The House Of Fear

Pipped At The Post

The House Of Fear
Directed by Roy William Neill
USA 1945
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Inspired rather loosely by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure Of The Five Orange Pips, The House Of Fear is the tenth of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes featuring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as his loyal friend Doctor Watson. It also bizarrely, given the circumstances of the story, features Dennis Hoey returning as Inspector Lestrade but, since there’s only one scene near the start of the picture which features Holmes’ 221B Baker Street address, this is the second (I think, by my count) of the films to not include a brief appearance by Mary Gordon as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson.

It starts off, somewhat unusually, on a longish sequence with a voice over narrative setting the scene about a group of men living in a large house in Scotland who are each, night after night, getting delivered an envelope containing a steadily supply of diminishing orange pips as a forewarning of their horrible death in the next few hours. Each body is found mutilated beyond recognition, due to some grisly fate but identifiable due to a personal item or feature of the body (which immediately put me on my guard not to trust any one of these corpses... I won’t spoil the ending for you here though),

It then turns out this narrative set up is actually being spoken by an insurance agent at 221B Baker Street, as he has been telling Holmes and Watson the tale and calls them in to investigate. They arrive just as a third murder has been committed and they set about investigating, both in the house and the local village in this fun filled movie which, again, showcases all that’s best with these particular Holmes movies.

Being as it’s Universal, everything is lit by longtime director of the series Roy William Neill in that crisp but sinister looking, shadowy style which helped make their monster movies such a hit. Indeed, Neill directed the first of the monster mash ups, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (reviewed here) for Universal a few years earlier (if you look closely near the end, you may be able to spot the wolf man’s cane). He even uses a nice Dutch angle at one point, as Holmes and Lestrade descend a staircase into a smugglers cave near the end of the movie.

There is a definite budget conscious re-use of sets and model shots etc on this one. For instance, the house in long shot is the old ruined church establishing shot from Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror (reviewed here), which makes no sense and doesn't tie in with the interior of the house (which I think is from at least one of the others). And the village and the pub sets will also absolutely feel like old friends to watchers of these Holmes films by this point too.

There are some clunky but fun parts here too, of course. I mean, why would Holmes call on Scotland Yard to come and give him aid when he’s in Scotland, when the local constabulary would surely do just as well? And why, in this case, would it be the always ineffective Inspector Lestrade who they send to help him. Not that I mind of course, Dennis Hoey was very much part of the team by this point and watching him bounce off the two principal leads is great fun. He also a nicely silly line in this when, in his confusion, he utters, “Suffering cats! What’s going on here.” Although, this is nowhere near as silly an exclamation as when Dr. Watson, true to form after he and Holmes are nearly flattened by a particularly nasty boulder pushed off a cliff at them, cries out, “Great Scott Holmes! That was meant for us!”

Other than this though, apart from a woman sporting the double bun style of hair which was popularised again by Carrie Fisher in the first Star Wars movie in 1977... and the novelty of the ending which I won’t reveal to you here (although you may well begin to suspect the final solution long before it’s revealed), The House Of Fear is another brilliant piece of classic mystery movie entertainment which I could revisit year after year if I didn’t have so many other movies to watch. So a short review for a short but sweet movie in this wonderful series of Holmes movies. Four more now to revisit.