The League of Frightened Men

Back in the day some rollicking frat boys injured Eduardo Ciannelli and he now walks with the aid of two canes. he's a successful novelist and has menace in his voice as always when he talks.

The others of this fraternity occupy various rungs on the social scale, but they all get the same menacing message that revenge is on the horizon for that hazing incident at Harvard.

Seems open and shut except to Walter Connolly as Nero Wolfe. Someone else has decided to do some murders under this blanket threat.

Connolly is a bit nicer than Edward Arnold in the other Nero Wolfe film. Lionel Stander is less of a dunce as Archie in this film.

The League Of Frightened Men is a good B film from Columbia.

Twenty year ago, when a student at Harvard, Eduardo Ciannelli was hazed by his fellows and crippled. Now he needs two canes to walk about. He lived for decades in poverty, supported by the guilty men, until his career as an author took off. Once he now longer needed their financial support, they began to die, and the remainder come to Nero Wolfe, asking for him to find the evidence to put away the man they all know is guilty.

It's a far better movie than the earlier one; Alfred Green was a fine director, and there isn't the clangorous humor. Unfortunately Walter Connolly is the most un-Nero-Wolfe like detective you can imagine. He goes out to gather evidence himself. He's kind and courteous and even considerate. It's a fine mystery, and well shot and performed. It just ain't Nero Wolfe.

In 1936, Columbia made its first Nero Wolfe film and it starred Edward Arnold as the amateur detective. A year later, they brought Wolfe back but with Walter Connolly playing the dick. In both cases, unfortunately, they chose Lionel Stander to play Wolfe's right hand man, Archie. I say unfortunately because Archie in the Nero Wolfe books was sophisticated and smart....not an uncouth boob like he is in these two films.

In "The League of Frightened Men", a group of Harvard alumni are worried that one of their old classmates might be murdering them. And, if this is the case, the man in question had plenty of reason and justification for doing so. But it's not at all certain the man in question is a killer and it's up to Wolfe to get to the bottom of this.

I really disliked this film...more so than the first one. It's because it's one of the talkiest murder mysteries I've seen. It's also confusing (Wolfe sometimes seems to pull things completely out of thin air) and gimmicky at the end...where Wolfe invites everyone to his house in order to reveal the real killer....a trope used approximately 30452998 times in other films (give or take 3). Overall, a disappointment...and odd to see the agoraphobe, Wolfe, leaving his home repeatedly during the movie.

First things first: available DVDs of this film do not have great picture quality. This is one of the Paramount films of the '30's now owned by another studio with no interest on issuing a "restored" version. So you can only get copies of films recorded on TV years ago. So you have to put up with all the flaws that such copies upon copies have.

Previous reviewers of this film have rightly pointed out the differences between the screen portrayal of "Nero Wolfe" and the depiction presented by Rex Stout in his many novels and short stories. Some might remember that the Saturday Evening Post used to publish some of the later Stout stories and provide illustrations of the detective which fed readers' imaginations. All portrayed a very large man, said in an early novel to be 1/6 of a ton and in later novels to be 1/7 of a ton. In any case like an NFL lineman today. Well, the actors who portrayed Wolfe on the screen all fell far short of the scale, and none conveyed the seriousness, dignity, and gravitas of Stout's conception. Wolfe was not a mirthful man given to jovial humor and feigned laughter. So Walter Connolly as Wolfe with his always cocked sideways head and chuckles does not meet the physical criteria.

Anyway, some reviewer mistakes a big fact about this movie: the league of men did make compensation to their injured classmate, paying his way through Harvard and providing a stipend afterwards. It's all there in the unrolling of the movie. Archie even castigates the accused for being "ungrateful."

There are two comments that have to be made from a motion picture perspective. 1. Stander, who would go on after his career blackball, played a much more sympathetic role as helper and associate to Macmillan and Wife. Here he is abrasive, small minded, and annoying -- totally unlike the smoother Lee Horsley and Timothy Sutton who would play "Archie" in later TV versions of Nero Wolfe. 2. Ciannelli was a very intense actor whose presence on the screen always compelled attention even in the minor but title role as villain in a Republic serial "The Mysterious Dr. Satan." Watch him as the riveting leader of the Thug rebels in "Gunga Din" (the Cary Grant movie) for one of his memorable roles.

Huge plot holes can be found, including the mystery of the box left in a bookstore, how a murder could be committed in a lights out room where the murderer grabbed a gun from the victim and shot him while knocking down a third person who inadvertently entered (err, wasn't there light from the hallway?), and exactly how did Wolfe solve the puzzle, other than guesswork, and why the crazy hoax was devised in the way it was since there was no foreseeable conclusion to it. Why hoax given the deaths that had taken place?

As a previous reviewer said, this movie is for those who want completeness in their search for dramatic portrayals of Nero Wolfe, but good luck in trying to track down English versions of the various Russian and Italian films which IMDb identifies.

Walter Connelly is Neto Wolfe in the 1937 League of Frightened Men. He's pretty bad but he's not really playing Wolfe, just an overweight detective as the film gives him nothing of Wolfe's personality. I liked Edward Arnold better. He was at least more lively.

A man, Professor Hibbard (Leonard Mudie) visits Wolfe and announces that he is about to be murdered, and that two previously reported deaths were not accidents, but murders.

When he was a sophomore at Harvard, he and these other men hazed a student, Paul Chapin (Eduardo Ciannelli) and left him a cripple who walks with the use of two canes. Now, 19 years later, he is extracting his revenge.

Excuse me - 19 years later? All of these men were born in the 1880s, putting them in their fifties, not 38-ish.

Wolfe promises to protect them for a fee and sends Archie to investigate. Is Chapin after them, or is someone trying to pin the killings on him?

Since this isn't based on a Rex Stout novel, it appears the writers only used the character names and threw the rest of it out the window. They also threw elements from the first movie out as well.

Though Archie (Lionel Stander) is a bachelor in the books, in the 1936 film, he gets married. Evidently by 1937 she's not around any longer. In the books and in the 1936 film, Wolfe refuses to leave the house. Now he thinks nothing of it.

Now he's also British. Instead of a chef he has a reformed thug named Butch as butler and chef. However, in one of the last scenes, he is working with his orchids.

Stander is a complete miscast as the sophisticated and smooth Archie of the books.

In short, not very good, with some very old Harvard alumni.