I Watch Films: The Detective (Father Brown)
For some reason this had the American title The Detective rather than the British one, Father Brown. Alec Guinness plays Father Brown, G K Chesterton’s amateur detective. We meet him in the process of returning some stolen goods to a safe for one of his parishioners who has confessed the crime to him. He is promptly arrested and the police try to match him with the fake clergymen in their records. To their surprise he’s real.
After this he gets word that Gustav Flambeau, master of disguise and international thief extraordinaire, is trying to steal a cross kept in Brown’s church when it is sent to Rome for a conference. Brown then spends the rest of the film matching wits with Flambeau, trying to stop his thefts and, more importantly, trying to save his soul.
This is a genial, slow-paced detective film, in which Brown tries hard to look into the character of his opponent. There’s a handful of good jokes, and a number more that fall a bit flat. The cast is excellent, with Bernard Lee as the Inspector also after Flambeau (not his soul though), Peter Finch as the master criminal Flambeau, Joan Greenwood magnificent as Lady Warren the aristocrat of the parish, and Sid James as a reformed criminal in the congregation.
Watch This: For an entertaining, old-fashioned and very English (for all that half the film is set in France) detective film
Don’t Watch This: if you want something fast-paced, or in colour.
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