Operation St. Peter’s (1967)

If you read Krimi! 0 (and if you haven’t: What’s stopping you?), you'd have learnt that the commercially most successful Krimi in Germany was surprisingly not one of the Rialto Wallace’s but the GK Chesterton Father Brown adaption Das schwarze Schaf (tr. “The Black Sheep”, 1960), a film that never saw an English language release but that proved so popular with the audience that a follow-up was shot two years later: Er kanns nicht lassen (tr. “He can’t help it”, 1962). 

Father Brown was played by Heinz Rühmann, one of the most popular German actors ever with a career ranging over more than 5 decades. He was a quiet comedian, usually playing a kind-hearted Average Joe. 

Those two films were the only two adaptations that can genuinely be considered classic Krimis, however, they generated one last footnote: the Italian comedy Operazione San Pietro/Operation St. Peter’s (1967), directed by none other than Lucio Fulci. In Germany this film was marketed as Die Abenteuer des Kardinal Braun (tr. “The Adventures of Cardinal Brown”). 

Father Brown has now been promoted from small English priest to a Vatican based Cardinal and the film unfortunately is a complete mess and really for completists only. 

 One of the main issues is that it can’t decide whether it wants to be a standalone film or whether it wants to act as a continuation of the earlier two films. 

The trouble is that as a continuation of the series, the film is very badly written with the Brown character appearing first after more than 40 minutes. Even subsequently he has very little to do, does practically no detecting work of any kind other than ordering each and every Italian priest on a wild goose chase after the thieves of Michelangelo’s Pietà. 

That chase makes up at least 20 minutes of the final movie and as such may be considered overdone, though it has some effective scenes of entire religious orders storming out of their monasteries in their different frocks running up and down the country in various formations. Some of those scenes look quite stunning, I must admit. 

E.G. Robertson has one of his final parts as a babbling mafia don in fear of the vicious beating he once received from his peers. Cue: Black and white flashback à la introductory sequence of The Beyond. 

Uta Levka of Edgar Wallace fame as well as of Scream and Scream Again and The Oblong Box has a much bigger and more talkative part than usual and does look quite dishy. Thanks to the crystal clear pause function of modern DVDs you can also catch a nice topless glimpse of her that could otherwise be missed. (God forbid!) 

The comedy of the film is of a very daft Italian kind. It’s not even ludicrous enough to make you cringe, very harmless and predictable overall, not enough that it’ll have you slapping your laps with laughter. 

The film is only really available on a purely German language DVD without English subtitles or dubbing. Internationally, even amongst Fulci fans, this production is hardly known at all. 

Stephen Thrower is one of the few scholars who wrote about this production in his excellent book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci but even he seems to miss the connection to the earlier movies. Instead he focuses on the radical Fulci critique of the Catholic Church in films like The Eroticist and considers Operazione flawed as the humour against the Church is only very superficial and not deep enough. Rühmann’s character really never gets a proper mention other than in a small part of his synopsis. For all intents and purposes Rühmann, however, was one of THE main characters and reason why the film managed to get the green light at all. Admittedly, this was a very badly written Father Brown entry, but a Father Brown entry nonetheless and as such there is no way that anyone would have wanted to even make it an anti-Church pamphlet. Father Brown films are by their nature pro-religious.