Father Brown

Works of art are disappearing one after another; behind it is a master thief who changes disguise at will. Father Brown has two problems: to catch the thief, and to save his soul. The second matters more to him than the first. When he takes on the job of carrying a cross to Rome the priest finds himself directly opposite the thief, and the chase runs on to Paris. Robert Hamer directed the film from G. K. Chesterton's stories. Alec Guinness plays the priest, with Peter Finch opposite him as the thief. The telling does not take the detective business seriously; what interests it is two men trying to understand each other. Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker and Bernard Lee are also in the cast. It belongs to the polite, low-voiced strand of British comedy; nobody shouts, everybody implies.