The Fat Man radio show ran from
1946 to 1951. Dashiell Hammett gets credit for the idea of the show but clearly,
he had nothing to do with the writing of the radio crime drama or this film.
He hadn't written a thing since The Thin Man over a decade previously. The
radio show starred J. Scott Smart as private detective Brad Runyan. Though
on the radio, Smart was in fact quite rotund and so when they decided to
make a film, he was a natural choice. The actor basically did nothing but
bit parts in films - radio was more his forte and he has a very agreeable
voice. This was his only starring role and it's a shame that a few sequels
didn't come along because this is a solid if not exciting film. Perhaps a
decade earlier this would have been made into a B series, but those days
were coming to an end.
This is directed by William Castle and he
has a nice cast in retrospect - Rock Hudson with a million-dollar smile,
Julie London as a bar girl, Jayne Meadows as a dental assistant, Jerome Cowan
as a policeman, John Russell and the famous clown Emmett Kelly as a clown.
Hudson was still very early in his career and London had not begun her singing
career - so disappointingly doesn't sing here. It has a decent plot that
isn't a mystery so much as a story that with the use of flashbacks slowly
unfolds. It begins with a man calmly knocking on the door of a dentist in
his hotel room - socking him and throwing him out the window to his death.
The dentist's assistant (Meadows) feels
something is funny after the cops rule it an accident and she goes to Runyan
for his help. He is eating as usual. Only an x-ray of a dental plate is missing.
He agrees to help and this takes him from NYC to California and he focuses
on a patient (Hudson) who never returned for his appointment. This leads
him to Julie London who was in love with Hudson and some suspicious characters
from his past. 77-minutes and is quite agreeable with bits of humor
provided by Runyan's Man Friday (Clinton Sundberg).
