THE FAT MAN

A hero for our obese times--one and done in 1951.

This is a publicity photo for “The Fat Man.” That’s Jayne Meadows and a bad guy (I wonder what happens to her in this movie?)

I came across The Fat Man, a 1951 movie starring J. Scott Smart, who played the title role on radio for six years.

When they weren’t castigating Dashiell Hammett, a film-noir founding father, they were using him. Hammett’s characters include Sam Spade and Kasper Gutman (the original fat man) from Maltese Falcon and his one book, The Thin Man, yielded six films for Hollywood. So it’s not surprising that The Fat Man had his turn at the plate.

But Smart isn’t the conniving Gutman but a man of the people, a friend to restaurant help, doormen, and bellboys. Smart’s Fat Man calls women “sweetheart” and knows how to cut a rug, deft with the heft, you might say.

He’s also a decisive detective, though not as debonaire as William Powell’s Thin Man (who had the advantage of playing off Myrna Loy).

I’ve heard several Fat Man radio shows and prefer them to others in the non-slender sleuth genre, such as Nero Wolfe (played by Sydney Greenstreet).

The movie has plenty of familiar faces. There’s Rock Hudson, Julie London, and Jayne Meadows, along with Emmett Kelly, the famous clown. Old TV fans will also recognize John Russell, star of Lawman.

Directed by William Castle, the man who brought you House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, the film has the look of a show destined to kick off a movie series. After all, in the great days of radio drama, shows like The Aldrich Family, Big Town, The Whistler, and The Shadow all spawned multiple movies.

The Red Scare intervened, however. Even though Dashiell Hammett had little to do with the Fat Man movie or radio show, once he was branded a Red, he and his creations were persona non grata. By the end of 1951, Sam Spade, Fat Man, and Thin Man radio shows were all off the air.

Otherwise, J. Smart might have earned a sequel. Friendly but tough, he wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, but he liked to eat and he liked to dance. Apparently, he did so in real life.

“He lived in a fisherman’s shack on the Maine coast, painting seascapes during the week and flying to New York long enough to do his radio show and, in one instance, win a Charleston dance contest,” noted John Dunning in Over the Air, his monumental radio encyclopedia.