Half mystery, half documentary, adding up to half a movie. We are free, of course, to see in the title an allusion to that famous fictional representative of the Chinese people, Charlie Chan, and to interpret the title as a somewhat less provocative version of "God Is Dead." We are, in fact, encouraged to do so by three explicit mentions of that personage. But there is also an actual Chan in the movie, or rather, not in the movie, inasmuch as he has disappeared, along with several thousand dollars he owes to his two partners in the Wing-On cab company. These two take to his trail like Charlie Chan or rather, again, not much like Charlie Chan after all. Their missing-person search, taking them all around San Francisco's Chinatown, does not go smoothly. This is partly because of the Oriental inscrutability of the case, and partly because of the unlikeness of the two detectives to Charlie Chan. It is also, however, due to the mystery plot being continually stopped cold, shoved aside, and overshadowed by the director's cultural show-and-tell: cinema-vérité street scenes, daubs of local color, ruminative asides, scholarly lectures, ethnic in-jokes ("We no have wonton soup. We have wonton soup spelled backwards: not now"), a Chinese rendition of "Rock Around the Clock," a "Samurai Night Fever" T-shirt, a slice of Chinese apple pie, etc., etc. Produced for $20,000 with grants from the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts; directed by Wayne Wang. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd