RADIO POLICEMAN TO APPEAR ON FILMS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21216, 10 December 1938, Page 16

RADIO POLICEMAN TO APPEAR ON FILMS

MANY PROBLEMS FACED The first of a series of Inspector Hornleigh films based on the famous detective character of radio’s “Monday • Night at Seven,” is now being made ■ by Twentieth Century-Fox, at the Pinewood studios. Gordon Harker is to play Hornleigh, and Alastair Sim his assistant, Sergeant Bingham. Eugene Forde, director of three Charlie Chan pictures and associated with eight others, has been brought over from America to direct the film. This translation of a fourteen-minute radio idea to a film that will run for something like an hour and a quarter is providing a challenge that everybody concerned is taking very seriously. H. W. Priwin, the inventor of Hornleigh, Bryan Wallace, who is writing the script, Forde, and Harker himself are applying themselves to this material!- I sation of a phantom figure as gravely • as though they were solving a problem i iin higher mathematics. They realise very well that the least I slip in making a live man of Horn- i leigh will estrange the millions of i listeners who form their potential : audience. The 8.8. C., in the short time at their command, have to concentrate on a single clue, a single piece of crossexamination. The film with its larger canvas has to add clue to clue until the last one slips into place and completes the jig-saw puzzle. More challenging still, they have to round out’

a character which has no existent background beyond the sound effects of train and car and office telephone. “The audience has no idea what sort of fellow Hornleigh is,” says Eugene Forde. “They don’t know whether he is married, where he lives, what sort of ties he wears, if he smokes cigarettes or a pipe, or anything about him. On the screen we have got to give him a background, make him human—and sometimes fallible. Nobody in the world really likes an infallible detective. And he has got to be a nice, natural fellow —the sort of man you wouldn’t mind asking home for supper. That was the whole secret of the Charlie Chan series. Nobody would have minded having that little Chinese home for. the evening.” So Gordon Harker is playing Hornleigh straight, without Cockney comedy. Just a straightforward, hard-working detective who does his routine job intelligently; a neatly-dressed fellow with a dry sense of humour, who has obviously, but not too obviously, risen from the ranks.