Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe - Counterfeit For Murder

Counterfeit For Murder 

Having never read a Nero Wolfe novel until after I watched the movies made of them about fifteen years ago,  Nero Wolfe will always be as played for TV by the wonderful actor Maury Chaykin and Archie Goodwin will always be the equally wonderful creation of the role by Timothy Hutton.  I watched an interview that Chaykin did in which he said that A&E network cancelled that really fine series which, from what I can gather, was very popular so it could run crumby re-runs of cable trash fare.  Such is the idiocy of cable TV, in the end. 

But if I'd heard them first, the excellent versions done by by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation done in the early 1980s. Mavor Moore playing Nero Wolfe and Don Francks as Archie Goodwin, they'd have been my idea of the roles.   Moore and Francks in real life were much older than the roles when they played them so well for radio are a good illustration of why radio drama is such a great medium.   I'm tempted to post the publicity photo that can be found online but I'm not going to violate the magic of the medium.

Sadly, the really excellent CBC radio drama unit which produced lots of really fine stuff and lots and lots of really good stuff, was dissolved in 2012 due to budget cuts under the stinking Harper regime. Just another reason to hate the Tories. 

I read a lot about Rex Stout who was a pretty interesting guy with lots of admirable qualities.  

Without Some Leavening It Just Sits There Like A Lump

I did a lot of transplanting this week so I listened to a lot of different things to decide on what I'd post. There are thousands of radio plays online, I could post one every night and not run out of things worth listening to for a long time. 

For those who might be interested, I found a trove of radio plays by Harold Pinter.   I listened to a couple which I hadn't seen done before and found my only reaction was to wonder if Pinter ever created a likable character.   It is so relentlessly depressing that I felt it was superfluous, the news providing enough of that stuff with the characters being real.  I don't see that Pinter ever felt anything like an inclination to try to figure out something better.  It was just sourness relieved by bitterness, which made me wonder what he had to be so morose about.  His life wasn't exactly wretched.  But, then, that was true of so many of the angry young men who came to fashion in that period.   When you don't present anyone as likable it's no wonder, you just feel like throwing up your hands and giving up.  Which seems to be what so much 20th century British literature replaces any kind of profundity or fresh insight with.   But it doesn't seem to me to be any kind of thing that is sustainable.  I have to add it is odd as I genuinely liked Harold Pinter and used to find some of his work quite watchable, if not exactly compelling.   And it's so unrealistic.  There are nice people in the world who aren't motivated by either base, selfish, cynical motives.  I've known Brits like that, though maybe they didn't make it into Pinter's class.

By comparison the radio plays by Samuel Beckett I listened to were often quite depressing and dispiriting but, the extent to which he had characters which were at all developed, I found some of them likable.  These days there has to be someone I like in something for me to listen to it, watch it or read it.    I mean, I can listen to the radio-ized Philip Marlowe, with all of that self-indulgent cynicism and I at least find him and a few of the others likable, in the end.   Though I don't think he's someone I'd like to have a drink with.  Not more than once.  Not without grabbing him by the lapels and saying, "Snap out of it, guy."

Listening to them, I decided to go with something a little more fun.

Update:  Well Stupy, I wasn't talking about those productions of Philip Marlowe, I was talking about those from much later which were far superior.  If you don't know about those, that's not my fault.

Update 2:  "link or shut up"  Well, for example, there are these produced by the BBC Radio 4. Only I heard them elsewhere.  You'll have to wait for them to come round on the BBC Player.  You should really try to take advantage of the resources revealed by the internet, there is so much more to the world than what you learned in your little universe in the lesser NYC area in your infancy, which you might want to leave behind.

And that's only an example. There are the ones dramatized by Bill Morrison in which Ed Bishop played Marlowe, which were quite good.

Philip Marlowe was excessively cynical but he had a moral core that extended past himself, his self-interest, his advantage.   Anyone who re-wrote or played him as a sadist was distorting the character.

Update 3:  You know, Stupy, you've been doing this long enough and I've been responding to your attempts at discrediting what I've said long enough - regularly kicking your ass - that someone would expect a smart person would realize I don't just say stuff without being able to back it up.   You're not a smart person.