The Avengers Dossier, Page Twenty-Two

Many of Britain's top film and television actors of the 1950s and 1960s can be seen guest-starring in episodes of "The Avengers." Here's another brief look at one such guest-star.

THORLEY WALTERS

In "What the Butler Saw", character actor Thorley Walters was an bulter with a ruthless streak, one of the 150 characters he portrayed in film and on television.

Thorley Walters was born in 1913, the son of a clergyman. With his parents' blessing, he pursued a career in acting. After brief experience in the theatre (where he mostly appeared in supporting roles in Shakespearean plays, but also had a few starring turns as romantic leads), he turned to films in 1935 and never looked back.

Walters' early film career was spent in low-budget comedies where he almost immediately found a niche playing comic parts, and he was more often than not a featured player. Filmgoers may not have immediately known his name, but they relied on him to make them laugh during the war years and throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

As he aged, Walters became a familiar face in horror films, historical dramas, and literary adaptations. He had supporting roles in some of the best films from Hammer--among them being "Frankenstein Created Women" (1967) and "Vampire Circus" (1972)--and he made an excellent Dr. Watson in four different, completely unrelated Sherlock Holmes adaptations--including the awful "Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace" (1962)--and he appeared in several different adaptations of John Le Carre novels, both on television and on the big screen.

During the 1980s, Walters almost exclusively played incompetent law enforcement officers and bumbling government officials on television, with recurring roles on series such as "Strangers" (1980 - 1982) and "Bulman" (1985 - 1987) (where he played the character off Bill Dugdale on both series) and "Crown Court" (1975 - 1984). He continued working right up until shortly before his death in 1991 at the age of 78.

The Avengers: What the Butler Saw

What the Butler Saw (1966)
Starring: Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Thorley Walters, Denis Quilley, Ewan Hooper, and Kynaston Reeves
Director: Bill Bain
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

In an effort to find and eliminate the person responsible for leaking government secrets, John Steed (Macnee) enrolls in a school for butlers while Emma Peel (Rigg) sets out to get close to (literally and figuratively) one of the prime suspects--a playboy R.A.F. pilot (Quilley).

The central mystery and threat in this episode is so simple that it's hardly worth of the talents of England's greatest spybreakers--some of the particulars are tricky, but the overall effort would have been very easy to trace to its source once detected--but all the stunts John Steed pulls while trying to ferret out the villains, excellent supporting characters, and a grisly murder and body disposal make this episode a lot of fun.

"What the Butler Saw" is also elevated by a fantastic supporting cast. Thorley Walters (as the stern master of an academy geared toward educating gentlemen's gentlemen; Denis Quilley as the dashing pilot ladies can't get enough of; and Kyanston as the old general who may have crossed the line from eccentric to crazy all play their parts brilliantly. Of course, it helps that they were working with a script that was full of banter and humor. It all added up to  mixture that excused the fact the assignment was almost two simple for our two heavy hitters. (Steed's showing off his disguise skills and his butlering antics are contribute in major ways to this.)

Although, that said, the writers of the episode did make the effort to establish the politically sensitive nature of the investigation, as well as taking a very clever approach to giving Steed a little bit of a personal stake in the case. The writers also did an excellent job with the character of the playboy pilot, making him both a excellent sense of merriment as Emma Peel first pursues him so she can get close to him for the investigation, and then later has to take steps to avoid ending up in bed with him. The ultimate twist to the subplot involving him and Peel catapulted him to the status of my favorite supporting character in all the episodes I've seen of "The Avengers".

The only pairing of Lee and Fisher that was a disaster?

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) 

Starring: Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters and Hans Söhnker 

Director: Terence Fisher 

Rating: Two of Ten Stars 

 Sherlock Holmes (Lee) and his arch-nemisis Professor Moriarity (Söhnker) matching wits over an Egyptian necklace owned by Cleopatra, as it is stolen, recovered, and re-stolen.

  This 1962 German film, with its two British stars and a British director, has surprisingly little to recommend it. The script is like a reject from the Universal Pictures series starring Basil Rathbone (with everything I don't like about the weaker efforts among those amplified ten-fold here, most notably Watson being portrayed as a bumbling, retarded simpleton), with an unbearably bad score. 

 It's amazing that a film with so much potential--Christopher Lee as Holmes and Terence Fisher directing... should be a sure winner!--could go so wrong. While Christopher Lee is absolutely right in his opinion that he and Thorley Walters more closely resemble the literary Holmes and Watson than any other on-screen pair, and there's no question that Lee gives a good performance as Holmes and that Walters does as good a Watson as he can given what has to work with, there is very little else that works in this movie. 

 There are a couple of interesting moments between Holmes and Moriarity (who is played by the appropriately sinister German actor Hans Söhnker), but the downside is that they feel like they belong more in a hard-boiled, pulp fiction detective novel than a Holmes adventure.