Der grüne Finger

There is a good story here but it makes for such an unexciting and times clunky old fashioned film.

Chief Inspector Gerald Harvey visits mystery novelist Paul Temple (Anthony Hulme) at his country mansion. He wants Temple's help over a spate of jewellery robberies. The gang are not afraid to kill. At the nearby local pub where Temple drops him off, Harvey supposedly shoots himself suddenly. The landlord tells Temple it is suicide and this is confirmed by the local doctor. Temple has doubts.

Temple hooks up with journalist Steve, it was her brother that was killed. The gang carried out similar style of robberies in South Africa. It seems the same gang has come over to Britain.

Then there is the meek Amelia Marchment who is studying the history of English inns who seems to know something about the gang as well.

Based on the Francis Durbridge radio thriller. There is a kernel of a decent mystery here with a criminal mastermind behind it all and lots of double crossings. However the film is too low budget, Hulme is too plain and the film production company just cannot realise this as an effective thriller.

Anthony Hulme is Paul Temple, a mystery writer and occasional consultant for the police. When one of them shows up for help with a string of smash-and-grab jewelry robberies, he winds up dead, in an apparent suicide. Later, when newspaperwoman Joy Shelton shows up for an interview, she turns out to be the dead man's sister. They begin to cooperate on the case.

It's an inexpensively produced movie version of the BBC show that ran for about three decades, and a fair mystery; not only does the audience get clues as soon as the hero, sometimes they are offered before he gets them; this adds a tension to the proceedings, as the audience -- I anyway -- began to wonder if he would ever catch the bad guy.

The movie was produced by Butcher's Film Service at their Nettleton studio. The firm was founded by William Butcher, a Blackheath chemist in the first decade of the 20th century, in an era when they did film developing and often had a sideline in equipment. They were distributing films by 1909, mostly to northern England. Butcher's was never a classy firm; their typical directors, by the 1940s, included Maclean Rogers and Francis Searle, and their biggest stars were Arthur Lucan as Old Mother Riley, and Frank Randle. However, they also distributed movies by Cecil Hepworth, Maurice Elvey, and Walter Forde. They survived as a production company well into the 1960s, and were still distributing movies in the 1980s. That's quite a length of time in the turbulent industry.

The first of four film adaptations concerning the mild-mannered gentleman detective, Paul Temple. Not to be confused with Simon Templar, of course; Temple is a far lesser creation, who doesn't seem to do a great deal apart from plod his way around crime scenes and drink a lot. He started out on the radio before appearing in this four-film series.

The plot of this one charts a gang of jewel thieves who ruthlessly murder anybody with a chance to expose them. There are a couple of neat set-pieces here, like an apparent suicide in a pub which turns out to be a murder, but as a whole it's oddly unexciting. When the main characters fail to get worked up about sudden death and murder right under their very noses (a character is even bumped off in the courthouse!) the viewer is unable to either.

SEND FOR PAUL TEMPLE just about gets by with some mild atmosphere and some not-bad performances, although the entire cast was unknown to me. But it really pales in comparison to contemporary cinema, in particularly the film noir genre which was raging across the pond, which is no surprise given the low budget and rather limited nature of the film.

Paul Temple was the great radio detective of the 40s and 50s, immensely popular all round the world, where people everywhere sat glued to their radios to listen to the next chapter of some dreadfully exciting mystery of murders and deceptions and atrocious robberies demanding the extraordinary help of Paul Temple to get things sorted out. All the necessary ingredients are found here to make up a real Paul Temple affair, the strange unexplainable murders, the woman in distress, the ruthless killers, masked as proper citizens, and a tremendously intricate mystery plot with a complicated background of a history abroad, almost like a Sherlock Holmes elaborate novel. The style of Francis Durbridge is smooth and stylish, he has a certain elegance of writing and concocting his plots which you don't find neither in Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charters, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming or any of the others, and his plots are always a challenge to your intelligence - Paul Temple is smarter and cooler than you would ever be, and he always solves his case. The actors here are no aces, there is no cinematography, the direction is efficient but gives no room for any depth of character or psychology, the absence of any Hitchcock quality is blatant, so the whole film depends entirely on the script. Fortunately this is sufficient, and his mysteries would deserve some revival, especially today when the criminal genre is completely drowned in atrocious superficiality of only violence and sex.

This is the first of the four feature films made between 1946 and 1952 featuring the lead character of Paul Temple, detective, based upon the stories and radio scripts of Frances Durbridge. In this film, Anthony Hulme plays Temple, but in the other three, Temple was played by John Bentley. This is a very good one. Of the four films, only three have been issued on video or DVD. The first and the last are both better than CALLING PAUL TEMPLE (1948, see my review), which is not as good, although it is notable for Dinah Sheridan playing 'Steve', one of her most renowned roles later on being the mother in THE RAILWAY CHILDREN (1970, see my review). (Dinah Sheridan's real name was Dinah Ginsburg, and her father was a Russian.) The story of this film deals with a ruthless gang of jewel thieves who frequently murder people when they carry out their robberies in England. It is realized that they follow a similar pattern to that of an earlier jewel thief gang in South Africa some years before, and that they must be led by the same man, whose true identity is not known, but who goes by the name of the Knave of Diamonds. One night watchman just before dying manages to say something about 'the green finger', which makes no sense to anyone, though its meaning later becomes very clear. There is a mysterious little woman called Miss Marchmont, played with verve by the character actress Beatrice Varley, whose true identity also turns out to be a surprise in the story. There is another mysterious name, 'the first penguin', which is important, but what or who is meant by it? The film is entertaining for those who find a 1940s detective film interesting.