by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Game of Thrones Charles
and I watched another download of a TV show featuring Peter Lorre: “The Human
Factor,” a quite engaging episode of a quirky TV series called Checkmate, filmed by Revue Productions (the subsidiary of the
giant Music Corporation of America, or MCA, agency founded in the 1950’s to
produce specifically for television) and aired for two seasons, from fall 1960
to spring 1962. Basically Checkmate
is Nero Wolfe meets Route
66: two young men from San Francisco, Don
Corey (Anthony George) and Jed Sills (Doug McClure), run a high-end private
detective agency, but the real work seems to be done by their Nero Wolfe-esque
criminological consultant, Dr. Carl Hyatt (Sebastian Cabot). Lorre appears in
this one as master criminal Alonzo Pace Graham — we’re never told just what crimes he committed but they were serious enough to
earn him a 15-year stretch in prison from which he’s just got out and hatched a
revenge plot against Hyatt that involves hiring a similarly built confederate
to impersonate Hyatt (I wasn’t sure whether the impostor was also played by
Sebastian Cabot, though it seems likely) and also engaging a much-married widow
named Helena Quattrell to seduce Hyatt (the real one). The plot consists of
having Helena Quattrell disappear and her blood turn up on Hyatt’s clothes
(courtesy of a syringe Alonzo stuck in her to draw out the blood so he could
plant it), while she’s reported missing by her friend Fay Razon (Rebecca Welles
— when I saw that name on the credits I wondered if she was the daughter of
Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, but that Rebecca Welles would have only been a teenager when this was made and
this was a different Rebecca Welles, born February 5, 1928, and at the time
this show was made she was the wife of Don Weis, who directed it), who’s also
in on Alonzo’s plot, though ultimately the two young boys running the detective
agency and looking like they couldn’t find their way out of a hole even if
they’d been the one to dig it, along with the real Hyatt, figure it all out and
Alonzo is arrested again. This was an engaging show even though it could have
used stronger actors in the two young leads, and it’s a pity Sebastian Cabot
didn’t get engaged to play the real
Nero Wolfe. Alas, after selling two Nero Wolfe stories to Columbia in the
late-1930’s — Meet Nero Wolfe in
1936 and The League of Frightened Men in 1937 — Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, was so upset at the miscasting
of Walter Connolly as Wolfe in the second film that he decided to pull the
rights and never again allow the Wolfe stories to be filmed (though a
short-lived TV series with William Conrad, also not a good choice, was made
later after Stout died), so Sydney Greenstreet, who would have been absolutely
perfect for the role, got to play Nero Wolfe on radio but never in a movie; and
Sebastian Cabot, who wouldn’t have fit the part as perfectly as Greenstreet but
would still have been an inspired choice, didn’t either even though his role
here shows how right for it he would have been! It’s also worth noting that the
composer for this show was “Johnny Williams” — a young man who has since
shortened his first name to John Williams and become one of the most popular
and most honored film-score composers of all time!
