Film review: Inspector Hornleigh (1939)

Watching Christmas Carol sent me down an Alastair Sim rabbit hole and I discovered, (a) that he was late to acting, starting only around age 30, and (b) that his earliest popular roles were in a series of films based on a successful radio program called Inspector Hornleigh.  So here we are.  The quality isn't great (it's not just that it's a DVD in a 4K world, the print is rather blurry) and there are no subtitles, which we put on for everything now, but it's a fun little romp.  Sim is actually the comic-relief Scottish sidekick (his actual accent), which is a bit jarring after seeing his Scrooge), while the titular Hornleigh is played by a crusty William Hartnell-esque cockney actor called Gordon Harker. Sim's Sergeant Bingham gets no end of abuse (it's no chummy Holmes-Watson relationship, although Bingham is a good deal more competent than the Nigel Bruce version of Watson), much of it outright nationalist.  And that's an interesting feature of this eve-of-WWII production: London is littered with non-Londoners - not just the Welsh, Scots and Irish, but Hungarians (?).  It's as if everywhere has emptied into London, which, prior to the Blitz, I imagine was the case, although there's no mention of the war, probably because the film is an adaptation of a much earlier play.  The plot is almost inconsequential, although it does involve the unlikely event of the theft of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's famous little briefcase, which is only discovered when a murdered man is found in a boarding house and a statue noticed to be missing.  

Also featured: a former IRA (or whatever the resistance movement was called back then) soldier threatening people with a grenade!  It's a very solid little number, which makes you realize how many perfectly enjoyable films were being cranked out by the British Film Industry and have been lost to history.  So congratulations to the completely anonymous bare-bones DVD company that churned this one out (and the two sequels which are on the way from Amazon even as I type this).  Inspector Hornleigh is an interesting character: irascible, although he does have a sneaking fondness for his sidekick, and definitely working class.  No nonsense, polite enough to everyone he's questioning 

(usually posh people) but definitely never cowed by them.  A copper's copper - fond of a pint, with his eye on retirement, but a steely resolve to put lawbreakers behind bars.  Why isn't there a streaming service devoted to showing these kind of films?  Now I think about it, there probably is...