Send for Paul Temple

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.

The first of four Paul Temple pictures made by the cut-price Butcher Empire Studios is full of plot twists and red herrings, but loses momentum around the halfway mark. Anthony Hulme makes a decent enough Temple, but would be replaced by John Bentley for the remainder of the series.

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.

Looking at the style of this production, you wouldn't really have to guess it was based on characters originally created for the wireless. The production is very precise, static almost as we witness the eponymous amateur sleuth (Anthony Hulme) try to get to the bottom of some diamond thievery and of the mysterious death of a police constable working on these heists. Along the way he enlists the help of the dead man's girlfriend - a journalist who uses the moniker "Steve" (Joy Shelton) and pretty soon they are embroiled in a clever and dangerous plot hiding in plain sight. What does make this work is the writing - the story requires us to engage our own grey cells a bit if we are to get any satisfaction from the otherwise rather pedestrian presentation. We are given some clues, some red herrings and the actors sort of act as guides as we try to solve the mystery for ourselves. I reckon this would have worked just as well on the radio, but on film it is an enjoyable enough mystery that over-stretches a bit long - at eighty minutes - but is still worth a watch.

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.