Wonderful character development!

How sad is this?

A different way of telling a story

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A lunatic escapes from a mental asylum after seeing a newspaper article about an opera production at a nearby theater. The police fail to find him, and Charlie Chan happens to be nearby. The maniac is believed to be a former opera singer supposedly killed in a Chicago opera house fire years ago, with intentions of taking revenge on the opera stars who had locked him in the opera house. But there are feuds and intrigues among the opera cast and crew as well.But the story is not so simple after all. The maniac is at the opera house, but why is he there? For revenge, or for some other reason? The story takes on very unexpected turns before it concludes.Good performances by all, especially by Boris Karloff who plays the maniac without overdoing it, and it is not merely Number One Son who provides comic relief.

According to the extended credits on here, Boris Karloff's singing is dubbed by someone named Tudor Williams.He sounds very much like Lawrence Tibbett, the most popular baritone at the Metropolitan Opera in the mid-1930s, and a singer who would have been known to general movie-going audiences then through radio, recordings, and his own movies. One of the other posters mentions that the dumpy costume worn during the performance by Boris Karloff and the baritone he replaces was a costume of Tibbett's. Tibbett's movie studio was Fox, and he made what was probably his most successful movie for them, Metropolitan, the same year as CC at the Opera.Is it possible that "Tudor Williams" was a cover for Lawrence Tibbett?????

I have no idea whether this is T H E best Charlie Chan movie, but it's indeed among the few top ones among dozens that made up the series. This one mixes four separate story lines with good plot contrivance that don't get in the way: 1 a young couple wanting to get married but having their dream hampered. 2 a wife and 3 a husband who want to punish their adulterous spouses. 4 a mentally ill amnesiac who escapes from an asylum to exact revenge upon his adulterous wife who had trapped him years earlier in a building on fire. It will take time and turns to learn who is who, but all apparently have good reasons to kill a opera star...while the opera's on stage. The 'comedy moment' son#1 bit is present but doesn't get in the way and is less annoying that usual. Acting is good, although plagued by some drama queen 1930s clichés. There is also a cop who doesn't like Chinese people, but it's an odd character that sits between comedy relief and supporting roles. Recommended.

SPOILERS BELOW Everyone who has written about this film here seems right on time, except for the one who doubted Boris Karloff would be voice-dubbed for a B-movie. That person should remember that this was a 20th Century-Fox B-movie and the studio would and probably did bring a dubbing resource in for this key scene. Karloff's voice as Gravelle has to be striking and outstanding, and it is.For reasons cited by other writers this movie can be watched over and over again and still enjoyed, if you're indulgent of old movie conventions, as I am. It is genuinely, unabashedly and charmingly corny.Here we seem to have the best take on Charlie Chan (as interpreted by Oland); others have come close, but this one nails it. Of course many of us wonder what it would be like to see the lost Chans from before 1935, and how they would stack up.The key is that, although Director Humberstone plays the story essentially straight, there is also an intangible element of tongue-in-cheek fun, as if he's sending up the mystery/horror movie conventions a little bit even while he's carefully using them. The use of Karloff is obviously and completely iconic. Humberstone is especially good at getting revealing reaction shots. There's one great example near the beginning, where one of the performers, Madame Borelli (Nedda Harrigan) discovers Gravelle (Karloff) in her dressing room, and instead of screaming for help, slyly hisses, "I thought you were dead"; we can see the wheels turning within her predatory mind. To what end? You'll find out. The looks Madame Rochelle casts when suddenly confronted by Gravelle on stage are priceless, capping off an extraordinary cinematic moment.One writer said they wished to hear Oscar Levant's opera, "Carnival" in its entirety. I doubt such a work exists. My guess is that it was written as a fragment, as the excerpts we see in the picture make little sense except to set up and advance the plot.