Send for Paul Temple

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.

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.

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.

The attempt to turn radio's Paul Temple into a movie series had limited success.

This film is uneven and all the information is carried in its radio writer dialog. The cast are undistinguished but production values get by. They even have a go at a staged in the studio Ram Raid, which is a whole lot better than their toy car bridge crash. Pacing is surprisingly quite lively.

The characters can be divided into regulars, including an unfunny "yellow face" comic butler, and suspects. The stamp of the pre-war Edgar Wallace thrillers is firmly upon it all, without the film reaching even their modest levels of interest.

With its eye firmly on the Empire quota, it's so stodgily British as to numb an audience into wondering what the Big Picture in the program will be like. Our suit and tie wearing, BBC accented hero was never going to be a threat to Charly Chan and Michael Shayne.