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.
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.