Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This early talkie crime melodrama, just like so many other films at the time, still had to cope with many problems: the actors not yet having been adequately trained for talking pictures, the poor sound quality, and the scripts that also were written by people who'd written either silent movie scripts or stage plays before, but never any TALKIE script.So this 'old' story of a lovely young girl marrying the wrong man who soon turns out not only to be a cheat and an egoist, but also a murderer, and her faithful friend, famous explorer Beetham, coming to her rescue at his own life's risk may look a little pale today - and especially for those who know that it's the oldest still existing movie in which the great Chinese detective Charlie Chan appears, and is even actually played by an Asian! Well, E.L. Park does quite nicely - in the few moments he appears toward the end of the movie... All the rest of the investigation is being done by British detective Sir Frederick Bruce (Gilbert Emory).Well, if we - even as really fervent admirers of the 'Charlie Chan' movies - accept that fact (anyway, his name isn't mentioned in the title to lead us astray and make us think that this is an 'actual' Charlie Chan movie), we can see "Behind That Curtain" simply as a late 1920s' murder and love drama, not one of the best ones for sure, but still with quite a lot of suspense, an exotic atmosphere which takes us all the way from England via India to China (in fact, Boris Karloff can be seen in one of his early roles as Beetham's Indian servant), fascinating shots of the desert, and - even IF they're becoming a little melodramatic at times - a loving couple, Lois Moran and Warner Baxter (one of the big matinée idols in silents as well as in early talkies), for whose fate we really DO care! An interesting document of early tries at sound cinema; and a quite entertaining and suspenseful one, too, for the friends of classic Hollywood.

I, too, was disappointed that there was very little Charlie Chan in this movie, but I found the small part by Boris Karloff entertaining. The most confusing part of the film was the beginning, where the Colonel was seen attempting to recover damaging papers from the same person who (also?) possessed damaging papers concerning the man who eventually murdered him. The Colonel's papers were never discussed, and they became a red herring. I found myself going back to the beginning to see if I had the characters confused. As far as I could tell, the actual murderer never knew that the man he murdered had any damaging papers. Also, the film didn't establish that the murderer was aware that the Colonel had visited the murdered man. How would the murderer know to frame the Colonel? And why do something as dumb as putting the Colonel's Chinese slippers on the murdered man? As though the Colonel, if really guilty, would put his own Chinese slippers on someone he just murdered!

This is an early example of the talking film. The delivery of the lines and emotions seem to be in slow motion. I am not sure if this was shot as a silent film as well. I tend to believe it was because much of the acting is done with eyes and face. Overall it is faithful to the plot line of the book, but characters have been removed and that lessens the "mystery" of the film. We know "who done it" about 30 minutes into the picture.Boris Karloff has a small role as a servant and Charlie Chan is seen even less (somewhere around the 42 minute mark).For film enthusiasts only. The regular "tv mentality" person won't be able to sit through it.

Author Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) was among America's most popular writers of the 1910s and 1920s and many of his works, such as 'Seven Keys to Baldpate', were translated to stage and screen with great success. About 1919 Biggers encountered stories about Hawaii's celebrated Chang Apana (1887-1933), a police officer of Chinese heritage who was noted for his fearlessness in dealing with criminals engaged in the opium trade. Apana, who carried a whip as his weapon of choice, was more noted for courage than detective skills--but he proved the inspiration for Charlie Chan.Between 1925 and 1932 Biggers wrote six Chan novels. HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY and THE Chinese PARROT were filmed as silents in 1926; the first sound film to feature Chan was BEHIND THAT CURTAIN. But although it is generally based on the Biggers novel, the film takes a very strange direction: instead of presenting the mystery novel that Biggers wrote, it dispenses with mystery and presents the story of a runaway wife as a melodrama pure and simple, and Chan (played here by E.L. Park) is only a cameo role tacked on at the film's finish.The cast sports several notable actors of the era, most particularly Warner Baxter, who had a distinguished career, and it offers an early and very brief role to Boris Karloff in his pre-FRANKENSTEIN era. But the cast struggles a great deal with the new technology of sound and they read as stiff and mannered. The direction and cinematography are only serviceable, and even for an early sound film BEHIND THAT CURTAIN feels extremely slow and heavy-handed.BEHIND THAT CURTAIN is not presently available to the home market in the form of a studio release, nor is it likely to be so at any time in the near future. Although it is generally credited as "The First Sound-Era Charlie Chan Film," it is not really a part of the series that would become so popular between 1931 and 1942. Hardcore Chan fans will want to see the film at least once, but once will be more than enough.Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer