The stories of writer G.K. Chesterton about the amateur detective Father Brown were also filmed and some of these films are still famous today.

The first film, created in the year 1934, was directed by Edward Sedgwick and Walter Connolly played the role of Father Brown. The perhaps most successful film was shot in 1954 by the British director Robert Hamer and was entitled Father Brown, an adaptation of Chesterton's The Blue Cross.

In Germany, the films with Heinz Ruhmann probably have the greatest reputation. The Austrian director Helmut Ashley adapted the book The Black Sheep into a movie with Heinz Ruhmann in the lead role. The sequel He Can't Stop Doing It was directed by German director Axel von Ambesse with Heinz Ruhmann in the role of mischievous Father Brown.

In these two adaptations, Father Brown is not depicted as a British, but as an Irish clergyman. Long before his career as a Detective Chief Inspector Derrick, Horst Tappert played let a minor role as a band trumpeter in He Can't Stop Doing It.

Due to the success of the two films with Heinz Ruhmann in 1968, a third film was shot. The Adventures of Father Brown were no longer based on the books by G.K. Chesterton. The German-French-Italian co-production, however, could not build on the success of the first two Ruhmann films - perhaps because they had more of the slapstick in the foreground. The first two films are worth seeing in any case and are re-run often on television.

In the years 1966 to 1972, a series was shown on German television in which the role of Father Brown was played by State Theater actor Josef Meinrad (known from the Sissi films, The German Champion and The Trapp Family). This series was kept closely to the literary text G.K. Chesterton. In addition to Father Brown, who is of course helped by God, this series also hosts Inspector Smith (played by Guido Wieland).

In 1974, a British television series about investigating Father Brown was broadcast in which the British actor Kenneth Gilbert More played the role of Father Brown. Kenneth Gilbert More is known from a remake of the Hitchcock classic The 39 Steps, the television series The Forsyte Saga and the movie Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

In 1979, the American director John Llewellyn Moxey also filmed a Father Brown film, which, similar to The Adventures of Father Brown (the last of the Father Brown films with Heinz Ruhmann) was not based on any of the G.K. Chesterton books. Father Brown is investigating on the island of Manhattan, one of the five boroughs of New York. Similar to the well-known criminal defence lawyer Perry Mason, Father Brown investigates crime where innocent persons are charged.

Since 2003, the television series Father Brown has been airing in Germany, in which the role of the Bavarian minister Guido Braun is played by Ottfried Fischer, who, in his first case, clears a murder on a fictitious island. Father Brown is there to help his housekeeper Margot Ro?hauptner that is generally only called by him Ro?hauptnerin.

In his investigation, Father Brown is assisted by his sacristan Armin Knopp. Father Brown, at that time working as a chaplain in a Hamburg prison must prove through his investigations that the suspicions against Knopp are unsustainable and therefore achieve his early release on parole. Knopp, very thankful to the father, subsequently because his companion and assistant in investigations.

Inspector Geiger is also on the father’s side, hoping to obtain a promotion through the solved cases of the father’s. In return, the priest uses the police contacts of the inspector to obtain information in a simple way people or have an evaluation. He also likes to make use of Geiger’s possibilities to conduct DNA or fingerprint analysis.

Of course, Father’s Brown may not miss from the series – he is always disappointed in him and keeps transferring him to other parishes. Bishop Hemmelrath always hopes that a new parish might discourage the pastor of another criminal investigation and is, however, disappointed from time to time, so that Pastor Brown and the Ro?hauptnerin again have to pack their bags.