G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown on DVD

Sometime ago, meaning, I can’t remember when, and the time that has passed probably amounts to a year and a half now, I bought the first volume in the British produced of the Father Brown series starring Kenneth More.I’d only read The Blue Cross at the time, but I had read Orthodoxy and Heretics, and The Man Who Was Thursday.

It has been something since I purchased the first volume and I did procure the second when it became available, and what it all comes down to is I happy that I did. I’ve watched the DVDs over and over; a few of the episodes are favorites so I enjoy them more often.

I did make the mistake of taking a look at some of the reviews on Amazon. Many were lukewarm and some simply, not complementary at all, and a few were downright savage, but I will say that those reviews just didn’t get it.

Get what?

Get the fact that this series of stories were televised at a time when putting Chesterton’s Father Brown on the small screen was almost too much of a challenge. I suspect that, now, with big budgets and technological expertise and talent that is available, efforts at bring Father Brown to the TV audience would be a huge disaster, especially in America. I can say this with complete confidence because it was tried once in the 1970s with Sanctuary of Fear and well, the program, while making it to VHS, has never been heard from since. I’m not knocking anyone, performer, writer or director. In all honesty the adaption was so loose, the name should’ve been change to protect the Innocence of Father Brown.

Father Brown, the small, painfully unassuming priest was created by a non-Roman Catholic. Later Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism, and he used his Catholic creation to not only fight crime, but fight evil and attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. Read the stories and you’ll see that—watch the Father Brown series and you’ll see that, too.

But I warn you, the program was produced in the 1970s, and doesn’t know have that commercial ‘snap, crackle, pop,’ which TV audiences are use to and now condemn when they don’t see it. The production quality of 21st television production can hide the worst acting and story.

I would’ve liked to know what G. K. Chesterton would’ve thought of a small screen Father Brown. I would’ve liked to know what he thought of Father Brown on the big screen, being that his priest made it to the motion picture screen in 1934, two years before Chesterton’s death. But I know that I like Father Brown as portrayed by Kenneth More on the small screen, and I’d like to think Mr. Chesterton would be pleased, too.

To be honest, I would like to play the role of the wily, yet, diminutive cleric. But Kenneth More would be a difficult act to follow, because I enjoyed his interpretation. I enjoyed the majority of the episodes, while I just liked a few of the other episodes. Some were hurt by the acting or the dramatizations, or both. But, I watched them all—some more than others.

Episodes that come immediately to mind are The Mirror and the Magistrate, Volume 1; The Secret Garden, Volume 2; and there is The Dagger with Wings, Volume 1. These mysteries and solutions, in particular, and the way Father Brown engages in them and the other characters, are strong and have a good sense of the stories. The acting is solid, yet theatrical. I suspect that the theatrical nature of some of the programs might throw the current TV viewers. Again, the Father Brown series doesn’t have the ‘snap, crackle, and the pop,’ and they’re Period pieces, and unless the historical background, at least for American productions, includes something epic or the mafia, or devious killers, and/or the ongoing effort to ‘get the guy and the girl together’ and into the sack, … well, a celibate priest doesn’t have a chance.