Lunchtime Classic Comedy: Inspector Hornleigh (1939) – Gordon Harker,Alistair Sim,

Inspector Hornleigh is a 1938 British detective film directed by Eugene Forde, starring Gordon Harker and Alastair Sim, with Miki Hood, Wally Patch, Steven Geray and Edward Underdown. The film was shot at Pinewood Studios in England. The screenplay was co-written by Bryan Edgar Wallace.

The film is a spin-off from a popular BBC radio series of the 1930s, Inspector Hornleigh Investigates,^[2] created and written by Hans Wolfgang Priwin, which ran on the BBC from 1937 to 1940.

The screenplay was not written by Priwin and the leading characters are somewhat modified. The actor who played Inspector Hornleigh on the BBC, S.J. Warmington, is replaced by comedian Gordon Harker, and is given a bumbling sidekick, played by Alastair Sim, solely as comic relief. The BBC series was a serious detective drama, but in the film the two leading characters play the script for laughs, and the casting of two well-known comedy stars in the parts indicates that this was the director’s intention. The rest of the cast behave as if they are in a straight drama, highlighting the behaviour of Harker and Sim.

To emphasise that this was a comedy film series, and to enhance the comedy double-act between Harker and Sim, the subsequent films in the series were written by the comedy writers Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.

Although the film was released in 1939, it carries a copyright notice dated 1938. It was made by Argyle Television Films, but was given a cinema release in the UK.