FATHER BROWN, DETECTIVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 812, 18 February 1955, Page 20

FATHER BROWN, DETECTIVE

(Columbia-Facet) es, BROWN is not, I suspect, as well known even to devotees of the detective story as he used to be and, no devotee myself, I can’t say that he’s very well known to me. Nearly 20 years ago I read a small group of the celebrated stories in my first encounter with the work of Chesterton. I enjoyed them then without being excited by them, and that was my reaction again when I re-read the same group over the weekend that I saw the film. Father Brown-for the benefit of those who don’t know him at all-is a very «ort Roman Catholic priest, with a face as round and dull as a dumpling and eyes as empty as the North Sea, who against all appearances has considerable success as an amateur detective. Actually, his original was Monsignor John O’Connor, a great friend of Chesterton, who received G.K. into the Catholic Church and wrote a book about him a year or two after he died. I’ve described Father Brown as he first appeared to the great free-thinking detective Valentin (he came to a bad end) in The Blue Cross, which is fitting enough because in a very general way Father Brown, Detective, is based on that story. This describes the attempt of a celebrated criminal named Flambeau to steal a cross which Father Brown is taking to a Eucharistic Congress. That’s about as far as story and film go together, for in the film there’s no arrest and indeed the priest is cheated rather than cheating, loses the cross and spends the rest of the time trying to get it back-and with it the soul of Flambeau. Whether there’s sanction for this. in Father Brown stories which I haven’t read I can’t, of course, say. Father Brown, Detective, was made by one of Britain’s-abler directors, Robert Hamer, for an American company, and I think it won't be denied that he has done a workmanlike job. Mr. Hamer also had a hand in the script, though the actual adaptation was the work of his colleague in this department, Thelma Schnee. It’s what she has done that may bring complaint from those who know Father Brown best. My

own feeling is that while the detail of the little priest’s behaviour is pretty right, or at any rate, typical, she has him, in the interests of his spiritual crusade, taking rather more liberties than one would expect with the things that are Caesar’s. I’m quite ready to be put right about this, however, for all things considered it might have been safer for me to look at the film as an original creation. On those terms I could say I found it agreeably entertaining and amusing in a quiet way, and here and there lively and even exciting. Unwilling to go further than that about the production as a whole, I retain the unhappy feeling which I took into the theatre that this time certainly the wrong person is reviewing the film. I have kept to the last my comment on the playing of the principal part, and here with delight I can give unqualified praise. Alec Guinness may not fit the physical specifications for Father Brown (there was, for a start, never an eye less empty), but from his first cherubic blink at the camera when he is caught uncommitting a burglary by one of his flock, he wears the cloth of the mild, odd, likeable priest as though it had been specially cut for him-which, of course, is what he has been doing with so many other parts ever since he played Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations. And while Mr. Guinness is adequately supported by a cast which includes Cecil Parker, Joan Greenwood and Peter Finch, Father Brown would still be worth seeing for his performance if all these others had failed miserably.