The League of Frightened Men

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.

Nero Wolfe is supposedly one of the great sleuths of detective fiction, but his appeal eludes me. Wolfe is an extremely unsympathetic character: arrogant, lazy, self-indulgent, corpulent. He avoids detective work (or any other work) unless he absolutely needs the money, preferring to spend his time eating enormous gourmet meals and tending his expensive orchids in his swank penthouse. Even more off-putting is the fact that Wolfe refuses to set foot outside, insisting that all the clues be brought to him by his 'leg man' Archie Goodwin. (It would be interesting if Wolfe were an agoraphobe, trapped in his house due to psychological terror rather than laziness.) Goodwin is a much more interesting character than Wolfe, and should have made a go of it as a detective without Wolfe's patronage.

In 1936, Columbia attempted to make a low-budget series of Nero Wolfe features. The casting for 'Meet Nero Wolfe' was impressive. Edward Arnold captured Wolfe's personality perfectly. I savour one scene in which Arnold, as Wolfe, supped a beer and then immediately spat it out again ... expertly depicting the basic vulgarity and self-indulgence of this character. Even more brilliantly, Lionel Stander was absolute perfection as Archie Goodwin, the role Stander was born to play. With this team, the series could have clicked.

For some reason, Edward Arnold did not come back for seconds. The next (and last) instalment in Columbia's short-lived series was 'The League of Frightened Men'. Stander returns as Goodwin, but Nero Wolfe is now played by Walter Connolly, an utterly unimpressive performer. Connolly's high-pitched voice and indecisive manner have ruined every role I've seen him play. There are quite a few good things in this movie (including its title), and I should like to have seen Charlie Chan or Philo Vance handle this material, with these production values (and with Lionel Stander along for the ride). But with Connolly in the central role, this film is a lot duller than it had to be.

The frightened men are ten Harvard alumni, from the same graduating class. They all came from wealthy backgrounds, and formed a fraternity. While at Harvard, they hazed Paul Chapin, a scholarship student from a lower-class background. The hazing went wrong (we never learn the details) and Chapin was crippled for life. All of this was years ago, and the ten men are now middle-aged. But three of them have died under mysterious circumstances, and a fourth has vanished. The other six have received threatening letters. In terror, they come to Wolfe (why not the police?), seeking his help. The obvious suspect is Chapin ... but in the interim he has become a successful author of murder mysteries, despite being crippled. Would he jeopardise his financial success for mere revenge? And, if Chapin is guilty, why has he waited so long for vengeance?

Eduardo Ciannelli was a character actor whom I've always disliked yet whom I consistently admire. His cold manner, coarse features and accent keep him resolutely unlikeable on screen, but his talent as an actor is manifest. (Unlike that of Walter Connolly.) There's one very powerful scene in this film. The Harvard alumni -- a bunch of overstuffed fiftyish men -- stand trembling in Wolfe's study, pleading with him to protect them from Chapin. Suddenly the door opens and Eduardo Ciannelli totters into the room, supporting his twisted body on two walking sticks. With Lon Chaney-like effort, he crutches his way round the room, confronting the men who maimed him, snarling with rage while they quiver and shake. Then he lurches out of the room again. A great scene by a great actor; too bad it isn't in a better film.

A major flaw in 'The League of Frightened Men' is that our sympathies are meant to be with Wolfe's six clients, and against Chapin. But I felt just the other way. These men pulled a stupid stunt that crippled a man for life, yet they don't seem the least bit disposed to compensating him. They haven't even the grace to apologise. (A correspondent who has read Rex Stout's novel informs me that they did give Chapin some compensation in the book; the subject isn't even mentioned in this film.) Ciannelli typically played unsympathetic characters, but here for once I was in his corner.

Also on hand here is character actress Rafaela Ottiano, whom I usually find quite sexy even while I'm repulsed by most of the characters she plays on screen. She and Lionel Stander are quite good here. Edward McNamara, the living embodiment of the Irish cop, plays here (for once) a cop who isn't Irish. One of the potential murder victims in this movie is played by Victor Kilian, ironically a murder victim in real life. 'The League of Frightened Men' has a lot of those wonderful elements that make many low-budget second features of the 1930s so enjoyable ... but the pieces never quite come together, and the hole at the centre of this movie is Walter Connolly's weak and boring performance. I don't believe that there has ever been a first-rate Nero Wolfe movie, but 'Meet Nero Wolfe' with Edward Arnold is much more enjoyable than this limp sequel. Mostly for the performances of Stander, Ciannelli and Ottiano, I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10.

Members of the Harvard Club are convinced that one of their own is out to get them all after two deaths in their circle have occurred. Another disappears and is presumed dead. So some of the remainder want Nero Wolfe to find a case against a disabled novelist called Chapin who they believe is the murderer. They were responsible for Chapin's disability after a student prank had gone wrong 19 years earlier and feel that his bitterness over that is the motivation.

Wolfe takes on the case and names his own exorbitant terms as usual. He proceeds to read all the mystery novels that Chapin has written searching for clues regarding Chapin's mindset. Chapin gets arrested after a third murder occurs. The action involves the retrieval of a typewriter that has tell-tale signs among it's keys.

This film plays down a lot of the characteristic Nero Wolfe foibles. He's quite willing to go out more and do his own legwork instead of relying on his sidekick Goodwin all the time. The first Columbia Nero Wolfe mystery with Edward Arnold had made the character more housebound. I like Walter Connolly as Wolfe in this as he has something of the detective in his screen presence. He had already played Father Brown onscreen and was to play Charlie Chan on radio.

"The League Of Frightened Men" gets off to a gripping start, with two murders in the first few seconds! Unfortunately, the story soon reveals itself to be both confusing and underdeveloped: several characters are difficult to tell apart (matters are not helped by the fact that the prints of this already bare-bones production have never been remastered). Walter Connolly is an adequate replacement for Edward Arnold as Nero Wolfe, though his character seems to have abandoned his trademark habit of never going outside his house. Lionel Stander reprises the sidekick role. Eduardo Ciannelli and Rafaela Ottiano have a few good (i.e., "bad") moments, but overall it's not really surprising that this film series never had a third chapter. ** out of 4.

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.