Meet Nero Wolfe - Reception

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) .

"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 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.