On Screen:
DWORKIN, MARTIN S.
On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin Alec Guinness Portrays A Gentle Clerical Sleuth THE RESPECTABLE detective story, wherein gentleman sleuths pursue aristocratic criminals in an atmosphere of fine...
...For one thing, we may be thankful that he doesn't croon sentimental tunes at us, in the apparent expectation that banality will redound to the glory of religion...
...His prodigies aim at the return of prodigals rather than their mere punishment...
...The film is entertaining, even though all its elements are understated and some of its outcomes obvious...
...The humanized, even humorized priest is becoming increasingly familiar on our screens...
...Most of its charm, of course, depends on Guinness, who is as witty for what he does not do or say as for what he does...
...The price of democratizing the detective story is that any ambitious proletarian can learn and practice the tactics of heroicized hoodlums--or the not essentially dissimilar police...
...Chesterton herewith cleverly rings a change on a recurrent and quite popular characteristic of gentleman detectives: their disregard--and even contempt--for the police...
...Peter Finch is a noble criminal, and Joan Greenwood is a charmingly aristocratic widow who will play a large part in his rehabilitation, we may be sure...
...Let us say that Guinness's clergyman, with his charming idiosyncrasies, is in somewhat better taste than the usual stereotypes, despite his comedy...
...After this, the hindrance of the police is a minor matter...
...Holmes is continually demonstrating his superiority over Inspector Lestrade...
...The usual gentleman detective ignores, evades or variously impedes the police, for reasons which are essentially those of an amateur seeking to create a work of art, disdaining journeyman competence with its usual penalty of mediocrity...
...Chesterton's worldly priest, however, is able to show disrespect for the police on the highest grounds: Their obsession with mere apprehension and punishment of malefactors interferes with his efforts to secure their ultimate salvation...
...Here Guinness doesn't bedevil a sergeant or general, as in military comedies, but pleasantly exasperates his bishop...
...G. K. Chesterton's "Father Brown," a gentleman of the cloth, is also concerned with the "subtler depravity" underlying artistocratically criminal behavior...
...Melville wrote that "an uncommon prudence is habitual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide...
...Perhaps it is in the nature of things, however, that the pursuit of the physical criminal and his tangible crimes provide the dramatic suspense, while his eventual conversion makes for little more than the form of the film's happy ending...
...Other laughs depend on the comical confrontation of authority...
...On SCREEN By Martin S. Dworkin Alec Guinness Portrays A Gentle Clerical Sleuth THE RESPECTABLE detective story, wherein gentleman sleuths pursue aristocratic criminals in an atmosphere of fine wines, good cigars and objets d'art, seems lost today among the "realistic" excitements of the Hammett-Chandler-Cheyney-Spillane school...
...The substance of the current film about Father Brown, The Detective, has to do, then, with the recapture of a sinner, and only incidentally with the outwitting of a master thief and the return of stolen art masterpieces...
...ft is such "uncommon prudence" that the gentleman detective exults in penetrating, to the glory of right reason and the somewhat incidental benefit of law and order...
...This is a great pity--especially for those who enjoy a well-written description of a malfeasance that is ingenious rather than brutal, and who like to exercise their intellects in amateur detection rather than their viscera in vicarious violence...
...Much of the humor is based on incongruity, as in the sight of a priest practicing jiu-jitsu despite his priestly habit...
...Moreover, no social scientists or embattled moralists ever rose to accuse respectable detective fiction of fomenting crime...
...His innumerable followers perpetuate this denigration of police methods--and lead inevitably to a reaction in which the workaday ways of cops are extolled, as by Sergeant Joe Friday and his laconic friends...
...Such reasons conceive questions of law and order to be irrelevant--much less those of right and wrong...
...The form of the film as a whole is comic, and all its characters are comical in varying degrees...
...He is a master of comic cadence, phrasing the preposterous with such delicate aplomb that absurdities can remain commonplace only with the punctuation of our constant laughter...
...Alec Guinness's Father Brown is a classic example of the ecclesiastic who hides his brilliant qualities in affectionate bumbling--the highbrow who must play his superiority for laughs in order to be effective...
...There is a delightful sequence of sophisticated slapstick in a Parisian archive, with Guinness and Ernest Thesiger (that perfect Jaques of a few stage seasons back) out-bumbling each other amid crushed eye-glasses and near-sighted confusion...
...For one thing, the models provided in the stories were beyond emulation by any but extraordinary folk possessed of the necessary breeding, education and--above all--taste...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 49
