Father Brown Complete Season 1 DVD Box Set | Classic British Mystery Series | Perfect for Mystery Lovers & British TV Fans" （如果商品是DVD套装） 或 "Father Brown Season 1 Full Episodes | Stream British Detective Mysteries | Great for Cozy Nights & Crime Drama Fans" （如果商品是数字流媒体版本）

This is the first of two DVD box sets of the short-lived "Father Brown" British TV series from the 1970s. Like many other Acorn Media DVD releases of old television shows, the packaging consists of a box with two DVD keep cases inside, with three or four hourlong episodes on each of the two discs. Having seen the BBC's slick new "Father Brown" series with Mark Williams on PBS, I'm surprised to admit that I much prefer this older series. Unlike the Williams version, these older episodes with Kenneth More stick closely to the original GK Chesterton short stories, and even the divergences from Chesterton's original novel are done more for the sake of visualization than for the sake of creative rewriting. Where the Mark Williams series uses Chesterton's stories more as a general framework for launching wholly original plots and dialogue, this show maintains the elegant wordplay and moral-deductive reasoning of Chesterton's original stories. Kenneth More plays Father Brown closer the style of Chesterton's eccentric priest-detective than Williams, who comes across in the new series as more of a generic amateur sleuth. With his absentminded asides and brilliant facial expressions, More nails the abstracted and seemingly meaningless flights of reasoning that often carry the titular priest to brilliant solutions of murder cases. Where the new "Father Brown" reduces characters and plot elements to the most generic possible interpretations, giving us lots of people rifling through desks, this older show takes greater care over the actual mysteries, focusing more on plot than on the slick editing and visuals of the Williams version. While this older program has a cheaper look than the new show, it is more intelligent and more faithful to the literary source material, and it offers a surprising number of distinguished British guest stars like Bernard Lee of James Bond fame. As Chesterton conceived it after meeting a real-life priest who knew more about practical matters than he did, Father Brown is an unassuming parish priest in 1920s Britain who grasps worldly matters better than he lets on and who invariably deduces the solutions of murder mysteries through his brilliant moral insights into the natures of different people. The central paradox of Father Brown, evident in More's subtle interpretation, is that his Catholicism makes him far less superstitious and far more level-headed than many people allegedly freed of religious superstitions. There's very little of this characterization in the bland Mark Williams show, but Kenneth More presents it in spades. In Williams, you rarely hear anything that sounds like Chesterton, but this older show preserves the original dialogue of the stories, and More really makes it sing. If you're a fan of the original stories, this the Father Brown to watch.