The case of the concerned but ignorant movie channel

If a fortune cookie could speak, it would sound like Charlie Chan.

But the Fox Movie Channel -- citing protests about Asian stereotypes and white actors playing a Chinese sleuth -- pulled its summer festival of antique Chan mysteries recently for the wrong reasons.

Black stereotyping is much more offensive than Charlie in some of the Chan movies that Fox Movie Channel had planned on beaming to the 20 million homes it reaches.

Mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers created Chan as an all-knowing Honolulu cop who never met a homicide he couldn’t unknot. And Hollywood gave him a soundstage -- more than three dozen movies, mainly in the 1930s and ‘40s, and most famously with white actors Warren Oland and Sidney Toler playing the role in what detractors call “yellowface.”

In some ways Chan is every bit the Chinese caricature he’s made out to be by Asian American activists and other social critics. He is inscrutable, spins relentless aphorisms in Confucianese, and speaks in a heavily accented, old-world idiom that some find demeaning.

Chan’s Jewish equivalent would be a detective cracking Yiddishisms like comedian Jackie Mason. All right, point made.

Yet Chan is much more than a facile stereotype. He doesn’t do martial arts. He is suave, benevolent, resourceful, acutely observant and brilliant, inevitably outthinking the murderous criminals he encounters while leaving the legwork to his fully Americanized sons, who call him “pop.” Beyond his stunning infallibility as a detective, Chan also has a droll, self-effacing sense of humor. No wonder his popularity has endured in some circles.

What’s not to like and admire about the hero of these mysteries, most of which remain great fun despite being dated and simplistic?

On the other hand, Fox Movie Channel’s play list included a 1935 Chan film featuring Stepin Fetchit as an illiterate black called Snowshoes (as if he deserved nothing more than a nickname).

Cut along the same racist lines, moreover, is Birmingham Brown, the ever-terrified, google-eyed Chan chauffeur played by Mantan Moreland, a sort of Stepin Fetchit-lite who got big laughs in many of the 1940s-era Toler films for turning tail out of fear when a case turned scary.

Sample line from Birmingham in panicky flight: “Feets, do your duty.”

Now that’s offensive, the gnarled grammar and tone of the character projecting inferiority and low intelligence based on race.

Why didn’t Fox Movie Channel do its duty and have someone with at least a modicum of sensitivity screen these potboilers before they were cleared for air?

Give the Fox people credit for swiftly responding to viewer concerns. Yet it proclaimed itself a doofus when announcing it canceled its TV festival after being “made aware” that Chan films “may contain situations or depictions that are sensitive to some viewers.”

It was just “made aware”? It had no clue, despite past criticisms of these films on race and ethnic grounds? Duh. Welcome to the 21st century.

If you’re getting a whiff of deja vu, think “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” which came to symbolize the essence of TV bigotry in the medium’s first two decades after originating as a popular radio series about African Americans in Harlem. It was created and written by, as well as starred, Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, a pair of white performers who posed for publicity photos and appeared in two movies as their characters in blackface.

“Amos ‘n’ Andy” was hugely popular before moving its segregated universe to TV in 1951 minus Correll and Freeman, becoming the small screen’s first sitcom with a nearly all-black cast. Lambasted by the NAACP, it was canceled by CBS in 1953 despite good ratings, then endured in syndication 13 more years before being banished from the airwaves because of opposition from civil rights groups.

Most of the show’s laughs came at the expense of the Kingfish, an endearing scam artist played by the gifted Tim Moore. If the Kingfish was shrewd, at least, other major characters displayed limited intelligence, one example being Johnny Lee’s fast-talking Algonquin J. Calhoun.

Here was Calhoun -- a lawyer, by the way -- giving a funeral eulogy: “You and me has always considered him one of our greatest friends. And I know that you all has loved him as much as I has. So now as we is all gathered here ... “

That too is offensive, echoing Chan’s driver, Birmingham Brown, but not the detective himself, whose superior brain and cool, faultless intellect make him someone to respect.

As for white actors with faux slanted eyes playing a Chinese character alongside Asian supporting actors in the Chan movies, the first choice should have been to hire Chinese Charlies. But these decisions were made in the 1930s and 1940s, not 1991, for example, when Asian American activists objected to Welshman Jonathan Pryce playing the Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon” when that musical came to Broadway.

The point: How does rejecting the Chan movies, because of casting choices made seven decades ago, benefit Asian actors in 2003?

It’s hard seeing the major harm in principle, in fact. Should Laurence Olivier have been banned from playing the coffee-skinned Moor in “Othello” or Maria Callas prevented from singing the title role in “Madam Butterfly?” On the contrary, if it works, it works, the smart course being to make these judgments case by case. If a black or Asian Hamlet is credible, go for that too.

But draw the line at Birmingham.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard. rosenberg@latimes.com.