Meet Nero Wolfe (Columbia,1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Nero Wolfe TV pilot my husband Charles and I watched the very first attempt to put Nero Wolfe on film, the 1936 Columbia “B” Meet Nero Wolfe, based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance. The title refers to a particularly deadly snake found only in South America, and when I read the book I assumed the name was pronounced in French style as “fair-de-launce,” but the characters in the movie Anglicize it and say “fur-duh-lance.” The plot starts out on a golf course, where E. J. Kimball (Walter Kingsford) and his son Manuel (Russell Hardie) show up to play, only to be told by the course management that because it’s Sunday they only allow foursomes to play. The club official offers to pair up the Kimballs with two other players, Professor Edwin Barstow (Boyd Irwin, Sr.) and Claude Roberts (Victor Jory), only Professor Barstow borrows E. J. Kimball’s driver and immediately keels over dead of an apparent heart attack as soon as he takes his tee shot. Nero Wolfe (Edward Arnold) gets involved in the case when his favorite bootlegger during the Prohibition era, Maria Maringola (the young Rita Hayworth, then still wearing her hair dark and using her birth name, Rita Cansino), whose beer remains Wolfe’s favorite, seeks his help in finding her brother Carlo. When Kimball’s chauffeur is also murdered, Wolfe deduces that the elder Kimball is the murderer’s real target. It seems that E. J. Kimball spent 15 years in South America, most of them in Argentina, where he met and married Manuel Kimball’s mother. Unfortunately, Mrs. Kimball died suddenly and unexpectedly, and E. J. was tried for her murder but was acquitted. But that didn’t stop Manuel from seeing his father as his mother’s murderer and hatching an elaborate plot to kill his dad for revenge.

Meet Nero Wolfe was scripted by Joseph Anthony, Howard J. Green and Bruce Manning (the last of whom had a curious career; after winning a contract with Columbia on the strength of a 1933 suspense novel called The Ninth Guest, he quickly moved to Universal and became best known as Deanna Durbin’s favorite writer) and directed by Herbert J. Biberman. Biberman was a casualty of the Hollywood blacklist – as was his wife, actress Gale Sondergaard; and one cast member from this film, Lionel Stander, who played Archie Goidwin. Biberman made his directorial debut in 1935 with a prison drama called One-Way Ticket, then made Meet Nero Wolfe, and after that racked up a few credits as a writer, returned to directing with the anti-Nazi film The Master Race (1944), and after he was blacklisted shot the legendary film Salt of the Earth (1954), about a real-life mining strike led by the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union after they were thrown out of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for refusing to require their leaders to take the anti-Communist loyalty oaths demanded by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The union actually put up the money to make this film, and the leading actress, Mexican up-and-comer Rosaura Revueltas, was herself blacklisted and didn’t work in films again until 1976. (Other blacklistees involved ini Salt of the Earth were writer Michael Wllson and actor Will Geer.)

My husband Charles actually liked the TV pilot better than the feature film, but I didn't. Aafter the relative weakness of William Shatner as Archie it was a real treat to see the authority with which Lionel Stander grabbed the role and never let go. Arnold’s Nero Wolfe is above average – though it’s a real pity that Rex Stout’s long-running distaste for the movie business and what they had done with his character deprived us of seeing a Nero Wolfe film with the best imaginable actor playing him, Sydney Greenstreet. (I remember while reading a Rex Stout Wolfe novel that Greenstreet would have been the perfect actor to play Wolfe because Wolfe is Greenstreet’s Maltese Falcon character, Casper Gutman, only on the right side of the law.) It turned out Sydney Greenstreet did get to play Nero Wolfe on radio – but, alas, never got to do a Wolfe movie, partly because of Stout’s persnicketiness and partly because he was under contract to Warner Bros., which wasn’t big on series mystery films the way MGM, 20th Century-Fox, RKO and Columbia were. Still, aside from Greenstreet (who wouldn’t make his film debut until 1941, five years after Meet Nero Wolfe was made), it’s hard to imagine a better actor for Rex Stout’s character at the time as Arnold.

My main annoyance with Meet Nero Wolfe is the comedy aspect, especially the truly annoying character of Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore), Archie Goodwin’s fiancée. She’s constantly nagging him about when they are going to get married – Nero Wolfe is always giving him some assignment or other that keeps him away from the altar – and she’s also perpetually nagging him to give up his job with Wolfe and become a furniture salesman. Much to my surprise, at the end ofM< i>Meet Nero Wolfe the writing committee pulled a surprise I wasn’t expecting – they actually had Archie Goodwin and Mazie Gray get married and leave on a honeymoon – only Wolfe, who treats them to the tickets for a steamship and a honeymoon suite in Paris, insists that Archie tail a man on board the ship and report all his movements back to Wolfe in New York. Quite frankly I felt sorry for Archie sticking himself with this horribiy annoying woman for the rest of his life!