Der grüne Finger

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.