The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1939]

Hurried into production shortly after the debut of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles, this comparatively lavish 20th Century-Fox production purports to be based on William Gillette's stage play about Conan Doyle's great detective – but actually features a nicely-put-together, new-minted plot. The script sticks to the letter of the title by pluralising the schemes of Professor Moriarty [George Zucco], who cannily presents his nemesis with two adventures: the business about a limping gaucho who plays a melancholy Inca funeral dirge and stalks through the fog with a deadly bolas, threatening a wealthy heiress [Ida Lupino], is wonderfully Doyle-like, but is also a feint, a deliciously complicated case to distract Holmes from his true purpose, which is the theft of the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

This is the film in which Rathbone's Holmes and Bruce's Watson settle into their double-act. Rathbone is eccentric, incisive, brisk, given to barking laughter at his companion [then fondly squeezing his shoulder to show he doesn't mean it] and relishes dialogue exchanges with Bruce, Zucco and E.E. Clive's Lestrade stand-in from Scotland Yard. Bruce is fatter and greyer than only a few months earlier in Baskervilles and presented as more of an 'incorrigible bungler', gifted with silly-ass comic bits [laying in a gutter and bantering with a passerby, stepping in a pond during a break-in] though occasionally down-to-earth enough to leap to the obvious while Holmes is off on a flight of fancy. Things are hardly improved by the presence of Billy the Page [Terry Kilburn], a lone hold-over from the play, a smugly smart servant boy who has an unlikely expertise in chinchilla trivia and seems to make Watson jealous.

Among the triumphs is Zucco's Moriarty, planning one last coup to humiliate his enemy before retiring to devote himself to pure mathematics. He matches Holmes's penchant for disguise by impersonating a London copper to infiltrate the Tower, face lighting up as he is left alone with the wealth of the nation at the mercy of his grasping fingers. A nice contrast with the jovial banter between Holmes, Watson and their circle is the professor's taunting of his own closest associate, a resentful butler [Frank Dawson] sneered at for his cowardly failure to cut his master's throat while shaving his beard off. In addition to stretches of excellent fogbound melodramatics, the film offers Rathbone's Holmes in his single best in-disguise moment – a big-nosed, moustachioed music hall performer in a striped jacket who does a jolly, ridiculous turn with I Do Like to Be Beside the Sea-Side at a society ball before hissing a warning at the heroine from the bushes.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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