Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Ocean-going steamships and trains make great settings for 1940s mysteries. Charlie didn't have any adventures in a train, but this is the second on a ship--the third if you count the docked sailing ship in one of his outings. Toler is outstanding as always, in one of the greatest ongoing screen characterizations of an ideal film detective: clever, humane, with a sense of humor and of justice. It's his ability to make Chan so very likeable which really elevates these films, putting them, on the whole, on about the same level as the great Universal Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. And Toler never had the support of a truly first-rate, all-pro actor, as Rathbone had in Bruce. This movie is pure fun. Lots of action. The humor is sometimes very corny, but that's part of the charm. Highly recommended!

The best quality of "Dangerous Money" is Charlie Chan's habit for metaphors and aphorisms, like the one mentioned above, or "Kangaroos also reach destination by leaps and bounds". The script is often muddled, the multiple suspects, with few exceptions, are not distinct enough as characters (maybe because they are played by an almost completely unknown cast), Sidney Toler is a bit stodgy as Chan (he does well with the funny lines, though), and Willie Best's comic relief is a matter of taste, however I would advise you to watch this film if only for one truly memorable and outrageous surprise at the end. You may well forget the rest of the picture a day or two later, but I doubt you'll forget that surprise anytime soon. Production values are decent for a Monogram film. ** out of 4.

Storywise, this is yet another disposable Chan story, industrialized movie-making.There are two things of interest here.One is how the needs of the Chan franchise ferret out peculiar corners of the American national story. In this case the US was well into the beginning of administering regions in the Pacific. This gave opportunities for new kinds of crime and the novelty of the crime was one of the attractions of the series at this point. So we have the smuggling of colonial currency, an esoteric illegality — and the use of new weapon, a "knifethrowing" pistol.Ho hum. I suppose that will be interesting to historians. But for students of film there's a lesson here too. What do you do if your story depends on matters of race and you want to exploit that but also want to bury it? You fold it into other narrative elements of race.For those who don't know the franchise, it was very long and successful. It stars a white guy pretending to be a Chinese master detective, the acting mostly through a halting English and a few phrases like: "a hasty man can drink tea with a fork." Incidentally, this fits in an odd place in the detective genre because we never really see any detecting, any real wisdom. The only thing we see is him setting traps with the trap revealing the hidden crook. He never figures it out directly.Back to race. Chan's race is hidden twice. First, we have one of his sons as "assistant," a comic, bumbling idiot. This truly is racist and deliberately so. The contrast between the son (played by a real Asian) and his lack of insight and his father is amplified by the physical appearance and the obvious appearance.And this is further folded or shadowed (an appropriate term) by the black guy. He is placed as far from the son in all dimensions as the son is from the father. He is that much more comic, and independently clueless, and also independently "ethnic." Its a vile notion to exploit by today's standards, but the method of shadowed folding is clear.Its a device used in literature, but much more common in film because you can link so many more qualities in parallel, here all aligned to "detection" qualities. That Africanamerican's name is Chattanooga, derived probably from Jack Benny's "man" Rochester.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Another poor Monogram Charlie Chan film. The production values, story, acting and directing are very weak. The story is uninteresting. A ship to the South Seas would have been fun in a 20th Century Fox Chan movie but not so here. Only of note because this was the second and final time Willie Best played Chatanooga. Otherwise, one to skip.