Dressed to Kill (1946)

Dressed to Kill, released in 1946, was the last of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies. Roy William Neill was the director, as he had been on eleven of these films.

Dressed to Kill is based, very very loosely, on the Conan Doyle short story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.

It starts with three music boxes. They’re not valuable antiques, in fact they’re worth almost nothing. But they’re worth killing for. The prologue to the movie gives the audience a clue as to the reason, but both Sherlock Holmes and Scotland Yard are totally in the dark.

The music boxes are an interesting variation on the ingenious plot device of The Adventure of the Six Napoleons. We know, and Holmes knows, that there is vital evidence concealed in these three music boxes, and that for some reason it is necessary to possess all three. But Holmes cannot for the life of him see how the trick was done.

It has some connection with a robbery from the Bank of England, but it wasn’t money that was stolen. Not exactly.

The problem is that all three music boxes were sold, to three different people. Holmes has to find those three people and find the music boxes but someone else is trying to do the same thing. Someone very determined and desperate and very ruthless. Someone who is one step ahead of both Holmes and Scotland Yard.

There is a woman in the case. Holmes doesn’t yet know her identity but he knows that she is very dangerous and will stop at nothing.

The woman is Hilda Courtney (Patricia Morison) and Holmes finds her to be a formidable opponent.

The major weakness in this movie is that the script is a bit uninspired. It borrows from previous entries in the series and the solution to the mystery is a little too obvious and the ending a little too contrived. At one point Holmes has a narrow escape but it seems much too easy and fails to evoke any real sense that he’s in danger.

Universal were happy to continue the series but Rathbone had had enough and one can’t blame him. He’d been a fairly big star in the 30s but in the 40s his career was just marking time and it’s understandable that he felt he needed to move on. It didn’t really work and his career never really regained momentum.

Amusingly a lot of critics at the time complained that the film’s title was meaningless, which is the sort of inanity that makes one wonder how film critics ever get to be film critics. Hilda Courtney is a classic femme fatale, she’s always exquisitely and seductively dressed and she’s not averse to killing. The title is perfect.

Several of the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies are specifically set in the 1940s with the Second World War playing a major role. These movies have Holmes hunting spies and saboteurs. In my view these are by far the weakest movies in the series. Holmes feels totally out of place in these wartime stories.

Happily the majority of the films in the Universal series avoid this pitfall. They essentially take place in a kind of Holmesian alternative universe. People drive cars, but apart from that it could easily be the 1920s or the Edwardian era or even the 1890s.

Dressed to Kill falls into this latter category. There’s nothing in this film that really looks 1940s. Even the cars seem old-fashioned for 1946. It’s as if Holmes and Dr Watson are totally unaware that they’re no longer in late Victorian London. I really love this temporal vagueness.

Countless actors have portrayed Sherlock Holmes in movies and on TV, including some very fine actors some of whom were extremely good in the rôle. I have a soft spot for Ronald Howard as a young Sherlock Holmes in the underrated 1954 Sherlock Holmes TV series. Peter Cushing did a very fine job in Hammer’s 1959 The Hound of the Baskervilles. But two performances stand head and shoulders above all the rest - Jeremy Brett in the 1980s/1990s Granada TV series and Basil Rathbone. Their interpretations of the character were wildly different. Brett played him as an irritable, unstable neurotic genius. Rathbone’s Holmes is supremely self-confident and always in totally control. The great thing is that when you read Conan Doyle’s stories both interpretations are justified and completely valid.

I simply can’t make a choice between Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone. They’re both magnetic and so much fun to watch.

Dressed to Kill is one of the lesser entries in the series but it’s reasonably entertaining and it has a fine femme fatale. Recommended.