Pursuit To Algiers

Clues On Cruise

Pursuit To Algiers
Directed by Roy William Neill
USA 1945
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Just two of the regular characters are in this, the 12th of the ongoing Sherlock Holmes series, those of Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson although, saying that, a lot of the recurring actors who have been popping up in several different roles as part of the repertory company which populates these movies are still on hand. No Mary Gordon though, since none of the action takes place near Baker Street. Nor indeed is Dennis Hoey on hand to have Lestrade give any of his dubious but entertaining assistance.

Pursuit To Algiers starts off with Holmes and Watson being recruited by a foreign government to escort the son of an assassinated king back to his homeland in a bizarrely convoluted manner, in which Holmes has to solve clues both in the street and in a local fish and chip shop in order to piece together the information that he is wanted at a certain address at a certain time. It’s all good secret agent style stuff and lots of fun although, in the context used here, it very much seems like unnecessary overkill, to be honest.

Once they are on the case, Holmes takes Nikolas, the heir to an empire (if Holmes can get him to said empire unscathed) with him on a three manned plane while Watson is sent to their destination in Algiers by cruise ship, to act as a decoy. Alas, after only a short while Watson is faced with the knowledge that the plane Holmes and his client were on was shot down above treacherous mountains by unscrupulous villains. It’s not long, however, before Holmes and Nikolas are found waiting for Watson in the adjoining cabin, as Watson had been used as more than a dupe than he thought, in order that the two could take a safer but slower way of travel and avoid the plane tragedy that Holmes expected to happen all along.

After that it’s a joyous affair, as the three stay on the cruise ship for the remainder of the film and try to ward off various assassination attempts while Holmes indulges in verbal jousting with his would be assassins... in a strictly gentlemanly way, of course, since everybody knows he knows but, they don’t want to say it out loud.

Well I say gentlemanly but, when Holmes figures out that one of the assassins is recruited from a circus act where he uses his skills at throwing knives, he not only avoids being a pin cushion himself but manages to break the gentleman’s hand as it comes through the cabin porthole to make the kill. Which is unusual for Holmes but it’s good stuff and certainly Holmes character doesn’t lose any of his credibility pursuing such quick justice in a certain scene.

This is what I call a comfy film. For some reason I feel relaxed when watching movies that take place on a cruise ship and this one follows the old Agatha Christie method of populating the cast of characters with a number of possible suspects who all look like they’ve got something on their minds and could be a possible threat to the main protagonists. This proves to be the film’s undoing on a certain twist near the end (which I won’t spoil here) as one of the more twitchy fellows in this, one of the stewards, is acting too suspiciously to be a neutral member of the cast and, since the director almost goes out of his way to make you assume he’s a villain, he’s obviously not and, by a certain point in the film, you realise that there’s only one person who this person could now be revealed as. There’s more than one dupe on the ship, for sure.

One of the characters in this is a singer who seems to be in a state of distress whenever she is near Holmes but who makes friends with Dr. Watson. What this means practically is that, for the first time since the second film in the series by 20th Century Fox, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (reviewed by me here), there are a fair few musical numbers but producer/director Neill doesn’t allow them to slow the film down and often concentrates on the histrionic tension of some of the characters watching and listening, as he allows the audience to wonder who is friend or foe. It also means we get a chance to hear Watson sing. Now, the dub as he warbles Loch Lomond is so intensely different in terms of the background ambience and clarity of the sound, I was convinced this was a comical overdub from a professional singer but, according to a couple of sources, this was Bruce singing himself. Now, I’m not so sure of that but can’t disprove it either so... hmm.

Bruce’s Watson is the usual tip top comic performance that mixes the characters less smarter aspects with alert caution... caution enough to save the life of one character, in fact, when he spots something wrong with a person’s coffee. He throws salt over his left shoulder as he should when some salt is spilled and, since this necessary custom to ward off bad luck has, I suspect, fallen by the wayside in recent years, one wonders what the younger section of modern audiences might make of this moment in the film.

And talking of things which have fallen by the wayside, one thing which I loved is that Watson reminded me of a phrase I’d not heard in a long time... ‘to sleep like a top.’ However, when I looked up the derivation of the word, first known to be introduced in a Shakespeare play, the deduction that a spinning top appears completely still when it’s spinning seems to me to be somewhat stretched as an explanation. I suspect that there was once a more satisfactory explanation for the phrase but, alas, that it’s been lost in the mists of time.

And that’s me done on Pursuit to Algiers... not based on an Arthur Conan Doyle story and stretching the characters to a point where, I believe, Rathbone was now getting very tired of playing the role (the role, of course, for which he will probably always be best remembered). I think this is just another wonderful film in the series and, although the restoration of the print doesn’t seem to be as brilliant as most of the others in this set, it’s still better than it’s been in the past and another worthy addition to the series. Two more left to go.