J. Scott Smart is pretty hefty without being morbidly obese. Some jokes are made about his girth and his love of good food because this was back in the day when jokes could still be made about people who were different from the stereotypical American. As a motion picture actor, he has the charisma of a damp rag.It's a routine B movie, a screen adaptation of the radio show popular at the time. Not much effort has gone into it. A nice dentist has been coshed and his body thrown out a window. It looks like suicide to the police but the dentist's assistant, Jane Meadows (looking fine), suspects there was more to it. The dental records and X rays of a certain Roy Clark (Rock Hudson, as good as he'd ever been) are missing. So what's up? The investigation takes Smart from New York to Los Angeles where he runs into varied characters, as is usual in these stories, except for two Jewish truck driver who have sharp, witty dialog and deliver it well but are directed a lento. The major characters like Julie London (yum) have flashbacks. ("I remember the first time I met Roy...") There's nothing notable about any of them. The attempts are humor are pedestrian.The clotted plot leads to a shoot out at the end, with the killer trapped inside a circus big tent at night. It looks like curtains for the clown. But no! He uses one of the prop cannons to turn himself into a human cannonball, launches himself through the air, and lands on a blue and yellow plastic blow-up raft in the form of a grinning horse, just a few yards off the beach at the resort town of Cancún, Mexico, where waiters immediately rush out and ply him with piña coladas and seviche. He adopts a NeutraSlim diet, loses one tonne, and finds himself surrounded with tan and radiantly healthy bikini-clad blonds. He forgets all about the Fat Man, and maybe you should too.Anyway, it all ends properly.

When I was growing up, pre-television, we used to listen to many radio shows. One of these was The Fat Man, starring J. Scott Smart. This, as with some other radio shows, was made into a movie. The casting of Smart in the title role was good, since he looked the part and the sound was identical to the radio program.In virtually every radio show, Bradford Runyan is hired to solve a crime; the film carries on the tradition. However, the radio program lasted for only a half hour, and even though there was a "time compression" effect, there was time to do significantly more in the film. As an example, Runyan asks a lady to dance, and when she accepts, he acquits himself well. That could never have worked on the radio program, to be sure.For those of us who remember the program, there's a lot of nostalgia in the film. For those who never heard the show (such as my wife), it's still okay, but probably not as valued.

The plot of the movie is fairly basic. It begins with the death of a dentist - which death turns out to be tied in with a 6-year-old armored car robbery investigation, another murder, and a circus. The Fat Man, Brad Runyon, is a private investigator hired by the dentist's nurse to investigate, since the police are satisfied that his death was an accident.The movie's humor is fairly silly - for one thing, the director went a bit overboard on using all the sight gags that they couldn't use on radio (see below), such as Brad trying to fit into a tiny car, a phone booth, and dancing (which was kind of adorable).One interesting bit of trivia about this movie - J. Scott Smart, the actor playing Brad Runyon (the titular "Fat Man") also played him in the radio serial of the same name. It was really nice to see that (unlike many actors) he really looked the part he played.In the radio serial, he didn't have the sidekick character they gave him for the movie - but the guy was pretty harmless and amusing, so it worked out pretty well (it didn't turn them into a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin clone or anything). On the radio, what made Runyon stand out was that he was a big guy, but not the least bit sedentary.It's a movie to watch if you like the radio serial (another trivia point - the radio show was inspired by a CHAPTER TITLE from the Maltese Falcon) or if you want to see famous clown Emmett Kelley play - well - a clown. Or if you like Julie London who looks pretty stunning in a cocktail dress.

Curiosity picture mainly because it is one of Rock Hudson's earlier films. I won't bother going over the film's many faults except to note the awkward humor. For example, after the nurse was killed, I couldn't believe the joking around. Also, why was she killed in the first place? It was never explained. This bummed me out because she was very attractive even if she couldn't act. It was obvious that this supposed to the first of a series of "Fat Man" detective movies, ala the "Thin Man" movies, but fortunately we are still waiting for the second one.