The League of Frightened Men (Columbia, 1937)

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

Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched The League of Frightened Men, the second and last of the Nero Wolfe mystery films Columbia Pictures made in 1936 and 1937. The 1936 film was called Meet Nero Wolfe, it was based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance (which introduced the characters of Nero Wolfe and his sidekick and go-fer, Archie Goodwin) and was one of only five films ever directed by Herbert J. Biberman, whose career was destroyed by the Hollywood blacklist. The League of Frightened Men was directed by a journeyman hack, Alfred E. Green, and though the three-person writing committee included some scribes with spectacular credits – Guy Endore, Eugene Solow and Edward Chodorov – it was reasonably faithful to Stout’s story but quite a bit less so to his character. The biggest single mistake Columbia and its producer, Edward Chodorov, made in this film was recasting Nero Wolfe: instead of having Edward Arnold reprise the role from Meet Nero Wolfe, they signed Walter Connolly – which allegedly so incensed Rex Stout that he pulled the rights to the character and never allowed another Nero Wolfe film to be made during his lifetime. (At least that’s the print-the-legend version; YouTube also contains an intriguing 1959 pilot for a proposed Nero Wolfe TV series, with Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and the young William Shatner as Archie, and that was made 16 years before Stout’s death in 1975.) William K. Everson,in his book The Detective in Film, sums up what went wrong with the cast change: “Connolly was an excellent actor, particularly in exasperated comedy, but he was not the right personality to attempt Nero Wolfe.”

Granted that in 1937 the perfect actor for Wolfe, Sydney Greenstreet, was still exclusively a stage actor – he wouldn’t make his film debut until 1941, as the villainous Casper Gutman in the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon (and one of the reasons I think Greenstreet, who actually got to play Nero Wolfe on radio, would have been the perfect Wolfe for film is that Wolfe is essentially Casper Gutman on the right side of the law), it still seems strange that the “suits” at Columbia went with a comic actor for Wolfe in The League of Frightened Men instead of using Arnold again. The mistake was compounded by the writing committee, which violated the integrity of Stout’s Wolfe by frequently having him leave his home and do normal things like getting into and out of cabs, and in the final scene even inviting Archie (Liolen Stander again) to go to a bar with him for a beer. While Stout’s Wolfe was not totally home-bound, on the rare occasions when he went out in the novels, Archie and the rest of Wolfe’s staff had to do as much pre-planning as a major invasion just to prepare the world for Wolfe’s coming. It’s a real pity that the producer and writers screwed up so badly on the casting of Wolfe and letting him go out and about like a normal person, because the rest of The League of Frightened Men is quite good and had the makings of a much better film than Meet Neroi Wolfe.

The plot is quite a bit better: 19 years before the main action, a group of 10 college students put one of their colleagues, Paul Chapin (Eduardo Ciannelli, who usually played all-powerful Mob bosses like his role in Marked Woman), which left Chapin permanently disabled. He can walk, but only with crutches, and the 10 people responsible for his hazing have got together to form an organization, which is called the “League of Atonement” in Stout’s novel but has no name in the film (at least until Wolfe dubs it “The League of Frightened Men,” hence the title), to heip him financially. They did so until a year before the movie starts, when after a series of false tries Paul Chapin finally publishes a novel, it becomes a best-seller and he no longer needs his classmates’ money. Unfortunately, two of the members of the League of Atonement are mysteriously killed and a third one disappears, and just before each victim was killed or disappeared a doggerel poem was sent to him, vowing revenge. The members of the League naturally assume that Paul Chapin is sending the letters and he’s responsible for the killings. Nero Wolfe summons all the surviving members of the League to his home and has them sign contracts by which they will employ him to find the killer, whether it be Chapin or someone else. He has researched all their finances and on that basis has decided how much each will pay (a common theme in Stout’s stories).

The surviving members of the League are cabdriver Pitney Scott (Victor Killian), financial advisor Ferdinand Bowen (Walter Kingsford, who was also in Meet Nero Wolfe), Michael Ayres (Jameson Thomas), Dr. Burton (Kenneth Hunter), Nicholas Cabot (Ian Wolf), Alexander Drummond (Jonathan Hale), and Augustus Farrell (Charles Wilson) – not counting Andrew Hibbard, the one who disappeared mysteriously and was presumed dead but turns up later in the film, disguised as a homeless person, so he can shadow Chapin. Wolfe ultimately deduces that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Ferdinand Bowen, who had embezzled money from the other members of the League until two of them caught him at it, whereupon he killed them and hit on the idea of framing Chapin. There are also a few red herrings along the way, including Hibbard’s wife Evelyn (Irene Hervey) and Burton’s daughter Agnes (Nana Bryant), who’s dating a young man to whom her family strongly objects. It also turns out that Chapin has a wife, Dora (Rafaela Ottario), who drugs Archie Goodwin. When he comes to, Archie reports to Wolfe, who has broken his usual rule against ever leaving home to question Chapin and eventually invites Chapin to his brownstone apartment for the big reveal that Bowen is the murderer. There’s also an attempt to determine who wrote the threats from tracing the typewriter on which they were written, which turns out to be a public typewriter at a university club to which all the suspects had access. As a film, The League of Frightened Men is blessedly free of the campy “comic relief” content that so marred Meet Nero Wolfe. One element from the earlier film blessedly not included this time is Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore), Archie Goodwiin’s incredibly obnoxious girlfriend – though moviegoers who recalled that they’d actually got married at the end of Meet Nero Wolfe probably wondered what happened to her ahd why she wasn’t in this one. The League of Frightened Men (a title I absolutely love, by the way) is a frustrating movie because it had the potential makings of a great film, and with a bit more care in the scripting and a stronger actor as Wolfe it might have indeed become a classic – but as it stands it only encouraged Rex Stout to eliminate screen versions of his famous character almost totally!