The Detective

British producers, it seems, know how to exploit a successful character type as well as any American who ever made three or four variations on the same basic idea. The title of Alec Guinness' latest picture is The Detective but it might just as accurately be called The Man in the White Suit Rides Again. Not that the plots are any more similar than one Abbott and Costello film is to another: it is the similarity of character type that constitutes a sequel. Father Brown is remarkably like that little fellow with the quizzical smile who engineered a mint robbery and who had a wife in every port.

Guinness has perfected the role with what one might consider too much practice, so this picture, like the others, is something of a minor gem. It fails only in capturing the true flavor of Chesterton's gentle detective tales. The concept of an arch-criminal brought to rights by an equally archdetective (an amateur, at that) is not of our era, with its low-keyed police efficiency. In all Europe there is only one man whose intellect can cope with the man who for ten years has pilfered art treasures without leaving the police any more of a clue than his pseudonym, Flambeau. To play this sort of thing in any but the Edwardian dress and spirit is as an acronistic as expecting Sherlock Holmes to track Dr. Moriarity with radar and an all-point bulletin. Still, Guinness and Peter Finch, as Flambeau, do their best to ignore the modern trappings of police and society, and to behave like brilliant amateurs, who are good and evil (respectively) for the joy of it, not because they are sociological case histories.

Played less as a comedy than other Guinness films of this type, The Detective makes up in clever dialogue what it lacks in suspense and visual gags. Anyone who found The Lavender Hill Mob enjoyable should like this only a little less. It just seems a shame that the fine character of Kind Hearts and Coronets, Oliver Twist and the Mudlark should become as much of a type, and be handled in the same way as Francis the talking mule.