Thu 11 Jun 2009
In case you’ve missed it, a long series of comments (17 so far) has followed Mike Nevins’ most recent column for this blog.
In that column, among other things, Mike suggested Jim Garner as an ideal choice for playing Archie Goodwin (with Orson Welles as Wolfe). It never happened, but in the course of discussing the possibility, Mike Doran brought up an example of a TV pilot film that could have had Rex Stout’s two famous characters in mind when it was made — sort of, maybe? — although it was ostensibly about another character altogether, one who’s very well known to collectors of Old Time Radio shows.
This made-for-TV movie is unaccountably not listed on IMDB, but it’s been circulating among collectors for some time now.
Have I intrigued you? Follow the link in the first paragraph above, and then to the comments that follow.
[UPDATE] Later the same day. Mike Grost has just sent me some images captured from the movie, the title of which is The Fat Man: The Thirty-Two Friends of Gina Lardelli, starring Robert Middleton. Presumably “The Fat Man” is the name of the proposed series, with the remainder being the title of the given episode.
Without knowing more about it than these two scenes, I’d say that if Rex Stout ever saw this film, he should have called his lawyers right then and there.
Anyone who fits my mental picture of Nero Wolfe more than this I can hardly imagine.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
This almost has to be a TV version of the radio show THE FAT MAN, sort of based on the Continental Op but not really, just an excuse for Dashiell Hammett to play off THE THIN MAN and get another paycheck without writing anything.
There was also a movie, directed by William Castle I believe, and starring the guy from the radio show, J. Scott Smart. Not very good.
As for Wolfe, the A & E series will do me just fine. Wish they would put them out on DVD in widescreen and uncut.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Picking the following out of the comments on the previous post, where this failed TV pilot first came up, Mike Doran had this to say:
“This is pure speculation on my part: I believe the Wolfe connection comes from [screen writers] Goff and Roberts: they wanted to do Wolfe but couldn’t get the rights from Rex Stout. Meanwhile, Screen Gems had the Fat Man rights and persuaded G&R to take it on: ‘Hey, why not? One fat detective is just like another, right, boys?’ Since the radio show had long been forgotten (I’m pretty sure that there weren’t any OTR clubs in the ’50s) G&R possibly decided to take the two properties and synthesize them into [the new] ‘Lucius Crane’ – keeping [radio’s fat man Brad] Runyon’s toughness and activity, adding Wolfe’s cosmopolitanism, making their mash-up just different enough to avoid possible legal action.”
As for the A&E series, Max, I don’t think anyone is going to disagree with you. It’s one of the few mystery series done in the US that matches what’s done on a regular basis in the UK.
Newcomers to this blog should check out my review of the A&E version of THE DOORBELL RANG here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1017
and Lee Goldberg’s long article on what it was like to write for the series, here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1019
June 11th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I agree with Mike Nevins: James Garner and Orson Welles would have been a dream team as Archie and Wolfe.
In the stills: that’s Tony Travis as the detective’s young assistant (left), and Robert Middleton as the detective (right). Boy, do they ever look like Archie and Wolfe.
Don’t know who that is playing the chef.
Robert Middleton is an A1 character actor, who played in support in countless films. He’s believably brainy and articulate as the detective.
Tony Travis hardly ever was in anything. He seems like an archetypal Nice Guy as the assistant. He does a good job.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Maybe I ought to quit while I’m ahead – getting quoted in one of my favorite blogs is pretty heady for a civilian like me – but since the subject is TV detectives, I’ll make bold and put in a request:
Does anybody out there know where I could get copies of a couple of other unsold pilots from this same period? Specifically:
(1) A Hercule Poirot pilot film from 1961 or 62 which starred Martin Gabel. I believe this aired on G.E. Theatre, which means it would have been introduced by Ronald Reagan.
(2) The Cool & Lam pilot from the same period, starring Benay Venuta and Billy Pearson. I’ve read that Erle Stanley Gardner rode a close herd on his properties in the wake of Perry Mason’s success, and I’d love to see the results in this case.
OK, two impossible requests in one off-topic comment. Still, it never hurts to ask…
June 11th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
To complete the circle, I only knew about THE FAT MAN from Mike Nevins. He mentions it in his book on the director Joseph H. Lewis.
Look for the book:
“Joseph H. Lewis: overview, interview, and filmography” (1998) by Francis M. Nevins.
It’s a fascinating study.
Mike Nevins knew Lewis personally, and interviewed him in depth.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Middleton looks fine, and I agree he would have been a superb choice as Wolfe. The actor playing the chef is noted character actor John Abbot, who would have been a fine choice as Fritz as well.
One ironic note, the opening for the radio series described Runyon as weighing in at 237 pounds, which would certainly qualify as fat in J. Scott Smart’s case, but not really for someone Middleton’s height and build. Robert Mitchum in his heyday,when he was starring in films like Out of the Past and Where Danger Lives,weighed 225. And 237 is hardly Wolfe’s one seventh of a ton.
Even more interesting that Joseph H. Lewis directed the pilot. Of course Lewis was a noted noir director (The Big Combo), though he is forever remembered by the nickname his westerns earned him, ‘Wagonwheel’ Lewis, for his penchant for shooting at least one shot in every western through the spokes of a wagon wheel.
But I’d be curious where this aired, as a stand alone, or as an epidsode of an anthology series? The former seems more likely since it seems to have completely disappeared as far as IMDB are concerned, not being listed under the director, actors, writers, title, or character search.
And I’ll join in wanting to see the Poirot and Cool and Lam pilots. I seem to remember talk at one point of a later Cool and Lam proposal with Shelly Winters and Joel Grey targeted for the roles, but I don’t think that ever got to the screen any more than the Robert Shaw Sherlock Holmes series once announced in TV Guide.
There is also a Mark Stevens pilot of a Michael Shayne series that was filmed and the Blake Edwards Brian Keith Mike Hammer is available thanks to Max Allan Collins. The half hour pilot for William Campbell Gault’s Brock Callaghan used to show up at odd hours on A&E for some reason.
Neither of the proposed James Bond series got past the synposis stage. The ABC series Commander Jamaica (about one Commander James Gunn) ended up as Doctor No and the CBS series proposal for James Bond Secret Agent ended up as the stories in For Your Eyes Only and on screen the Patrick McGoohan Secret Agent (aka Danger Man).
Sad to say the pilot for the Ross Martin Charlie Chan series was made and shown, and difficult to put out of ones mind. You have to wonder what the hell they were thinking. Still, the Kingh Deigh Judge Dee was better than we had any reason to hope, and if Deigh was Korean rather than Chinese, at least he was Asian. I guess we should just all be grateful no one ever decided to try out Imogene Coca as Miss Marple or Richard Harris as Maigret — oh, wait … Well, one out of two isn’t bad. Harris was a fine actor, but I kept expecting Maigret to go into a chorus of Camelot and segue into MacArthur Park.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:53 am
First: most likely, the Fat Man pilot never aired at all; unsold pilots didn’t become a staple of summer TV until the early ’60s, well after Fat Man’s apparent 1958 origin. There were loads of “test films” as they were then called, that have most likely flaked away into oblivion – unless some lower-management flunky managed to steal some prints and hide them in his garage. When Lee Goldberg was putting together his Unsold Television Pilots book, he was dependent on brief news items from ’50s-era TV Guides for much of his information. Many of the projects he cites possibly never got past the spec stage, while others were seen and rejected by networks or sponsors and consigned to the vaults, where no one would ever see them. In those days, nobody seemed to think that filmed TV would have more than the briefest shelf life – least of all the people who were making it.
I remember Shelley Winters appeearing one night with Johnny Carson to plug a TV-movie she’d made called Big Rose. It was A detective pilot, and in describing it to Carson, Winters said,”Basically it’s Cool and Lam.” Carson smiled pleasantly, clearly having no idea what Winters was referring to. A check of IMDb shows scanty credits, with no mention of Erle Stanley Gardner (this was 1974, long after Gardner’s death, but I’d guess the producers weren’t taking any chances on legal action).
As many posters here and elsewhere have noted, there have been many attempt s over the years to bring the great detectives to TV, with wildly varying degrees of success.
Finally, I can’t resist closing with a few words about Khigh Dhiegh (pronounced Ky Dee). He wasn’t Chinese or Korean or even Asian. He was profiled in TV Guide in the ’70s, at the height of the Hawaii Five-O years, in connection with his studies of I Ching (about which he had written a book). The story states that Mr. Dhiegh was of Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese descent. If you listen closely to his performances you will hear traces of his native region – New Joisey. The TV guide story does not give Khigh Dhiegh’s real name, which only came out after his death: he was born Kenneth Dickerson. (Look it up – my imagination isn’t nearly that good.)
June 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Ah,another illusion shattered. Guess Khigh Deigh was like the famous Italian Native American Iron Eyes Cody. Or Mexican Anthony Quinn who passed himself off as Native American to his father in law C.B. De Mille to kick start his acting career.
Still, the Judge Dee episode wasn’t bad if not exactly my vision of the character or how I would have liked to see the Robert Van Guilick’s books done.
Of course thanks to The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes quite a few sleuths made it to the small screen: Donald Pleasance as Hodgson’s ghost hunting Carnaki, and Barrie Inghram and John Neville as Dr. Thorndyke. Derek Jacobi became William Drew instead of Duckworth and was killed for his trouble in the William LeQueux story, but former Sherlock Holmes and Sir Denis Nayland Smith Douglas Wilmer was fine as Professor S.F.X Van Deusen. Ellis Peter’s Felse family was moved to the States for an episode of the Hitchcock Hour (I think based on the first Felse novel), and John Creasey’s Patrick Dawlish made the transition to an American too in an adaptation of The Crime Haters an unsold pilot aired as part of Boris Hitchcock’s Thriller.
I recently stumbled across a reference to an Australian series of Arthur Upfield’s Bony that I had never heard of. I’ve seen one intriguing photo of the actor who played the part. There was a Bony comic strip too, but I’ve only ever seen one panel reproduced.
Perhaps the most unusual is there was a series of Japanese films about Arsene Lupin (aside from the manga, anime, and live action Lupin III), with the French gentleman crook presented as French but played by a Japanese actor.
But for sheer boneheaded casting you would have to look pretty far to top Walter Connally (who also played Nero Wolfe), Barnard Hughes, or Alec Guiness as Father Brown (though the Guiness film isn’t bad). Luckily we have the series Kenneth More did in England.
As for unaired projects it’s amazing, considering how much they cost per episode that so many were made and never saw light. I think their was an ABC summer replacement series called Preview for a few seasons that was made up of nothing but unsold pilots.
Though it isn’t in IMDB (or anything else I can find) I have seen at least one reference to an episode of the Sebastian Cabot 1964 series Suspense in which Richard Conte supposedly played Sam Spade in an adaptation of one of the Spade short stories. It’s not listed among the episodes that played however. If it doesn’t exist, at least it was a good idea.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Didn’t Marv Lachman do a whole list of these somewhere? like here maybe?
That so many TV test films in the ’50s would go unseen isn’t so unusal if you bear in mind TV’s stepchild status at that time. Most of the companies doing film shows for TV were converted from the B-movie units of studios or Poverty Row facilities who’d rent out for a fraction of what a feature picture would cost. Factor in that they were shooting in black-and-white, and only making half-hours rather than 75 to 90 minute features, with cast and crew recruited from the second or third tier of talent (that’s not a quality judgment, just an acknowledgement of comparative popularity), and you have Hollywood on the budget plan.
With all the talk over the years about film preservation, I wonder what a diligent search of studio vaults would yield in terms of lost TV pilots of the ’50s and early ’60s? Ah, dreams…
By the way… ever hear the story of Buffy Sainte-Marie agreeing to do a guest shot on The Virginian? Ms. Sainte-Marie made a condition of her appearance that only Native American actors could be used in the episode. She came to the casting session with a wish list, topped by Michael Ansara. Then the Universal casting told her that Mr. Ansara was of Lebanese descent. Broke the lady’s heart. (I believe that Mr. Cody, mentioned above, was in that show; I’ll have to check.)Hooray for Hollywood…
June 12th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Mike,
You’re quite right about Marv Lachman’s list of series character detectives on TV. The primary list is on the primary M*F site in several parts, but the Addenda can be found right here on the blog: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=80
To avoid cluttering this comment up with too many link, it might be best to follow the link above, which will lead to all of the other installments.
The Donald Lam-Bertha Cool reference is in the Addenda, but a cursory investigation online hasn’t turned up any copies on DVD. So far.
The pilot is mentioned on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_and_Lam , and there are plenty of other references to it, some in great detail, it’s quite possible that it does exist.
Getting back to Marv’s list, it’s now appearing in printed form in Geoff Bradley’s CADS magazine, perhaps with additional entries not in any of the M*F posts.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Marv Lachman’s list also ran in Armchair Detective. I think I even added something on Wallace’s J.G, Reeder and confirmed the Robert Beatty Bulldog Drummond pilot, though it is so many years ago I forget. Great comprehensive effort on his part.
Whenever I think of Hollywood racial casting I always think of J. Carrol Naish, who in his long and distinguished career in film played Japanese, Italian (radio’s Life with Luigi), Native American, Chinese, Mexican … everything but what he was, an Irishman from the same Dublin theater group that gave us Barry Fitzgerald and most of the Hollywood Irish Mafia.
Still, it would be hard to top John Wayne as Genghis Khan and Susan Hayward as his “Tartar woman” in Dick Powell’s The Conqueror. A film which incidentally gave us such fine Asian actors as Pedro Armenderaz, William Conrad, Agnes Moorehead, Ted de Corsia, Thomas Gomez, and John Hoyt, and also spawned one of the great conspiracy theory/urban myths of all time thanks to being filmed in Utah near a nuclear test sight and the high rate of cancer deaths of the cast and crew. Though the connection has been proven and disproven so many times I don’t what the status is currently. Last time I heard it was considered debunked, but that may have changed.
As for the existence of the pilots, there is no telling. Things do show up in odd places. Sammy Davis Jr. found treasure trove of ‘lost’ old westerns in John Wayne’s garage supposedly when Wayne told him some of his old films were stored out there If true, I think some of the lost Tom Mix silents were among those found. The only known copy of the Lone Ranger serial showed up in an old movie house in Spain — which is why it has some Spanish subtitles and one chapter in French.
I do know a great deal of older live television exists on Kinescope but has never been put on VHS or DVD. It’s is preserved though, if you have the money and time to travel to New York to see it. I don’t know the status of series done on film and videotape however. Things are always showing up that were considered lost forever.
My own wish list for boxed sets include the anthology series such as Climax, Dick Powell Theater, Four Star Theater, and the old Kraft Suspense. These include adaptations of writers like Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler,Dorothy B. Hughes, Martha Albrand, John D. MacDonald, and countless others including the original pilot for Burke’s Law with Dick Powell in the lead. Some individual episodes can be found (like the Fleming Casino Royale on Climax), but there are many still missing.
Which leaves us all where Dumas left us in The Count of Monte Cristo: “Wait and hope.”
June 15th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I might have mentioned in passing that I have a sizable collection of old TV Guides, Chicago edition, dating back to the early ’50s and before, when it was a local publication called TV Forecast. Among the wonderful nuggets I’ve come across by accident include at least two TV guest appearances by J. Carrol Naish in which he got to play an Irish character; one was a Wagon Train, I’ll have to look up the other. Also, I seem to recall that Robert Middleton had a shot at another literary sleuth, Baynard Kendrick’s Capt. Duncan McClain – another old Edward Arnold role. Gonna have to look that one up too…
June 16th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Just a few odds and ends before they start throwing rocks at us:
(1) In September 1955, J.Carrol Naish appeared on Schlitz Playhouse Of Stars in an episodecalled “Dead Call”. The TV Guide listing notes the fact that at Naish’s request, the script was rewritten so his character could speak Limerick Irish. A further IMDb check shows that Wagon Train allowed Naish to be Irish twice, as caharacters named Charvanaugh and Burns. There may be more.
(2) Anthony Quinn, born in Mexico to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, once spoke in an interview of how Mexicans didn’t really accept him, but when he traveled to Ireland, he found many Irishmen who looked like him. These were the so-called “black Irish” of the west, supposedly descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada, who swam ashore and married the Catholic colleens. I believe Mr. Naish claimed similar ancestry. Quinn was amused no end by the fact that he looked Irish, and could prove it.
(3) I also tracked down Robert Middleton’s appearance as Capt. Duncan McLain, on Kraft Mystery Theater in late summer of 1962. This was only a couple of weeks after Claude Dauphin played Prof. Van Dusen, the Thinking Machine, on the same program. The series was a Revue production, as MCA-Universal was then known, and they’re famous for never throwing anything away. Maybe we should get a search warrant…
June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Great detective work, Mike! I think some of the Kraft Mystery shows are in circulation, unofficially at this point in time, but I’m going to make a point of checking out exactly what is available.
Here’s another one for you. Following a review of one of Dorothy B. Hughes’ books, David Vineyard said:
“I think Davidian Report, a spy novel, was adapted as an episode of a television anthology series, most likely Kraft Suspense Theater. I seem to recall Andrew Duggan in it.”
But this show on whatever series it made have been on is NOT listed on IMDB. Is there any chance you can find it?
June 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Steve –
Your E-mail, containing link and plenary indulgence, has been received and appreciated. This whole pesky business of working for a living can really get in the way of the truly vital work we all do here.
That said, I’ve got to pass along something I came across by accident last night. It seems that MEtoo, a local station here in Chicago (digital Ch 26.3), is starting to show Kraft Mystery/Suspense Theater episodes as part of their Sunday Afternoon Whodunits. They began this past Sunday with a 1963 show called “Shadow Of A Man”. I taped it, intending to watch it sometime in the indeterminate future. Lap dissolve to last night, and I’m looking through some of my old TV Guides from this period, and lo and behold, there’s the listing for this episode – which, it seems, is Revue’s attempt to turn Double Indemnity into a TV series. Honest – Jack Kelly plays Walter Neff and Broderick Crawford plays Barton Keyes, and those are the names of the characters. Both the TV Guide Close-Up listing and the NBC ad play up the connection, although I don’t recall seeing James M. Cain’s name in either place – or for that matter in the credits of the show (which I still haven’t watched all the way through).
Every time I go through these old magazines I seem to stumble on something unexpected like this, and I’ve had them a long time now. This is where I get most of the nickel knowledge I put in these posts, and I’m eternally grateful for having a place like this to put it.
July 6th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
[…] certain posts for which the comments that follow take on a life of their own. Take for example a short piece called “An Early Example of NERO WOLFE on TV?” There are 15 comments following, which […]
November 21st, 2017 at 2:44 am
– What’s a decade between friends?
MeTV is running Mannix in the overnight hours – 2am/1am Central time, weeknights.
They’ve just started Season 2, when Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts (mentioned above) took over the show and reworked it into Basic Private Eye (thereby prolonging its TV life).
Tomorrow (late Tuesday/early Wednesday/whatever), they’re running an episode titled “A Pittance Of Faith” – which is a rewrite of Goff & Roberts’s “Gina Lardelli” script for the Fat Man pilot that this whole post was about in the first place.
The byline on “Pittance” is ‘Blake Ritchie’, which is apparently G&R’s registered pseudonym, use to disguise stuff from the back files.
‘Mr. Ritchie’s’ credit turns up on a few other Mannixes (Mannices?) later in the run (Goff & Roberts must have had a big file cabinet …).
This is an example of “haircutting” – when a script for one source is rewritten for another one, a frequent occurrence in TV, then, now, and always.
Just thought I’d throw this in …
November 21st, 2017 at 11:25 am
Always interesting, always welcome!