The third and final installment of the Hornleigh films, two years after the first two, and firmly acknowledging the war. It has the same director as the second one, different from the first (although both men have the last name "Forde" they appear to be unrelated). There seems to be a bit of a shift in the portrayal of Hornleigh - maybe I'm misremembering but it seemed to me that he sounded more Cockney in the first two, and also he's occasionally as much of the butt of the joke as Bingham. Indeed, the film begins with him dictating his memoirs to Bingham and they are ludicrously self-serving (and, as the hurt Bingham notes, have yet to mention him in their hundreds of pages). He insists that the final chapter be headed "The Fifth Column" even though, as Bingham also notes, Hornleigh has never had anything to do with the Fifth Column. But he will, he believes, because he has read about an incipient investigation that requires the nation's best lawmen and figures that includes him. He is mocked by a new antagonist, fellow Inspector Blow, whom, it emerges, has actually been given the job. But Hornleigh doesn't know this when he is called into a meeting involving top army brass and is smug as he goes in. However, the job he's being given is simply to catch whomever it is has been stealing merchandise from army provisioners countrywide. Worse yet, it requires him to enlist as a (very old) private in order to catch the crooks. Of course this means Bingham has to as well, and we see further scenes of Hornleigh's hypocrisy as he chides Bingham for planning to get out of a long march by feigning sickness just before he does just that. However, Bingham scores a date with a nice barmaid,
except that it quickly emerges that she has leaked things he told her to the secretive shortwave radio operator who has been transmitting secrets across to mainland Europe (the Fifth Column!), something the hated Blow reveals when he visits just as Hornleigh and Bingham are doing their bin duty as punishment having been caught ransacking a storehouse looking for clues and mistaken for the thieves. Anyway, at this point we ditch the stolen provisions storyline and the army uniforms as our heroes start investigating the barmaid's suspicious dentist, obviously her link to the shortwave operator (who can't be caught because he broadcasts from a different place every night). Hornleigh works out that the dentist and wife will be out one evening and our boys break in and find a safe with all kinds of useful information about contacts, when the doorbell rings and a very pushy patient demands that his aching tooth be removed. Bingham is eventually forced to do this (with the help of gas) while the real dentist is upstairs, having come home unexpectedly. But then, after helping the drugged, now missing two teeth, patient to a bus, Bingham returns to find the dentist dead (gassed) in his own chair. Hornleigh goes upstairs to investigate, and after finding no one, decides to look for clues, leaving Bingham to telephone in the list of contacts from the safe. And that's when the dentist's (young and gorgeous) wife returns...
From there we have a whole final act set in a small town, involving Hornleigh scaring off a rival history teacher candidate so that he can impersonate said teacher at a small private school,
hotel shenanigans, a tragic postmaster, and an exciting finale on a mail train
(that's rather fascinating) [In fact, when this film was released by 20th Century Fox in the US, it was called Mail Train, and the whole film begins with a disclaimer announcing that the real Royal Mail couldn't be manipulated in this way because of safeguards.] Oh, and the provisions-theft-investigation? Blow gets assigned that. And Hornleigh gets proved prescient with his final chapter title. It's a shame that after this film Alastair Sim was tired of being the bumbling Scot sidekick (at one point the villain describes Hornleigh and Bingham as "the tall one who looks intelligent but isn't and the short one who doesn't but is") and his departure ended the series. He was too good to be contained!
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