Meet Nero Wolfe

Meet Nero Wolfe (1936)

"I CAN SOLVE ANY MURDER WITHOUT MOVING FROM MY DESK!"

Rex Stout's portly detective prides himself on solving crimes without venturing outside his comfortable home; here he relies on others to do the legwork in pinpointing who among a number of suspects is responsible for two sudden deaths, which the authorities at first are not convinced were murders.

Date of release
1936-07-16
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Mystery
Director
Herbert J. Biberman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Fer-de-Lance

Meet Nero Wolfe is a 1936 American mystery film based on the 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance, written by Rex Stout. Set in New York, the story introduced the detective genius Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin. The partnership endured through 33 novels and 39 short stories written by Stout, but continued in only one more film for Columbia Pictures. Wolfe's client is portrayed by Rita Hayworth, then billed as Rita Cansino, in an early performance.

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. 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.

Meet Nero Wolfe was the second film directed by Herbert Biberman (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 a…

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.

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