Simply Perfect

Pretty Good

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

I enjoy this series over the latter series with timothy Hutton. I found this series to have more texture than the latter series. It was and is fun to see all the actors interacting with each other. There was also a fun sense of humor to this series. Watching inspector Cramer getting out of a chair without using his hands and Wolfe's reaction each time to it. Also all of the actors in this version seem to enjoy their roles. I do like the latter series also but I prefer the first series most. I wish the series would have lasted longer. It seems that series such BONES, NCIS, CSI can go on and on add nauseuem. I prefer detective series were you have to think to find the guilty without major shoot outs, car chases etc. . I find that well written series do not last long at all on TV: Nero Wolfe,(both series), Ellery queen, probe, Spenser: for hire to name the major ones. It was a good series. Luckily I can watch both versions whenever I want to at my leisure.

I had never come across the character Nero Wolfe before, and I had never read any of Rex Stout's books. Then I saw this.I had seen William Conrad before in Canon. Here he is playing a different role. He is more selfish and testy than Canon, and barks out orders to the three people who work for him, and is rude to everybody else. Yet he still has a streak of affability that makes him likable.To me, this seemed strange. A man who is a private detective, but is obese to the point of invalidity, so he never leaves the house, and travels about the brownstone in an elevator. He hires a younger, fitter man to do all the legwork for him. He has a greenhouse on top of his brownstone, where, with the help of an ex-employee of a British botanical garden, he keeps and cultivates rare orchids. He also employs a chef to cook rich food for him. I must have seen all manner of TV detectives, but I had never seen anything like this before.I thought William Conrad was brilliant. He was genuinely funny. As well as a case that had to be solved, there were also the interchanges between Wolfe and the wisecracking Archie. The arguments between Wolfe and Theodore in the greenhouse; and between Wolfe and Fritz in the kitchen are hilarious. The row between Wolfe and Fritz about which portions of garlic and saffron to put into the marinade for the shish kebab is classic. In one episode Wolfe pours a bottle of Dutch beer into a pint mug, then drinks the lot down in one draught. In another episode, Archie tells the police that Wolfe takes his exercise by throwing darts from his bedside, then walks round the bed to collect the darts from the dartboard.Sadly they only made one series of this, so maybe the show didn't catch on, or maybe they stopped it because George Voskovec, who played Fritz, sadly died.Watch this series. It will change your life!

I read a Nero Wolfe story as a kid and found this series intriguing. It starred William Conrad who was better known from his previous TV role as the portly detective Frank Cannon.This is another QM production made in the early 1980s but the series was short lived. Nero Wolfe is a clever detective but would rather eat and tend to his orchids than hit the streets doing detective work.For that he has his assistants to do the legwork such as Lee Horsley who played Archie Goodwin who also provides the muscle to go with Nero's brains. The episodes were enjoyable and its a shame we did not see more. Maybe US viewers were still pining for Frank Cannon.

I had never read any of the Nero Wolfe books before this series aired. I was drawn to it because I like William Conrad. How fortunate that I saw this and thus found the books!After reading a number of the novels, I was struck by a couple of things:First, the old brownstone was perfectly reproduced. Author Rex Stout made you feel you were really in that building when he wrote the novels, and the set designer followed suit.Second, the casting was a mixed bag. Conrad was an acceptable, though obviously softened, Wolfe. The characterizations of Fritz and Horstman were very well done, if mostly background. But Lee Horsley was badly out of place as Archie, as were the choices for Saul Panzer and Inspector Cramer.Several years later I saw the movie version with Thayer David and was very pleased. He would have been a letter perfect Wolfe.