Meet Nero Wolfe
Encyclopedia
Meet Nero Wolfe is a 1936 mystery film based on the 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance, written by Rex Stout
Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. Stout is best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the...

. Set in New York, the story introduced the detective genius Nero Wolfe
Nero Wolfe
Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective, created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detective genius. Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 short stories from 1934 to 1974, with most of them set in New York City. Wolfe's...

 (Edward Arnold
Edward Arnold (actor)
Edward Arnold was an American actor. He was born on the Lower East Side of New York City as Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider, the son of German immigrants Carl Schneider and Elizabeth Ohse.-Acting career:...

) and his assistant Archie Goodwin
Archie Goodwin (fictional detective)
Archie Goodwin is a fictional character and detective in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. The witty voice of all the stories, he recorded the cases of the detective genius from 1934 to 1975 . He lives in Nero Wolfe's brownstone in New York City.Archie was born on October 23 in Chillicothe, Ohio,...

 (Lionel Stander
Lionel Stander
Lionel Jay Stander was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television.-Early life and career:Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children...

). The partnership endured through 33 novels and 39 short stories written by Stout, but continued in only one more film for Columbia Pictures.

The titles of the film begin with the November 1934 issue of The American Magazine — in which the abridged version of Fer-de-Lance appeared — lying on a table. The magazine is taken from the table and opened to an illustrated spread that reads, "Edward Arnold in Meet Nero Wolfe."

Plot

At the West Hills Golf Club in Westchester, E.J. Kimball (Walter Kingsford) and his son Manuel (Russell Hardie) are welcomed into the party of elderly Professor Barstow (Boyd Irwin Sr.) and his prospective son-in-law Claude Roberts (Victor Jory
Victor Jory
Victor Jory was a Canadian actor.-Biography:Born in Dawson City, Yukon, Jory was the boxing and wrestling champion of the Coast Guard during his military service, and he kept his burly physique. He toured with theater troupes and appeared on Broadway, before making his Hollywood debut in 1930...

). Barstow sends his caddy back to the clubhouse to fetch his visor, and finds himself without his clubs when it is his turn to tee off. The elder Kimball loans his driver to Barstow. Immediately after hitting his drive, Barstow flinches. "A mosquito bit me just as I hit the ball," he complains with good humor. "Too bad," Kimball replies sympathetically, taking the club from Barstow and making his own drive. As the foursome sets out on the course, Barstow is stricken and succumbs quickly to an apparent heart attack.

At the New York brownstone
Brownstone
Brownstone is a brown Triassic or Jurassic sandstone which was once a popular building material. The term is also used in the United States to refer to a terraced house clad in this material.-Types:-Apostle Island brownstone:...

 of Nero Wolfe (Edward Arnold
Edward Arnold (actor)
Edward Arnold was an American actor. He was born on the Lower East Side of New York City as Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider, the son of German immigrants Carl Schneider and Elizabeth Ohse.-Acting career:...

), Marie Maringola (Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth was an American film actress and dancer who attained fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars...

) offers the sedentary detective genius $50 to find her brother. Although he is an expert metal worker, Carlo Maringola had such trouble finding work in America that he planned to return to the old country. On the eve of his departure Carlo told his sister that he could stay in America after all — he got a job. They had arranged a celebration but Carlo never came. He disappeared.

Wolfe takes Maria's case and sends his confidential assistant Archie Goodwin (Lionel Stander
Lionel Stander
Lionel Jay Stander was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television.-Early life and career:Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children...

) to investigate at Carlo's apartment house. Archie returns to the brownstone with evidence that suggests that Carlo will never be found alive — and that his death is linked to the death of Professor Barstow. Wolfe theorizes that Barstow was killed by a specially constructed golf club, one that was converted by Carlo into an air rifle that propelled a poisoned needle into his midsection when he struck the ball. His theory is borne out by an autopsy of Barstow, and the discovery of Carlo's body.

Solving the murder of Professor Barstow will be a far more lucrative endeavor, Wolfe is pleased to learn: a $50,000 reward has been offered. But interviews with Barstow's daughter (Joan Perry), his widow (Nana Bryant
Nana Bryant
Nana Bryant was an American film actress. She appeared in over 100 films between 1935 and 1955.She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died in Hollywood, California. Her grave is located at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery....

) and his doctor (Frank Conroy
Frank Conroy (actor)
Frank Parish Conroy was a British film and stage actor who appeared in many movies, notably The Little Minister, The Ox-Bow Incident, All My Sons, The Threat, The Royal Family of Broadway, The Young Philadelphians and The Day the Earth Stood Still...

), do little to advance the investigation.

Far more helpful is a luncheon for the four boys who caddied for Professor Barstow's foursome. Hearing their accounts, Wolfe concludes that the intended murder victim had been E.J. Kimball, not Barstow.

Kimball dismisses the notion that his life is in danger until he is informed that his car has been wrecked and his chauffeur is dead — killed by a fer-de-lance
Bothrops atrox
Bothrops atrox is a venomous pitviper species found in the tropical lowlands of northern South America east of the Andes. No subspecies are currently recognized.-Description:...

, a South American snake that is probably the most poisonous in the world. The autopsies of Professor Barstow and Carlo Maringola reveal that they too were poisoned, by the venom of the fer-de-lance. Convinced that his life is in deadly peril, Kimball pleads for Wolfe's help.

After E.J. Kimball tells him about his sensational past in South America, Wolfe concludes that at least six people had reason to wish him dead — and that the Barstow family is not above suspicion. Wolfe assigns Archie to move in with Kimball and his son, to watch over the old man. After a long game of Monopoly
Monopoly (game)
Marvin Gardens, the leading yellow property on the board shown, is actually a misspelling of the original location name, Marven Gardens. The misspelling was said to be introduced by Charles Todd and passed on when his home-made Monopoly board was copied by Charles Darrow and thence to Parker...

 on the Kimballs' terrace that evening, the three men rise to go in to dinner — and shots are fired.

The attack causes Wolfe to summon all of the principals to the brownstone. They are to spend the night, and they will stay as long as necessary. The next evening a deadly parcel arrives, addressed to Wolfe. The killer has Wolfe in his sights — and Wolfe knows he has the killer under his roof.

Cast

  • Edward Arnold
    Edward Arnold (actor)
    Edward Arnold was an American actor. He was born on the Lower East Side of New York City as Gunther Edward Arnold Schneider, the son of German immigrants Carl Schneider and Elizabeth Ohse.-Acting career:...

     as Nero Wolfe
    Nero Wolfe
    Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective, created in 1934 by the American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin narrates the cases of the detective genius. Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 short stories from 1934 to 1974, with most of them set in New York City. Wolfe's...

    , private detective
  • Lionel Stander
    Lionel Stander
    Lionel Jay Stander was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television.-Early life and career:Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children...

     as Archie Goodwin
    Archie Goodwin (fictional detective)
    Archie Goodwin is a fictional character and detective in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. The witty voice of all the stories, he recorded the cases of the detective genius from 1934 to 1975 . He lives in Nero Wolfe's brownstone in New York City.Archie was born on October 23 in Chillicothe, Ohio,...

    , Wolfe's confidential assistant
  • Dennie Moore
    Dennie Moore
    Dennie Moore was an American film and stage actress.-Early life:Deena Rivka Moore was born in New York City on New Year's Eve 1902 to Jewish parents Oren Moore , a cantor at one of the local synagogues, and Gabriella Gefen...

     as Mazie Gray, Archie's fiancée
  • Victor Jory
    Victor Jory
    Victor Jory was a Canadian actor.-Biography:Born in Dawson City, Yukon, Jory was the boxing and wrestling champion of the Coast Guard during his military service, and he kept his burly physique. He toured with theater troupes and appeared on Broadway, before making his Hollywood debut in 1930...

     as Claude Roberts, Ellen Barstow's fiancé
  • Nana Bryant
    Nana Bryant
    Nana Bryant was an American film actress. She appeared in over 100 films between 1935 and 1955.She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died in Hollywood, California. Her grave is located at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery....

     as Sarah Barstow, widow of Professor Barstow
  • Joan Perry
    Joan Perry
    Joan Perry , born Elizabeth Rosiland Miller, was an American film actress, model, and singer.In the early 1930s, Perry worked as a model in New York City. In 1935 she went to Hollywood and was signed under contract to Columbia Pictures and during her time there she co-starred opposite such actors...

     as Ellen Barstow, daughter of Professor Barstow
  • Russell Hardie as Manuel Kimball, son of E.J. Kimball
  • Walter Kingsford
    Walter Kingsford
    Walter Kingsford was a British stage, film and television actor born in Redhill, Surrey, England. He was born Walter Pearce and had several sisters...

     as E.J. Kimball, international merchant
  • Boyd Irwin Sr. as Professor Barstow, college president who dies on the golf course
  • John Qualen
    John Qualen
    John Qualen was a Canadian-American character actor of Norwegian heritage who specialized in Scandinavian roles....

     as Olaf, Wolfe's Scandinavian chef
  • Gene Morgan as O'Grady, police lieutenant
  • Rita Cansino (Rita Hayworth
    Rita Hayworth
    Rita Hayworth was an American film actress and dancer who attained fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars...

    ) as Maria Maringola, client
  • Frank Conroy
    Frank Conroy (actor)
    Frank Parish Conroy was a British film and stage actor who appeared in many movies, notably The Little Minister, The Ox-Bow Incident, All My Sons, The Threat, The Royal Family of Broadway, The Young Philadelphians and The Day the Earth Stood Still...

     as Nathaniel Bradford, Professor Barstow's doctor
  • Juan Torena as Carlo Maringola, metal worker and brother of Maria Maringola
  • Martha Tibbetts as the apartment house maid
  • Eddy Waller
    Eddy Waller
    Edward C. "Eddy" Waller was an American film and television actor. He was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.-Career:...

     as Golf Starter

Production

"When Columbia pictures bought the screen rights to Fer-de-Lance for $7,500 and secured the option to buy further stories in the series, it was thought the role would go to Walter Connolly
Walter Connolly
Walter Connolly was an American character actor who appeared in almost fifty films between 1914 and 1939.Connolly was a successful stage actor who appeared in twenty-two Broadway productions between 1916 and 1935, notably revivals of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Chekhov's...

. Instead Edward Arnold got it," reported John McAleer in Rex Stout: A Biography (1977). "Columbia's idea was to keep Arnold busy with low-cost Wolfe films between features. Two films presently were made by Columbia, Meet Nero Wolfe (Fer-de-Lance) and The League of Frightened Men
The League of Frightened Men (1937 film)
The League of Frightened Men is a 1937 mystery film based on the second Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout. Directed by Alfred E. Green, the Columbia Pictures film stars Walter Connolly as Nero Wolfe, a role played by Edward Arnold in the previous year's Meet Nero Wolfe...

. Connolly did portray Wolfe in the latter film, after Arnold decided he did not want to become identified in the public mind with one part. Lionel Stander portrayed Archie Goodwin. Stander was a capable actor but, as Archie, Rex thought he had been miscast."

Meet Nero Wolfe was the second film directed by Herbert Biberman
Herbert Biberman
Herbert J. Biberman , was an American screenwriter and film director. He may be best known for having been one of the Hollywood Ten as well as directing Salt of the Earth, a 1954 film about a zinc miners' strike in Grant County, New Mexico.He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Joseph and...

 (1900–1971), a director rooted in the theater who became best known as one of the Hollywood Ten.

"Fresh from the theater, Biberman blocked shots instead of composing them," wrote Bernard F. Dick in Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (1989):
Biberman opened up the action a bit, but the plot, based on Stout's Fer-de-Lance (1934), defeated him. He simply did not understand the medium; the cast reacts as it would on stage, but in film a stage reaction is overacting. Apart from some filmic touches — swish pans, dissolves, wipes, and an eerie shot of a dead man's hand clutching a newspaper clipping that another hand reaches down to retrieve — Meet Nero Wolfe is like a West End melodrama aimed at the tourist trade — slick, but so ephemeral that two days later the plot has vanished from the memory.


The film's greatest departure from the original story is the creation of Mazie Gray, who can indeed call herself Mrs. Archie Goodwin at the end of Meet Nero Wolfe. The decidedly un-Wolfean character is played by Dennie Moore, memorable for her performance as Olga the gossipy manicurist in the 1939 film, The Women
The Women (1939 film)
The Women is a 1939 American comedy-drama film directed by George Cukor. The film is based on Clare Boothe Luce's play of the same name, and was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who had to make the film acceptable for the Production Code in order for it to be released.The film...

.

Reception

"A most comforting sort of detective for these humid days is Nero Wolfe, a sedentary sleuth given to drinking great quantities of homemade beer in his cool, shade-drawn brownstone and solving murder mysteries therefrom by means of remote control," wrote The New York Times (July 16, 1936):
Mr. Wolfe is, of course, the rotund Edward Arnold, whose characterization of Rex Stout's fairly recent fictional figure presages brisk competition for such current screen master minds as Philo Vance and Perry Mason, both in matters of deduction as well as esthetically. Where Mr. Vance, for example, collects old chrysoprase and what not, Nero Wolfe grows orchids. Mr. Wolfe sets a precedent, too, in achieving something that seems not to have occurred to the other ratiocinators of the cinema. He collects huge fees.


"Its hero, less dashing than Philo Vance and less whimsical than Charlie Chan, but more mercenary than either, will be a highly acceptable addition to the screen's growing corps of private operatives," wrote Time (July 27, 1936) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,847774,00.html.

"The comedy and the guessing elements have been deftly mixed, the well-knit narrative precludes any drooping in interest and the cast disports itself in crack whodunit fashion," wrote Variety (July 22, 1936):
In bringing the Rex Stout figment to life Arnold has contributed lots more than girth and a capacity for beer guzzling. His Nero Wolfe jells suavely with the imagination and makes a piquant example of personality conception. For seven years this corpulent sleuth, with a craving for nothing but good food and ease, has not ventured from his home. When he isn't unraveling a crime for the cash it will bring him, he gravitates between two hobbies, bottle tilting and orchid growing.

Task of digging up evidence and following out leads for Wolfe on the outside falls to Lionel Stander. It's a typical mugg role for Stander but the performance he turns in pegs him as an important entertainment factor in the film.


In 2002 Scarlet Street
Scarlet Street (magazine)
Scarlet Street was an American film magazine that primarily specialized in the genres of horror, mystery and film noir. Its initial concentration was on Sherlock Holmes and related film and television productions, but later its subject matter expanded to include a variety of other genres.The title...

magazine revisited Meet Nero Wolfe — little seen in the years after its release — and found it neither the travesty it is sometimes thought to be, nor a faithful recreation of the world of Nero Wolfe.
Is it absurd and a "betrayal" of Stout to make Wolfe's orchid room a kind of greenhouse offshoot to his office? Of course, it is, but it's also a clever device that keeps the orchid-growing obsession in the action without breaking from the fairly complicated plot. Other departures — such as transforming chef Fritz Brenner into the Swedish Olaf ... are less explicable. ...

What goes wrong — at least from a purist's standpoint — is the decision to portray Wolfe as a far too jolly character. This is odd in itself, since Arnold was rarely an actor who specialized in projecting good humor.

Judging the film as a film and dismissing questions of fidelity to the source material, Meet Nero Wolfe is an above average minor A picture, a solid mystery, and unfailingly entertaining. Certain things — such as a sequence involving Archie playing the then new game of Monopoly — have a nice time capsule quality that has nothing to do with the Wolfe books, but have a value all their own. No, at bottom, it's not Rex Stout's Nero and Archie, but it's a well-developed mystery (thanks to Stout's plot) with compensations all its own — and an interesting piece of Wolfeana.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK