The Fat Man (Universal-International, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, September 1) when my husband Charles and I got home from the organ concert (Raúl Prieto Ramírez and an ensemble of rock musicians called “Organism” played a tribute to The Beatles), we switched on the TV to MS-NBC, only I turned it off again because what they were showing was a lame TV version of a podcast between Nicolle Wallace and Jason Bateman that appeared to be a rerun from a year ago. Instead I went to the computer and we watched a YouTube post of a quite good 1951 Universal-International “B” called The Fat Man. This started as a series of short stories and two novels by Dashiell Hammett from the 1920’s featuring an unnamed character called “The Continental Op.” “Op” was short for “operative” and “Continental” was the name of the (fictitious) detective agency for which he worked (based on the Pinkerton Detective Agency for which Hammett had actually worked). Hammett wasn’t all that specific about what the Continental Op looked like – though he didn’t describe him as particularly fat (in the Op stories, one of the Op’s colleagues, Mickey Linehan, was described as on the rotund side) – but that changed when radio producer Ed Rosenberg got hold of the character and built a series called “The Fat Man” around him. By the late 1940’s, when the show went on the air, Hammett had been hit by both the Hollywood blacklist and his own alcoholism, so royalties from the radio shows “The Fat Man” and “The Thin Man” (based on Nick Charles, the lead detective character in Hammett’s last novel, and his wife Nora) were just about his only source of income. In 1951 the radio show was doing so well Universal-International decided to buy the movie rights and cast the lead actor, J. Scott Smart, in a film version.

I have a particular affection for this movie because there’s a flashback scene to the wedding of small-time crook Roy Clark (Rock Hudson in an early pre-stardom role) and Pat Boyd (Julie London, best known as a torch singer but also quite a good actress). It’s one of those quickie affairs in a bungalow occupied by a justice of the peace and his family, and before they go in Clark says to Pat, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.” In the plot it’s that he’s an ex-convict, but anyone watching that today will immediately associate that with Hudson’s real-life Gay orientation and think that’s why his character is reluctant to marry a woman. (I suspect the writers at Universal were aware of Hudson’s homosexuality and delighted in slipping sly little digs about it into their scripts. In the 1954 film All That Heaven Allows he and Jane Wyman are in a car together and Hudson’s character is sounding off on the qualities he likes in a man. Wyman’s turns to him and says, “You want me to be a man?”) What I hadn’t remembered is that The Fat Man was actually a pretty good vest-pocket thriller. Its writers, Leonard Lee and Harry Essex, basically recycled their plot from the 1948 film I Walk Alone (which, as I explained in a moviemagg blog post about it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/10/i-walk-alone-hal-wallis-productions.html, was itself recycled from the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties).

A group of gangsters pulled off a daring robbery of a horse-race track (Charles wondered if today, in the age of credit cards where most transactions are electronic, a racetrack would be as cash-rich an environment for potential robbers today as it was in 1951) and escaped with all the loot. However, one of them, Roy Clark, got injured in a shoot-out between the robbers (dressed as members of the armored car’s usual security people) and the real security people, was arrested and drew a seven-year sentence. When he got out he naïvely expected that he’d received his full share of the loot, and rather than stringing him along the way Kirk Douglas did with Burt Lancaster in I Walk Alone, the robbers decided simply to kill him. As in I Walk Alone, the robbers – led by Gene Gordon (John Russell) and including self-described “hoodlum” “Fletch” Fletcher (Robert Osterloh) and chauffeur Happy Stevens (Harry Lewis) – have built up a nice legitimate business for themselves (as well as a nice trophy wife for Gordon, Lola, played by Lucille Barkley) and don’t want it disturbed by a former colleague demanding his share of their ill-gotten gains. They rig up an elaborate plan to kill Clark by burning him alive while he’s driving a truck; they soak the truck’s cargo with flammable liquids and set it on fire while Clark is driving it. The Fat Man, a.k.a. Bradford “Brad” Runyan (Rosenberg gave him a name, which Hammett hadn’t), stumbles onto the plot in New York City when a dental nurse named Jane Adams (Jayne Meadows, Mrs. Steve Allen, who was a quite good film noir villainess in her own right in the 1946 film Lady in the Lake but is rather wasted here in a sympathetic role) hires him to find out why her boss, Dr. Henry Bromley (radio announcer Ken Niles), was murdered and his death faked to look like an accident.

We’ve actually seen the crime go down – Dr. Bromley was approached by a hatchet-faced killer (later identified as Happy Stevens) who knocked him out, searched his files for a dental X-ray, stole one, got a bottle of a sleeping drug and waved it in front of the dentist’s nose, then pitched the dentist’s body out of his eighth-floor office window so he’d fall through the skylight of a restaurant below and it would look like an accident. (Charles joked that the restaurant would have a hard time fulfilling its reservations after that.) The motive was so that the burned body of Roy Clark could not be identified by its teeth, which Dr. Bromley had been in the process of repairing when he disappeared. With Runyan and his long-suffering assistant Bill Norton (Clinton Sundberg) – think Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, especially since both Wolfe and Runyan are insanely picky gourmands about their food – in tow, Jane flies to Los Angeles to Dr. Bromley’s main office (he was only in New York for a dental convention), only to discover that Roy Clark’s X-rays are missing from that office, too. The first time Clark came to Dr. Bromley’s temporary office, he was down on his luck and was able to scrape together only $10; the second time he was in a convertible, being driven by a chauffeur, and flashed a substantial bankroll and said he’d be coming into money soon. When Jane sees Happy Stevens, she identifies him as the chauffeur who was driving Clark that day, and from that Runyan is able to deduce that Gene Gordon is the leader of the holdup gang and his associates are the other robbers – though he figures this out too late to save Jane, who’s easily entrapped by the gang and killed by “Fletch.”

That leaves one loose end unaccounted for: how was Clark lured into the truck that killed him when it was incinerated? The answer is Clark’s former cellmate from prison, Ed Deets – a former circus clown played by real-life star clown Emmett Kelly, who gets a special credit. Ed took a $50,000 bribe from Gordon to hire Clark to move him so Gordon’s gang could set the truck on fire and eliminate Clark. Ed’s motive was he’d always wanted to own his own circus, and he used the $50,000 to buy one. There’s a quite impressive ending in which Runyan and the L.A. cops (led by Lt. Stark, played by Jerome Cowan nine years after he’d crossed paths with Dashiell Hammett by playing Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon – alas, in The Maltese Falcon he got killed in the first reel!) corner Deets in his newly purchased circus. Like so many befuddled criminals in previous movies, Deets tries to escape by going up, climbing up the aerialists’ ladder in his big top. The cops suddenly turn the house lights full on, Deets fires on them, they fire back, and ultimately he falls into the safety net below, then his body spills out of the net and onto the ground. In a surprising bit of pathos that suggests Emmett Kelly was a genuinely talented actor and not just a clown, he clutches the sand beneath his body and laments that he had wanted to own a circus so badly he was literally lured into killing somebody (and somebody he’d once considered a friend, at that) for it before he finally expires.

The Fat Man is a quite remarkable movie, no great shakes as cinema but quite good entertainment. It was directed by William Castle, who’s best remembered as the man who came up with bizarre horror cheapies in the 1950’s and cooked up unusual advertising gimmicks to promote them – like “Emergo,” a replica skeleton that emerged from behind the screen to terrorize the audience at the end of The House on Haunted Hill (1958); or “Percepto,” in which he and his minions wired certain seats to deliver mild electric shocks to random patrons at the climax of The Tingler (1959). (Director John Waters recalled deliberately arriving early at a theatre that was showing The Tingler to make sure he’d get one of the wired seats.) But before that phase of his career Castle made quite a few solidly entertaining “B” horror films and films noir for Columbia and Universal-International, including some of the Whistler and Crime Doctor series movies for Columbla as well as Just Before Dawn, The Gentleman from Nowhere, Undertow, and Hollywood Story (the last a film à clef about the still-unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922) and working as Orson Welles’s assistant on The Lady from Shanghai (1948).