by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I had hoped to
watch a Lifetime movie but the two that were on, The Perfect Soulmate and The Perfect Stalker, were both reruns of ones I’d seen recently, so
instead I watched a quite compelling episode of the Father Brown series on KPBS, one which originally aired in
Britain on January 19, 2017 (usually it takes a lot longer than seven months for episodes of British
mystery series to make it to the U.S.!) called “The Penitent Man.” It deals
with the master criminal Hercule Flambeau (John Light), who in addition to
being a running menace to Father Brown (essentially Moriarty to Brown’s Holmes)
is also a devastatingly handsome (our first glimpse of him shows him shirtless)
Continental charmer. He’s been arrested for the murder of Flynn Hardwick
(Callum Dixon) even though Brown is convinced this is one crime of which he’s
innocent because Flambeau’s criminal record, extensive though it is, doesn’t
include any crimes of violence. Nonetheless Flambeau actually confesses to the murder and is locked in the condemned cell
of the local prison — only Brown, who’s made an archaeological study of the
area and in particular of the prison, deduces that what Flambeau is really
after is a medallion carefully hidden in the condemned cell by an architect who
was also a religious fanatic and believed that having a medallion hidden there
would help the execution victims’ souls be redeemed, forgiven their crimes and
allowed in to heaven. Brown ends up in the cell with Flambeau and together they
search for the medallion’s hiding place — it’s 16 bricks up and 16 bricks over
from a brick inscribed “MARK 16:16” (“He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be
damned”).
Brown’s friends Bunty (Emer Kelly) and Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack)
spy on the Hardwick home and see Flynn Hardwick, alive and well, having an
argument with his wife Peggy (Emma Pallant) — eventually we realize that
Flambeau was paying Hardwick to lie
low and pretend to have been murdered, so Flambeau could get into the condemned
cell and steal the medallion — only Flynn doesn’t stay alive for long because
Peggy double-crosses him, hitting him over the head with a frying pan and
digging a grave for him. Bunty and Mrs. McCarthy witness Peggy putting her late
husband into a homemade grave she has just dug, and even photograph him
(incidentally the beautiful red car they drive virtually becomes a character
itself!), but Peggy catches them and holds them hostage wth a shotgun. Flambeau
escapes with a file provided him by Brown, who steals it off the prison
warden’s desk and gives it to Flambeau on the ground that that’s a lesser sin
than allowing the state to execute an innocent (of that crime, anyway) man. This is a quite good British mystery,
better than usual because it’s character-driven and not a whodunit (the
greatest British-born director of mystery films, Alfred Hitchcock, hated whodunits and preferred to let the audience, if not the characters, in from the get-go on what was really
going on), and the characters themselves are charming, while the plot
resolution (Flambeau escapes by literally swimming through a river of shit with Brown — the two get
out of the prison through its underwater sewer pipe — and Flambeau gets away
with the medallion but later mails it back to Brown because the experience has
“poisoned it for me”) is logical and blessedly free of the nihilistic
“surprise” element that’s marred more than a few recent Lifetime movies. The
whole Father Brown series is one of
the most tasteful British mystery shows, lacking in action (well, the
protagonist is a senior-citizen
priest, after all!) but charming and quite pleasant — and this was an unusually
good episode not only because it has a fascinating villain (an interesting
villain is practically a necessity in a crime story!) but because of the
understated quality of the writing (thank you, Rachel Flowerday and Tahsin
Guner, along with the great G. K. Chesterton who created Father Brown in the
first place!).
