Nero Wolfe: "Count the Man Down" (Nero Wolfe Pruductiions, CBS,1959)

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

Eventually Charles and I watched a couple of videos on YouTube last night, both featuring Rex Stout’s detective character Nero Wolfe. As I’ve argued in these pages before, Nero Wolfe is what the Sherlock Holmes stories would have been if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made Sherlock’s sedentary older brother Mycroft Holmes his central character. Nero Wolfe is a recluse who never (or almost never) leaves his New York City brownstone home, and his main interests besides crime-fighting are food (of which he eats a lot, and has the weight to prove it), orchids (he has an in-house greenhouse) and beer. To do his legwork he has a manservant named Archie Goodwin – sort of Watson to Wolfe’s Holmes – who lives in a room of Wolfe’s apartment and is an overall factotum. The first Nero Wolfe we watched last night was a pilot for a 1959 TV series featuring the character – itself something of a surprise because the print-the-legend version of the history of Nero Wolfe on film is that after two “B”-movies featuring the character in the late 1930’s at Columbia – Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936, based on the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (the title refers to a particularly poisonous South American snake whose venom is used as a murder weapon); and League of Frightened Men, based on Stout’s second Wolfe novel, in 1937. Unfortunately, though Columbia cast Edward Arnold as Wolfe in the first film – and Stout liked him – he did not like Walter Connolly, the comic character actor who replaced Arnold in League of Frightened Men. Stout was so incensed he withdrew the rights to Wolfe’s character, and supposedly decided never to allow Nero Wolfe to be filmed again. Director Frank D. Gilroy bought the rights from Stout’s estate in 1979, four years after the author’s death, for a TV-movie, and Paramount Television followed with a short-lived (just one season) TV series in 1981-82.

Yet here was an unsold TV pilot from 1959, while Res Stout was not only still alive but still working (the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, was published in 1934 and the last, A Family Affair, in 1975), with Swiss-born character actor Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and a young, almost unrecognizable William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. What’s more, the story, “Count the Man Down,” directly ties Shatner into the science-fiction realm which would make him famous as Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek seven years later because, though it’s set in (or at least near) the present day rather than five centuries into the future, it’s about space travel. It starts at Cape Canaveral, Florida, a location which has a romantic fascination for anyone old enough to have grown up with America’s space program (all the major U.S. launches in the 1960’s took place there), where four top space scientists are hunched over a set of very tacky-looking computer boards (but then the real ones at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where the ground control for the actual manned moon missions look almost as tacky by modern standards) to supervise the launch of the seventh moon probe. Only one of the scientists, Dr. Christian Lowenberg (Rene Paul), drops dead of an apparent heart attack just as the countdown reaches zero and the rocket lifts off. The authorities rule his death an accidental heart attack, but in New York City Nero Wolfe announces that he believes Dr. Lowenberg was murdered, and he says he can prove it.

Wolfe, through Goodwin, gathers together the five principal suspects – aircraft manufacturer Jerry Belson (Alexander Scourby, principal villain in Fritz Lang’s 1953 thriller The Big Heat and narrator of a tribute record to John F. Kennedy after his assassination), for whom Lowenberg designed the moon rocket; Lowenberg’s widow (Eva Seregni); and the other three scientists on the scene: Dr. Wohlgang (George Voskovec, who would have a recurring role as Nero Wolfe’s chef in the 1981-82 series), Professor Adams (John McLiam), and Ernest Petchen (Frank Marth). Though the script is an original by Sidney Carroll rather than one based on a Stout story, it fits Stout’s formula by having Wolfe solve the crime based on some pretty recherché evidence. Wolfe just happens to have read an old book about the Nazi space program, for whcih Dr. Wohlgang worked with Dr. Lowenberg as his assistant, and it mentioned a Nazi death device that involved building a needle into a hearing aid and rigging it to send an ultrasound signal so the intended victim would trigger a sonic blast that would kill him. (In an earlier version of the post I said that the hearing aid contained a poison via a needle, which was how the opening murder in the 1936 film Meet Nero Wolfe was done.) From this he deduces that Dr. Wohlgang was Dr. Lowenberg’s killer – he never forgave Lowenberg for having a better-paying and more prestigious career in the U.S. – and his co-conspirator was Dr. Lowenberg’s mistress and Belson’s secretary, Leslie Gear (Phyllis Hill), though writer Carroll never quite explains her motive for wanting her lover dead. It’s a pretty charming half-hour show (CBS purportedly commissioned it as a follow-up to the huge success of Perry Mason, but that was an hour-long show), though one wonders why an author who had come down so strongly against Columbia for casting Walter Connolly as Wolfe would be willing to accept the equally comedic Kasznar. As for Shatner, one espectred more authority from him, especially in an early example of the genre that would make him famous – but it’s still a good mystery, decently directed by Tom Donovan from Carroll’s script, which is very much in the Rex Stout manner.