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Paris 1938: After Hitler has annexed a few spots of Europe to Germany
without too much of an effort, The French gouvernment is expecting German
air raids on Paris every minute now, so at night, all outside lights have
to be turned off, all courtains have to be drawn, just to not give the
enemy any indications about the geography of the city. In front of this
backdrop, Petroff (Douglass Dumbrille), a rich but shady businessman who
has his hands in smuggling, is found murdered in his home, with his safe
emptied.Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) is called in to investigate, since the
French officer on the job, Marcel (Harold Huber), a clumsy rookie, is just
not up to the task. Chan and Marcel soon come up with a myriad of
suspects, including Petroff's former business associate Madero (Richard
Clarke) and his girlfriend Marie (Lynn Bari) - the two are the good guy
couple in distress -, a trio of thieves (Louis Mercier, George Davis,
Barbara Leonard), passport forger Santelle (Leo G.Carroll), and Pettroff's
business partners Belescu (Noel Madison) and Charlotte (Dorothy Tree). All
of these persons were at Petroff's somewhen in the night of the murder,
and/or had good reasons to kill him. Eventually it is revealed that the
whole case revolved around some shipping papers that would get a shipment
of ammunition out of the country to German shores - an act of high treason
of course -, and that Charlotte is actually a German spy. When she's found
out, she tries to escape by car and plane, but ultimately her plane
crashes and goes up in an explosion. In the finale, Chan drops a bomb
though: It was not Charlotte who has killed Petroff but Petroff's own
butler (Pedro de Cordoba), who just had to kill him when he heard Petroff
was handing over some shipping papers to the very Germans his own son was
to fight in the war, he just had to kill him and take the shipping papers
to prevent his son from being killed by the very bullets Petroff was
selling to the enemy. When confronted with this, Antoine quickly confesses
- but he'll probably not be sentenced for the murder but awarded a medal
for courage ... In itself, City in Darkness is little
more than a routine murder mystery with an espionage subplot - and
unfortunately, only very little use is made of the eerie settings the
titular city of darkness could have provided. Furthermore, Harold Huber in
the second lead puts a bit too much emphasis on comedy to really work in
the context of a traditional whodunnit. What's interesting about this
film though is that it unlike other series movies doesn't shy away from
commenting on the then current situation on international politics, and
though the war is averted at the end of this movie, Charlie Chan's last
remark that compares Hitler to a spider already seems to anticipate things
to come - in this respect you have to remember that 1939, when this film
was released, World War II was still in its infancy and not even called
World War II yet, and American propaganda movies built around popular
B-movie characters were still a few years into the future. This all
doesn't make City in Darkness a masterpiece (which it simply isn't), but
at least interesting from a historical point of view.
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