Dr. Syn Alias the Scarecrow (1963)

Director: James Neilson
Writer: Robert Westerby, based on the novel Christopher Syn by Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan
Stars: Patrick McGoohan, George Cole, Tony Britton, Michael Hordern and Geoffrey Keen

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’ve met the Rev. Dr. Christopher Syn in this project before. In 2016, I took a look at 1937’s Doctor Syn for the centennial of leading lady Margaret Lockwood. In 2025, I’m reviewing a fresh Dr. Syn movie for another centennial, of George Cole, who I know well on film and TV.

Introducing it is a real challenge but I’ll give it a shot. Dr. Syn was a character created by a British author, Russell Thorndike, the brother of famous actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. The swashbuckling parson/smuggler debuted in a novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, in 1915, and it was followed by six more, though it was the last of them chronologically.

Doctor Syn was the first film adaptation and this was the third, the second being Hammer’s Captain Clegg in 1962 with Dr. Syn renamed to Parson Blyss to avoid any copyright clash with Disney, who weren’t actually making a feature film at all, but three episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV show, collectively called The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

However, they promptly reedited it into this feature film, which was released in the UK in 1963, a few months before the TV show aired. What’s more, both were based on Christopher Syn by Thorndike and William Buchanan that saw the latter retelling The Further Adventures of Dr. Syn, not merely translating English into American but also changing the ending and a host of supporting characters.

So this is a 1963 feature based on a 1964 TV show that was based on a 1960 novel that was in turn based on a 1936 novel. Whew! I hope that’s helped clear things up.

I knew that the 1937 feature softened up Dr. Syn from the books to work for George Arliss, who was almost seventy. That feels even more apparent watching Patrick MacGoohan in the same role at just thirty-five, a vibrant country parson and a dangerous masked smuggler, one we can utterly believe started out as a pirate. He’d been Danger Man since 1960 but he wasn’t yet The Prisoner. That would start in 1967.

This is Disney so there has to be an opening song and, while it’s far more adventurous than their norm, it’s an awkward story song akin to a western TV show theme. Everything has the TV feel. The score is exorbitantly dynamic, the riding shots are overdone and obviously shot with rear projection. It’s such a simplistic take on good guys versus bad guys that it’s almost a live action cartoon.

What shines out are the costumes which are put to great use by the actors. Dr. Syn becomes the Scarecrow by putting on a fantastic mask of sackcloth and just as effective a jacket. It’s a tattered affair and it makes him look like he’s still on a wooden frame. His assistant, Sexton Mipps, becomes Hellspite, in a more generic but still creepy mask. The boy in a delightfully scary bird mask is young John Banks, alias the Curlew. This look, with a suitably memorable cackle by the Scarecrow, makes it easy to buy into these smugglers becoming legends. Sorry, in these parts they’re known as “gentlemen”.

The story broke down easily into three acts on the TV show because they were also three distinct episodes. They’re all intact here but in a blurred fashion to make it seem more like a single coherent story suitable for a feature.

The first involves a tough newcomer, Gen. Pugh, sent by King George III himself to halt the rampant smuggling in Romney Marsh. He uses every means he can, even bringing in the pressgangs, who catch Harry Banks, the eldest son of the local squire. John, the Curlew, is his younger brother. It’s all good introduction.

The second focuses on Joseph Ransley, one of the Scarecrow’s men who’s ripe for turning. Pugh manages it but Dr. Syn is aware and puts a clever plan into motion that leads to not one but two very different trials. This is surely the best of the three stories because it neatly puts distance between Dr. Syn and the Scarecrow, while spinning wheels within wheels, keeping us guessing all the way. It even provides solid roles for Patrick Wymark and Alan Dobie.

The third is the worst, because it returns to Pugh only to distract into a grand rescue, not only Harry Banks, who deserts from the navy he was pressed into but an American traitor to the crown. After all, the timing is right for the Disney Corp to throw in something that meant something to its American viewers. There’s an awkward romantic angle shoehorned in too.

While McGoohan steals the show as both Dr. Syn and especially the Scarecrow, he couldn’t function without a gang and George Cole is an impressive right hand man to both of them, as Mipps, who’s “sexton, verger, carpenter and undertaker”, and his alter ego Hellspite. He’s a jolly man who knows how to talk, as so many of his characters did, but also how to be quiet, a far less commonplace attribute.

He was given up for adoption, Cole being his adopted surname, and left school at fourteen, aiming to join the Merchant Navy. He found a role in a touring musical instead, so became an actor. His first film role arrived at only fifteen years of age and the lead in Cottage to Let took him and his mother in.

That was Alistair Sim, a key name in British comedy, and they shared the screen in a flurry of feature films and TV movies, including The Happiest Days of Your Life and two entries in the thematically similar St. Trinian’s series, Cole as “Flash” Harry, a memorable spiv. Of course, he would make more after Sim’s death.

While appearing in classic British comedies, he took over the lead role in A Life of Bliss on radio then continued it on television. He also appeared in films as wildly varied as Henry V (with Laurence Olivier) and Too Many Crooks; Cleopatra (with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton) and Fright; One Way Pendulum and The Vampire Lovers. He had quite the film career, even if a majority of his fans know him from television.

His first work there was as far back as 1948 in an Alistair Sim TV movie, Dr. Angelus, more likely a live play. His first show was an episode of Suspicion in 1957 and half of those were live too. A Life of Bliss in 1960 was his first regular TV role, but he’d move on to others: A Man of Our Times in 1968, Don’t Forget to Write in 1977 and, of course, Minder in 1979.

He played lovable crook Arthur Daley in 109 episodes of Minder over ten seasons, becoming a household name. It wasn’t even his show to begin with but he stole it ruthlessly. Cole built that habit over a sixty-seven year career that ran until 2008. He died at ninety in 2015.