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The Green Finger

Original title: Send for Paul Temple
  • 1946
  • 1h 23m
IMDb RATING
5.7/10
203
YOUR RATING
The Green Finger (1946)
Film NoirCrime

Novelist and amateur sleuth, Paul Temple, meets a newspaper woman called "Steve." Together they investigate a gang of diamond robbers.Novelist and amateur sleuth, Paul Temple, meets a newspaper woman called "Steve." Together they investigate a gang of diamond robbers.Novelist and amateur sleuth, Paul Temple, meets a newspaper woman called "Steve." Together they investigate a gang of diamond robbers.

  • Director
    • John Argyle
  • Writers
    • Francis Durbridge
    • John Argyle
  • Stars
    • Anthony Hulme
    • Joy Shelton
    • Tamara Desni
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    5.7/10
    203
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • John Argyle
    • Writers
      • Francis Durbridge
      • John Argyle
    • Stars
      • Anthony Hulme
      • Joy Shelton
      • Tamara Desni
    • 11User reviews
    • 2Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos57

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    Top cast23

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    Anthony Hulme
    • Paul Temple
    Joy Shelton
    • Steve Trent
    Tamara Desni
    Tamara Desni
    • Diana Thornley
    Jack Raine
    Jack Raine
    • Sir Graham Forbes
    Beatrice Varley
    Beatrice Varley
    • Miss Marchment
    Hylton Allen
    • Doctor Milton
    Maire O'Neill
    Maire O'Neill
    • Mrs. Neddy
    Michael Golden
    • Dixie
    Richard Shayne
    • Chief Inspector Dale
    Edward V. Robson
    • Inspector Merritt
    Philip Ray
    Philip Ray
    • Horace Daley
    • (as Phil Ray)
    Leslie Weston
    • Skid Tyler
    Olive Sloane
    Olive Sloane
    • Ruby
    H Victor Weske
    • Snow Williams
    • (as H. Victor Weske)
    Norman Pierce
    Norman Pierce
    • Sergeant Morrison
    Melville Crawford
    • Chief Inspector Harvey
    Charles Wade
    • Rikki
    John Adams
    • Detective at Briefing
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • John Argyle
    • Writers
      • Francis Durbridge
      • John Argyle
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews11

    5.7203
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    Featured reviews

    5JoeytheBrit

    Send for Paul Temple review

    The first of four Paul Temple pictures made by the cut-price Butcher Empire Studios is full of plot twists and red herrings, but loses momentum around the halfway mark. Anthony Hulme makes a decent enough Temple, but would be replaced by John Bentley for the remainder of the series.
    6boblipton

    A Good Mystery Yarn

    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.
    8clanciai

    Jewel thieves advancing to murder plots

    Paul Temple was the great radio detective of the 40s and 50s, immensely popular all round the world, where people everywhere sat glued to their radios to listen to the next chapter of some dreadfully exciting mystery of murders and deceptions and atrocious robberies demanding the extraordinary help of Paul Temple to get things sorted out. All the necessary ingredients are found here to make up a real Paul Temple affair, the strange unexplainable murders, the woman in distress, the ruthless killers, masked as proper citizens, and a tremendously intricate mystery plot with a complicated background of a history abroad, almost like a Sherlock Holmes elaborate novel. The style of Francis Durbridge is smooth and stylish, he has a certain elegance of writing and concocting his plots which you don't find neither in Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charters, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming or any of the others, and his plots are always a challenge to your intelligence - Paul Temple is smarter and cooler than you would ever be, and he always solves his case. The actors here are no aces, there is no cinematography, the direction is efficient but gives no room for any depth of character or psychology, the absence of any Hitchcock quality is blatant, so the whole film depends entirely on the script. Fortunately this is sufficient, and his mysteries would deserve some revival, especially today when the criminal genre is completely drowned in atrocious superficiality of only violence and sex.
    4Leofwine_draca

    Routine detective investigation, the first in a four-film series

    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.
    robert-temple-1

    The Green Finger and The First Penguin

    This is the first of the four feature films made between 1946 and 1952 featuring the lead character of Paul Temple, detective, based upon the stories and radio scripts of Frances Durbridge. In this film, Anthony Hulme plays Temple, but in the other three, Temple was played by John Bentley. This is a very good one. Of the four films, only three have been issued on video or DVD. The first and the last are both better than CALLING PAUL TEMPLE (1948, see my review), which is not as good, although it is notable for Dinah Sheridan playing 'Steve', one of her most renowned roles later on being the mother in THE RAILWAY CHILDREN (1970, see my review). (Dinah Sheridan's real name was Dinah Ginsburg, and her father was a Russian.) The story of this film deals with a ruthless gang of jewel thieves who frequently murder people when they carry out their robberies in England. It is realized that they follow a similar pattern to that of an earlier jewel thief gang in South Africa some years before, and that they must be led by the same man, whose true identity is not known, but who goes by the name of the Knave of Diamonds. One night watchman just before dying manages to say something about 'the green finger', which makes no sense to anyone, though its meaning later becomes very clear. There is a mysterious little woman called Miss Marchmont, played with verve by the character actress Beatrice Varley, whose true identity also turns out to be a surprise in the story. There is another mysterious name, 'the first penguin', which is important, but what or who is meant by it? The film is entertaining for those who find a 1940s detective film interesting.

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    Related interests

    Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946)
    Film Noir
    James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Sharon Angela, Max Casella, Dan Grimaldi, Joe Perrino, Donna Pescow, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Tony Sirico, and Michael Drayer in The Sopranos (1999)
    Crime

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      Based on the eight-part BBC Radio serial "Send For Paul Temple!" (broadcast over April to May 1938) by 25-year-old Francis Durbridge, novelised by the author later in '38 (subsequently reworked into "Beware of Johnny Washington" in 1951; the only literary outing for his US sleuth and sidekick Verity Glyn) and remade/abridged for radio in 1941. The story was the first of the three decade-long run of Temple mysteries.
    • Connections
      Followed by Calling Paul Temple (1948)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • December 23, 1946 (United Kingdom)
    • Country of origin
      • United Kingdom
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Mystery of the Green Finger
    • Filming locations
      • Nettlefold Studios, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, UK(studio: made at Nettlefold Studios Walton-On-Thames England)
    • Production company
      • Butcher's Film Service
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      • 1h 23m(83 min)
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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