Der grüne Finger

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.

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.

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.

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.