Father Brown, Detective (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 30, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
-
Director
Edward SedgwickRelease Date(s)
1934 (September 16, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: D+
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
This won’t take long. Based on G.K. Chesterton’s story The Blue Cross, Paramount’s Father Brown, Detective (1934) is a B-movie mystery that has virtually nothing to recommend it. While I didn’t expect this modest feature (running just 68 minutes) to be particularly faithful to Chesterton’s collared sleuth (most recently an ongoing TV series in Britain), I figured it would be something resembling other studios’ B-mysteries popular at the time—Fox’s Charlie Chans or the Philo Vance films, for instance.
Instead, I felt like a child suffering through a particularly dreary sermon at church.
The original stories place Father Brown’s parish in Essex; the film has him hailing from nearby Sussex, but no matter. The character actor playing Father Brown is popular Walter Connolly, who was Claudette Colbert’s father earlier that same year in It Happened One Night. He was born in Cincinnati, but manages a decent English (and vaguely Irish) accent.
Notorious jewel thief Flambeau (Paul Lukas) assists gambler Evelyn Fischer (Gertrude Michael, of The Farmer’s Daughter) during a raid at a London casino. He is instantly infatuated with her for no clear reason. Meantime, he’s sent notes to Leopold Fischer (Halliwell Hobbes), coincidentally Evelyn’s uncle, and to Father Brown (Connolly), announcing his intentions to steal the ten diamonds comprising the “Flying Star.” Four of these diamonds are encrusted on a small cross Father Brown keeps on behalf of the church; the other six are securely locked up in Leopold’s safe.
Father Brown makes little effort to hide the diamond-studded cross, hoping to lure Flambeau out in the open, not so much to apprehend him, but to save his soul. An okay scene has Flambeau clumsily turning up at Father Brown’s parish, pretending to be the victim of an automobile accident, Father Brown hiding the cross in a glass of milk. Later, “master of disguise” Flambeau masquerades as an insurance investigator and later as a bearded priest, but given Lukas’s pronounced, Bela Lugosi-like Hungarian accent, he’s anything but unrecognizable.
The biggest of Father Brown, Detective’s many problems is its relentless preachiness and moralizing. An antecedent to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Chesterton’s amateur sleuth is at once highly observant yet seemingly harmless. Here, though, Father Brown is an unsubtle do-gooder who does virtually no sleuthing or observing at all; instead he keeps insisting, without a shred of evidence or persuasive reasoning, that Flambeau is at his core a decent chap who really doesn’t want to be a master jewel thief at all. He’s completely confident that he can nudge Flambeau on a path of godly righteousness. Connolly plays this belief with such earnest, heartfelt certainly you’ll want to throw up.
It doesn’t help that Flambeau’s plans are muddled further by his inexplicable puppy love for Evelyn, who also inexplicably puts up with him sneaking into her boudoir late at night to see her, promising her some of the soon-to-be-stolen diamonds. The film has no suspense and generates even less interest because Flambeau is so preoccupied with Evelyn he’s just about the least-focused, certain-to-be-captured thief in movie history.
Nothing in Father Brown, Detective works. 1930s Paramount can’t help but give the film inapt continental Europe glamour, its house style; unlike the B-mysteries of Fox and Universal, the film never remotely convinces us we’re in London. Even supporting part actors like Una O’Connor and E.E. Clive, brought in for comedy relief, make no impressive at all and are given nothing to work from, a sharp contrast to their lively appearances in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein the following year. All Clive can do is swing his arms around and walk funny.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of Father Brown, Detective looks okay, if a little soft, in 1.37:1 full frame, black-and-white transfer presumably derived from secondary elements. (The pre-1948 Paramount library, now part of Universal, includes many problematic titles missing original negatives.) Overall it’s okay, but other mid-‘30s titles on Blu-ray have looked much superior. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) fares a little better. Optional English subtitles are provided on this Region “A” release.
The lone extra is a new audio commentary by film scholar Jason A. Ney.
Generally, even the weakest Hollywood B-movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s have something good to say about them—a funny supporting performance, interesting production design, a clever little bit of writing—but Father Brown, Detective stinks.
- Stuart Galbraith IV