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.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death is the sixth of the Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson (and the fourth to be made by Universal). It was released in 1943 and is based (loosely) on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes story The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.

The Rathbone/Bruce series began with 20th Century-Fox in 1939. For complicated reasons only two movies were made. In the early 40s Universal acquired the rights and very wisely decided to stick with the winning combination of Rathbone and Bruce. They also made the very unfortunate decision to try to update Sherlock Holmes by pitting him against the Nazis in a contemporary setting. After three such efforts sanity finally prevailed and the next film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, was a classic Holmesian adventure. While it still had a contemporary setting the story could just as easily have taken place in the 1890s as the 1940s. The war is relegated very much to the background and plays no part in the story. In fact this film (and the remainder of the Universal Sherlock Holmes cycle) really takes place in a self-contained fog-shrouded universe in which Holmes has always had rooms at 221b Baker Street and always will have.

This film also represents a very sharp, and very welcome, turn towards a gothic feel. This is of course something that Universal could do very very well. They even re-use sets built for Dracula.

Dr Watson is staying at Musgrave Manor, a gloomy 16th century pile in Northumberland. The house is being used as a temporary hospital for convalescent officers, with Dr Watson in charge of their care. Alarmed by the attempted murder of his assistant, Dr Bob Sexton, Watson asks his old friend Sherlock Holmes for help. Given that Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey) has been assigned to the case it’s just as well that Holmes will be on hand. Lestrade, as usual, is bungling the case hopelessly. He arrests an American officer, based on some very flimsy circumstantial evidence.

The murders begin immediately after the arrival of Holmes. Holmes suspects they have some connexion with the enigmatic Musgrave Ritual, performed for over 400 years on the occasion of the death of the current head of the family.

No-one in the family knows the meaning of the Musgrave Ritual. Sally Musgrave (Hillary Brooke) has to recite the ritual without having the slightest idea what it means. In fact the members of the famiy assume it has no meaning. Holmes does not accept this.

The murders and the ritual give Holmes puzzles to solve. He gets to do some real detective work and Bertram Millhauser provides a script that puts those puzzles at centre stage.

The chess scene and the reading of the Ritual are impressive set-pieces.

The previous film in the series, Sherlock Holmes in Washington, had been a flop. The decision to change direction and make Sherlock Holmes Faces Death a classic whodunit proved to be an excellent one. It was a major success with the public, and critics generally liked it as well. Perhaps wartime audiences didn’t want endless movies about Nazi spies. It seems that they actually wanted pure entertainment to take their minds off the war. And they wanted the real Sherlock Holmes, using his genius to solve baffling crimes.

Reverting to a traditional detective story format also makes the central characters, and the performances of the two leads, work much more effectively. Hunting Nazi spies made Sherlock Holmes seem like a fish out of water but here he is in his element.

Roy William Neill directed all but one of the Rathbone-Bruce films and he really was the perfect choice. He was essentially a B-feature director but he had an excellent visual sense and that, combined with Charles Van Enger’s marvellous black-and-white cinematography, gives the Holmes film their distinctive slightly gothic feel.

Bertram Millhauser’s screenplay utilises various elements of the original short story but most importantly it feels like a Sherlock Holmes story.

This movie is not perfect. While the climatic showdown between Holmes and the murderer is excellent it’s the film’s only real suspense scene. In particular it was a mistake not to make the audience feel that Sally Musgrave was in real danger.

Whether Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett (in the 1980s-1990s Granda TV series) was the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes is an unanswerable question. Both gave very different interpretations of the rôle but in both cases there was ample support in Conan Doyle’s stories for those interpretations. They simply emphasised different facets of the  personality of a complex character whose enduring popularity is based largely on the fact that he was so complex. Nigel Bruce’s Dr Watson is more controversial but on the hole the decision to make him a semi-comic character was probably justified. The films were dark enough that some comic relief was actually welcome. And in this film Watson is amusing without being a fool.

Optimum Releasing’s Region 2 DVD offers a superb transfer and some nice extras an including an audio commentary by noted Sherlockian David Stuart Davies.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death is a vast improvement on the three earlier Universal films. With this production Universal had found the correct formula. It’s by no means the best entry in the cycle but it’s still highly recommended.

The Pearl of Death (1944)

The Pearl of Death is one of the most admired of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes movies, and rightly so. It was released in 1944, and produced and directed by Roy William Neill.

It was based, very very loosely indeed, on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Six Napoleons.

The Pearl of Death begins with Sherlock Holmes giving an impressive demonstration of his genius as a detective. This is, alas, immediately followed by one of the biggest blunders of his career, one that threatens to tarnish his reputation in the eyes of the nation. The blunders is the direct result of Holmes’ overwhelming ego.

The subject of this embarrassing mistake is the famed Borgia Pearl, fabulously valuable but with a very evil reputation. Holmes is certain that criminal mastermind Giles Conover (Miles Mander) is behind the theft. Conover is certainly a worthy opponent for Holmes - he is clever and he is exceptionally ruthless.

The ruthlessness soon becomes evident with the first in what will be a series of horrifying murders. The victims have had their backs broken. Not surprisingly Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is totally at sea and is not even prepared to admit that the first murder really is a murder. Holmes however already has a shrewd idea how the murders were committed but the motives remain completely opaque. Nonetheless there are certain indications that lead the Great Detective to believe that the murders are linked to the theft of the notorious pearl.

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are in sparkling form. Rathbone gets to sport a number of disguises. In fact disguise plays a particularly crucial role in this story with the villains making very effective use of the technique. This gives the studio’s resident make-up genius Jack Pierce plenty of useful employment.

The most notable of the trio of evildoers is Miles Mander as Conover. Conover might not be quite in the Professor Moriarty class but he’s still a fine villain, convincingly intellectual and also convincingly (but subtly) depraved, and oddly seedy as well. Rondo Hatton, who built a brief film career on personal misfortune (he was horribly disfigured by acromegaly), makes a brief but terrifying appearance as the dreaded Creeper. The third member of the criminal triumvirate  is, perhaps surprisingly, Universal’s popular scream queen Evelyn Ankers as the clever and dangerous Naomi Drake. Ankers handles the role reasonably well.

Dennis Hoey is even more blustering, and even more ineffectual, than usual as Inspector Lestrade.

As is usual in the case of the best movies in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes cycle there’s some low-key but effective spooky atmosphere especially when the Creeper puts in his appearance. Cinematographer Virgil Miler was quite adept at this sort of thing while by now director Roy William Neill knew exactly what the studio required of him and he knew how to deliver the goods.

The comic relief is kept to a minimum this time although Nigel Bruce still gets a few amusing moments and Basil Rathbone gets to mock poor Lestrade rather unmercifully.

The transfer (in Optimum’s Region 2 Sherlock Holmes Definitive Collection DVD boxed set) is excellent and there are a few extras, including production notes courtesy of Richard Valley.

The Scarlet Claw is usually considered to be the best of all the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies with The Pearl of Death being the second best. From my memories of seeing The Scarlet Claw some years back (I really do need to watch it again) I’d tend to go along with that. The Pearl of Death certainly has no difficulty in living up to its glowing reputation. Highly recommended.

The Woman in Green (1945)

The Woman in Green was the eleventh of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies. It was released by Universal in 1945. It’s an original story but like many of the films in this series it borrows elements from several of Conan Doyle’s stories.

London is in the grip of terror caused by a series of grisly murders. The victims are all young women and after murdering them the killer has neatly removed one of their fingers. Scotland Yard is baffled. In desperation Inspector Gregson (Matthew Boulton) asks Sherlock Holmes for help.

Of course the obvious conclusion is that the murders are the work of a Jack the Ripper copycat but Holmes has his doubts. There are puzzling indications that suggest that these slayings are not the work of a homicidal maniac.

Holmes gets his first solid lead when the daughter of a very prominent man, Sir George Fenwick, consults him about her father. The night before she saw him wandering in his garden, trying to bury something - a severed human finger!

There is a diabolical plot afoot and Holmes has other problems - someone has tried to kill him.

There is, as the title suggests, a mysterious woman involved in this case. Could there also be a fiendish criminal mastermind pulling the strings behind the scenes?

Although this is a late entry in the cycle it’s a very good one. It boasts a nicely twisted little plot courtesy of screenwriter Bertram Millhauser. In the original version of the script the murder victims were children. The Production Code Authority, quite rightly, vetoed this. 

The screenplay has been criticised for supposed plot holes, such as the failure to explain the motivations for the four earlier murders. Personally I don’t agree. I think it’s extremely clear that all five murders were carried out with the same intentions and had the same results and there was no reason to explain something so obvious to the audience. The use of an innocent man as the would-be assassin of Sherlock Homes has also been criticised as being simply a lazy way to offer Holmes an important clue. Again I disagree. I think the choice of assassin was exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to Moriarty.

Rathbone and Bruce are in good form. Bruce as usual delivers the comic relief but in this case it’s subtle and gently amusing. Bruce also gets at least a few opportunities to demonstrate his ability to be serious and sensitive.

Henry Daniell is a marvelously cold-blooded Moriarty. Hillary Brooke provides both glamour and danger as the mysterious woman and does so to very good effect. Like most actresses she thoroughly enjoyed playing the femme fatale.

Like most of the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies The Woman in Green was directed by Roy William Neill. Neill was a cut above most of the directors employed by Universal on B-movies in the 1940s. His style is not ostentatious but it’s effective. He makes nicely subtle use of low-angle shots to highlight the menace of Professor Moriarty (yes of course Moriarty makes an appearance). He throws in a few Dutch angles as well but again they’re used sparingly and only when needed. They’re appropriate here, given one of the key plot elements (which happens to be oner of my favourite plot devices but I won’t spoil things by revealing what it is). There’s also some good special effects work by the studio’s resident expert in such matters John P. Fulton. This is actually a rather stylish movie.

The Woman in Green does not have the overt gothic elements that appear in several of the movies in this series. On the other hand it does have a surprisingly dark edge to it and there is a real sense of evil.

The Sherlock Holmes movies were in fact among the best of Universal’s 40s B-pictures. They’re all very well-crafted and quite atmospheric.

My copy of this movie came from Optimum’s Sherlock Holmes - The Definitive Collection DVD boxed set. The transfer is superb and there’s a swag of extras including an audio commentary by David Stuart Davies.

The Woman in Green is a worthy entry in Universal’s Sherlock Homes cycle even if it’s not quite up to the standard of The Scarlet Claw or The Pearl of Death or The Spider Woman. Highly recommended.