.”

Lin notes that even Holmes’s traditional characterization has some similarities to Asian stereotypes: “He’s depicted as being stoic, cerebral, emotionally reserved,” he says. “He’s intensely focused on his work, and he’s not interested in glory or credit, so his motivations are hard to understand.”

Huang goes one step further. “What makes Sherlock Holmes interesting — what makes any detective character interesting — is that he’s inscrutable,” he says. “That’s been a stigma for Asians, the idea that people don’t know what we’re thinking and that we’re impossible to understand. But for a movie sleuth, being mysterious and inscrutable is a strength, not a weakness.”

So imagine a reinvented Charlie Chan — younger, leaner, rawer and primed for action; a Hawaiian Chinese cop shaped by the tradition and philosophy of his ancestors, but firmly embedded in American culture. Someone with humble beginnings (and the humility to remember them), who’s risen to his position as a top crimefighter through sheer wit, will and the ability to be tough when it counts and smooth when needed.

That’s a pretty fair description of the real-life “Charlie Chan” — Hawaiian police officer Chang Apana, whose career inspired Harvard-educated novelist Earl Derr Biggers to create his iconic P.I., although Biggers’s translation of Apana erased the original’s flamboyant personality and daredevil ways. (Apana often went out in disguise to root out drug dealers and gamblers, rode a stallion through town like a Wild West marshal, and wielded a mean rawhide bullwhip in his fight against the denizens of Honolulu’s dark underbelly.)

Huang says he’s fascinated by those contrasts, between the historical Chang and his fictional counterpart Chan — the hot-blooded real Asian and the mild-mannered faux one — and he’s found a like-minded collaborator in filmmaker Wayne Wang, who’s optioned Huang’s book for the silver screen.

“Wayne and I are co-writing the script,” says Huang. “We’ve been back and forth with a few drafts already. And what we want to do is tell the story of something that actually happened: The meeting between Chang Apana and Warner Oland, the Swedish-born actor who played Charlie Chan on the big screen.”

Huang and Wang are hoping to get Jack Nicholson for the role of Oland. “That’s our dream, and it’s a very real possibility,” says Huang. The film would reveal the real story of Apana, even as it revisited the history of the Hollywood version. But it wouldn’t be a biopic.

“There are documentary aspects, because we’re talking about real human beings here,” says Huang. “But really, we see it more as a buddy film.”

Making a film that people will actually want to see, as opposed to a dry historical document, is critical, he says. “We want to do this right, because we probably only get one chance. If we can’t do it right this time, Charlie Chan really will be completely dead.”

Huang points out that the film that launched Wayne Wang’s directorial career was titled “Chan Is Missing”: “So doing this movie is really a full circle for him. Forty years later, he wants to say, Chan Is Back.”

Though Charlie Chan is the most iconic Asian sleuth in the annals of detective fiction, he’s not the only one. The success of Biggers’s best-selling books spawned imitators, most notably John Marquand’s Japanese detective Mr. Moto and Hugh Wiley’s “gentlemanly Oriental” snoop Mr. Wong. Both of these characters were brought to the silver screen in successful film franchises, with white actors cast in the lead: Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, and Boris Karloff as Mr. Wong.

Interestingly, the first three Charlie Chan films actually starred Asian actors — Japanese Americans George Kuwa and Kamayama Sojin played Chan in 1926’s “The House Without a Key” and 1927’s “The Chinese Parrot,” and Korean American E.L. Park played him in the third outing, 1929’s “Behind That Curtain.” All three did middling business.

It was only when Warner Oland debuted his eyelid-taped, fake-goateed Chan that the series became a box-office sensation, making Hollywood gun-shy of casting actual Asians to play Asian roles for the next three decades. Though the rapid growth of the Asian American population and the rise of the civil rights movement began to make the practice more rare by the Sixties, the last Charlie Chan film to see production — 1981’s “Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen” — starred Peter Ustinov.

Given that track record, it’s understandable that producers have wary about a reboot. “A Charlie Chan project has been in development at Fox for years,” says Dan Lin. Individuals rumored to be considered as a next-gen Chan have included Russell Wong of “Joy Luck Club” fame, and Lucy Liu (going from “Charlie’s Angels” to gender-flipped Charlie).

As for me, I’d like to see someone revive “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan,” which I still have fond memories of from childhood. Chu-chu the dog! The Chan Clan Band! The Chan Clan Mystery Van! Smartass tomboy Anne Chan (who, bizarrely enough, was voiced by a young Jodie Foster)! Someone make it happen!

Tao Jones Index Must-click quick-hits from across Asia and Asian America:

Trailer for Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: Blink and you missed the U.S. release of Tsui Hark’s incredible period actioner, but if you’re hankering for a real Asian sleuth — based on the historical Judge Di Renjie of the Tang Dynasty — Detective Dee is out on DVD now. Or is that DeeVDee? A prequel (in 3D!) is in the works.

“Woks and Lox” on December 24 at the Queens Kickshaw in Astoria, Queens: Say the organizers: “Ever since the first lonely Jew ordered Chinese take-out on Christmas, there has been an undeniable bond between Jews and Asians. This Christmas Eve, we want to celebrate that combined heritage at Woks and Lox, the very first Jewish and Asian Christmas.” Awesome.

George Takei bridges the greatest divide: The awesome George Takei goes boldly where no man has gone before: Into the breach between fans of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.”

The lost “All-American Muslim” Lowe’s commercial: You probably know hardware chain Lowe’s yanked their ads from TLC’s Muslim reality show “All-American Muslim” after being attacked by far-right sources. But did you know they actually had an ad ready to go before they pulled the plug? Okay, not really. But this fake ad by Outsourced’s Rizwan Manji and Parvesh Cheena is still pretty funny.