Father Brown - Father Brown in Other Media

Father Brown in Other Media

• Walter Connolly starred as the title character in the 1934 film Father Brown, Detective, based on "The Blue Cross". Connolly would later be cast as another famous fictional detective, Nero Wolfe, in the 1937 film, The League of Frightened Men and played Charlie Chan on NBC radio from 1932-1938.
• A Mutual Broadcasting System radio series, The Adventures of Father Brown (1945) featured Karl Swenson as Father Brown, Bill Griffis as Flambeau and Gretchen Douglas as Nora, the rectory housekeeper.
• The 1954 film Father Brown (released in the U.S. as The Detective) had a formidable cast, with Sir Alec Guinness playing the part of Father Brown, and is widely regarded as a minor classic. Like the 1934 film starring Connolly, it was based on Chesterton's first Brown short story, "The Blue Cross". An experience while playing the character reportedly prompted Guinness's own conversion to Roman Catholicism.
• Heinz Rühmann played Father Brown in two German adaptations of Chesterton's stories, Das schwarze Schaf (The black sheep) (1960) and Er kanns nicht lassen (He can't stop doing it) (1962) with both music-scores written by German composer Martin Böttcher. In these films Brown is an Irish priest. The actor later appeared in Operazione San Pietro (also starring Edward G. Robinson, 1967) as Cardinal Brown, but the movie is not based on any Chesterton story.
• A German television series superficially based on the character of Father Brown, Pfarrer Braun, was launched in 2003. Pfarrer Guido Braun, from Bavaria, played by Ottfried Fischer, solves murder cases in the (fictitious) island of Nordersand (Northsea-island) in the first two episodes. Later other German landscapes like the Harz, the Rhine or Meißen in Saxony became sets for the show. Martin Böttcher again wrote the score and he got the instruction by the producers to write a title-theme hinting at the theme of the cinema-movies with Heinz Rühmann. To date 21 (November 2012) episodes have been made, which ran very successfully in German ARD.
• In 1974, Kenneth More starred in a 13-episode Father Brown TV series, each episode adapted from one of Chesterton's short stories. The series, produced by Sir Lew Grade for Associated TeleVision, was shown in the United States as part of PBS's Mystery!. They were released on DVD in the UK in 2003, and in the USA four years later, both versions by Acorn Media UK.
• A U.S. film made for television, Sanctuary of Fear (1979), starred Barnard Hughes as an Americanized, modernized Father Brown in Manhattan, New York City. The film was intended as the pilot for a series but critical and audience reaction was unfavorable, largely due to the changes made to the character, and the mundane thriller plot.
• An Italian television series, I racconti di padre Brown (The Tales of Father Brown) starred Renato Rascel.
• BBC Radio 4 produced a series of Father Brown stories from 1984 to 1986, starring Andrew Sachs as Father Brown.
• A series of 16 Chesterton stories was produced by the Colonial Radio Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, J.T. Turner played Father Brown; all scripts were written by British radio dramatist M. J. Elliott.
• Father Brown was highlighted in volume 13 of the Case Closed manga's edition of "Gosho Aoyama's Mystery Library, a section of the graphic novels (usually the last page) where the author introduces a different detective (or occasionally, a villain) from mystery literature, television, or other media.
• Ignatius Press published the audio book version of The Innocence of Father Brown in 2008. The book is read by Kevin O'Brien and features introductions to each story written and read by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. The book was a winner of the 2009 Foreword Audio Book Awards.
• EWTN produced the Father Brown story "The Honour of Israel Gow" as an episode of the television series "The Theater of the Word", which first aired in 2009, starring Kevin O'Brien and Frank C. Turner.
• In 2012 the BBC commissioned a ten-episode series of Father Brown stories starring British actor Mark Williams in the title role to air on BBC One in early 2013. Filming for the series began around the Cotswolds in Summer 2012.