A month or two ago, I ordered via Amazon three Alec Guinness films I hadn't seen: The Card, The Captain's Paradise, and Father Brown (known as The Detective in the USA). That last I had in fact seen, but so many years ago that I remembered virtually nothing. Last night I had a chance to see it again, and found it quite splendid, entirely worthy of the same director's Kind Hearts and Coronets. Not only because of Guinness's performance, but also because of a young and very talented Peter Finch and of course my beloved Joan "The Voice" Greenwood, for once rather subfusc and un-outrageous. I've never seen the earlier 1930s version, but I'm sure that had G.K.Chesterton lived to see this one he would have been delighted. I was also pleased to find on the Web a picture of the original of the Father Brown character, Fr John O'Connor of Bradford. Fr O'Connor not only knew at first hand the violence, squalor and crime of the industrial slums he served in; he also, when the staff of a posh church rebuked a crippled down-and-out for soiling its marble floors, remarked that the man was the only lovely thing in an unlovely church, and went and served him Communion in his hovel. O'Connor's face, I was pleased to see, was well served by the Protean Guinness -- one can see the relation.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
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| Fr John O'Connor |
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