THE FEATHERED SERPENT (1948)

We open with an exposition dump presented by a group of people at a streetside cafe in a Mexican village. Professors Scott and Farnsworth were searching for a lost Aztec city but have gone missing, and this group, which includes professors, fiancées and relatives, has vowed to find them. Meanwhile, Charlie Chan, on a vacation road trip in Mexico with his number one and two sons, Lee and Tommy, and his chauffeur Birmingham Brown, find an older man collapsed in the nearby desert. It turns out he is Prof. Scott, who says that he and Farnsworth found the city but have been held captive and forced to decipher hieroglyphics which tell the whereabouts of a hidden fortune. Scott is knifed in the dark and Chan agrees to join the search since Farnsworth is a friend of his. One of the search party members, however, is the villain behind the hostage taking, though one is also a police spy in disguise. One by one, people find the secret entrance to the city and one by one, get captured by the bad guy, though there is more than one baddie in the mix. But with Chan and sons on the case, justice will prevail. The fifth of six movies with Roland Winters as Chan, this is notable primarily for being the only entry in the 47-film series to feature two sons in action with their dad. Victor Sen Yung plays the youthful and bumbling Tommy, and Keye Luke is the older "number one" son Lee. Luke played this character, also youthful and bumbling at the time, in several of the 1930s Chan films. It's fun to see the contrast here between the more mature Lee and his kid brother, and they get to kick some bad guy ass in the end. Interestingly, Luke and Winters in real life were the same age, and Yung was only eleven years younger than Winters. As in all the Winters movies (and many earlier ones), Mantan Moreland is a comic relief standout as Birmingham. I noticed here that Moreland pronounces "Tommy" as "Toe-mee"; I don't know if that is an accent thing or what, but he does it in all the Winters films. Included in the mostly colorless supporting cast is Nils Asther, whose career peaked in 1932 with The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Busy character actor Erville Alderson, who seemed to specialize in older and sickly roles, is old and sickly as the ill-fated Prof. Scott; Robert Livingston is OK as Prof. Stanley. Things begin to drag a bit in the last half, and the promise of the somewhat exotic setting is fulfilled only a bit by the Aztec temple set. Despite the title, the serpent is a tiny part of the story, and its name, Quetzalcoatl, is never mentioned. Pictured from left are Yung, Luke, Winters and Moreland. [DVD]