What are you watching?

“Christmas Party,” A Nero Wolfe Mystery, S1:E9.



Lots of people love this show. I should be one of them—I love old mysteries, old New York atmosphere, and the 1940s and like the Nero Wolfe characters—but… I dunno. I find so many episodes just so dull.

Part of the reason is that source-material author Rex Stout’s plots were generally weak; a few of the Wolfe novels and novellas have strong plots (Too Many Cooks, Some Buried Caesar, and “Black Orchids” spring to mind), but in general Stout was one of the weakest puzzle-plotters of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction (roughly ’20s-late ’40s).

Stout’s real strength was his dialogue, his witty repartee, and unfortunately many of the Nero Wolfe Mystery scripts lose that dialogue. Maury Chaykin, as Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton, as Archie Goodwin, give decent performances but don’t really look (and, in Chaykin’s case, sound) like the Stout characters. The supporting casts tend to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bad.

And the episodes are just so blandly filmed, making a high-budgeted show look cheap. “Christmas Party,” the episode I watched tonight, exemplifies all of these flaws.

Still, I keep watching from time to time in the hopes that I’ll see an episode I wholeheartedly like!

Nope, just the Chaykin-Hutton series, TV-wise. (I’ve also listened to the Sydney Greenstreet radio show and watched the ’30s movies.) Any good?

I’m watching (via YouTube) a 1984 mystery TV movie called A Talent for Murder. Starring Angela Lansbury and Laurence Olivier, adapted (word-for-word?) from the play of the same name by Jerome Chodorov (Wonderful Town) and Norman Panama (Road to Utopia, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House).



This is basically a filmed play, which is fine except that, needless to say, theater is always better as genuine theater. I’m only about a half hour into it, but so far the problem is the supporting cast. Lansbury and Olivier, of course, know how to play this material—slightly tongue-in-cheek, but never so far that it becomes campy—but the rest of the cast seem amateurish, spoiling some funny lines. Anyway, will chime back in when I finish the thing.

Finished it. It doesn’t work as a mystery/thriller—the murderer’s identity is at once easy to guess and impossible to deduce—but it does, in the end, as a play about two old friends. Olivier is pretty lovable here.

A big problem with suspense plays is putting the major twist at the first-act curtain: That happens with Sleuth, Deathtrap, others that I’m blanking on. That structuring makes sense, leaving audiences in suspense during intermission, but it creates this situation where the second-act twists don’t live up to what came before. Deathtrap has such a shocking first-act twist that everything Ira Levin does afterwards kinda comes off as anticlimax.

And that happens here too: That’s not especially shocking, though the basic concept could probably be used to better effect, but either way everything afterwards seems like a letdown.

Still, just seeing Olivier and Lansbury work hard on roles they could have easily phoned in makes A Talent for Murder fun.

Watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ “Into Thin Air” (S1:E5), which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.



Great episode—probably one of the show’s best, though I have to rewatch more to be sure. It’s a retelling of the old “Paris Exposition” story, which has been reported as a true story but is likely an urban legend. Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes was based on an Ethel Lina White book that was in turn based on this story.

Hitchcock didn’t direct this ep himself—the director is Don Medford, who went on to have an extensive TV career (The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Fugitive)—but the atmospherics are good, and the episode moves so fast. It’s just a good, fun retelling of a good, fun story. Starring Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, by the way.

Just watched, via YouTube, a surprisingly interesting TV-movie Matrix knockoff called Virtual Nightmare (2000).



It’s nothing amazing, but it’s a perfectly serviceable what-is-reality story that I think is actually better thought out than The Thirteenth Floor, which it’s also ripping off. Acting mostly decent, special effects nonexistent but I’m fine with that, a few clever lines (I particularly like “fast-acting placebo”). It kind of reminded me of what Fox in the Snow said he wanted here: “an entire film taking place in the Matrix with people wondering why these slightly strange things are happening.”