Dressed To Kill

No Chime To Die

Dressed To Kill
USA 1946
Directed by Roy William Neill
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Dressed To Kill is the third of five movies that I know of, to bear the exact same title as each other. However, for our purposes here, it’s the fourteenth and final of the Sherlock Holmes films made by first 20th Century Fox and then Universal, starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as the faithful Dr. Watson (I’ll get into why it was the last a little further down the page). It also, once again, features Mary Gordon as Holmes housekeeper/landlady Mrs. Hudson, although the interior room of 2212B Baker Street seems to have grown considerably in size again for this one. Inspector Lestrade as played by the incomparable Dennis Hoey does not make any appearance here, he already had his series swansong on the previous film, Terror By Night (reviewed here) but he is mentioned in it at least. Actually, I’m guessing he must have already been engaged in shooting another movie because this one is firmly set in London and features a large police presence.

The plot is similar in some ways to The Pearl Of Death (reviewed here), which was loosely based on The Adventure Of The Six Napoleons. In this one it’s three music boxes made by a prisoner and sold off at auction which are the things everyone is looking for. Holmes has a photographic memory for the tune that’s played on one of the three when an old friend of Watson, a music box collector who has bought one of them, is showing off his collection. It’s a good job Holmes can remember it note for note because he’s suddenly also trying to track down the music boxes when Watson’s friend is murdered by a henchman of lady antagonist Hilda Courtney (played by Patricia Morison), the super-villainess of the story who needs the boxes because they contain the key to the whereabouts of some forged Bank of London plates for five pound notes (the proper, big old five pound notes of yesteryear, I might add).

Holmes figures out, from his music box and a remembrance of the other, that a few notes have been changed on each rendition of the tune, Once A Jolly Swagman... so he consults with a criminal who he cleared of murder by proving he was cracking a safe somewhere else, who he knows is an expert on music. Eventually he figures out the coded messages in the tune variations and it’s one of those films where the villains are racing to get there first and murdering people as they go. Holmes himself eludes a deathtrap just in time while Watson is being duped by the lady in question. It’s been a while since Rathbone’s character went in disguise in the movies and, he doesn’t on this occasion either, but Patricia Morison does to steal one music box right from under the noses of Holmes and Watson.

And, yeah, it’s another entertaining, Holmesian romp with the added extra, if it’s your thing, of Nigel Bruce doing a Donal Duck impression. It doesn’t go down well with the young girl he’s trying to cheer up, for sure. It’s interesting to see the racially targeted humour of the day has stood the test of time and continued over the years too, nicely preserved here. For example, when Holmes is querying the price each music box sold for with the owner of the auction house, he asks why such a low price was paid for the third. Was there something wrong with it. The answer was, of course, that Mr. Kilgore, the man who bought it so cheaply, was a Scotsman. Yeah, alright then. if you say so.

Another point of interest, although it’s been mentioned in the films before, is Watson’s role as Holmes’ sensationalist biographer. In the short stories, originally published serially for many years in The Strand Magazine, it’s known to Holmes that Watson publishes lurid accounts of their adventures in that very magazine. In this film... and much more than a passing reference this time, much is made of Watson’s stories published in The Strand which, was just about still going when this film was made and set contemporary to its time... the magazine was going from late 1890 (with a January 1891 cover date) until it ceased publication in March of 1950 with Issue 711. Much is also made of the famous, ‘The Woman’ from the Arthur Conan Doyle story A Scandal In Bohemia, aka Holmes’ female nemesis Miss Irene Adler (who, although only actually appearing in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, has been used in various forms by many writers and in many films since).

As usual, Rathbone and Bruce are absolutely brilliant and everyone does very well. Indeed Miss Morison was so convincing in her disguise as a lowly housekeeper that, when she went to eat lunch in the studio canteen still in costume, she was told to get out and eat with the rest of the extras as she wasn’t supposed to go near the stars. She must have been delighted that her disguise on this day’s shoot was so good it even fooled the canteen staff.

But things were troubled with Rathbone and he decided to quit the role, both in the films and on the radio (although he would occasionally play Holmes on stage and was, in other ways, dogged by the role throughout his career). He felt that, since his first film for Fox, The Hound Of The Baskervilles (reviewed here), the role had been like a cookie cutter template producing repetitive impressions. I’d myself argue that Rathbone was so good in the role in every one of his fourteen Holmes films (all made between 1939 and 1946 with a two year break in between the Fox and Universal periods... so they were really knocking these things out quickly, to be fair) that it was criminal to leave a role which was evidently so popular with cinema goers internationally and, to this day, I’d argue that, despite the obvious intentional differences to the original stories, he was the one, definitive Holmes. On the radio, they recast Tom Conway in the Holmes role opposite Nigel Bruce’s Watson for a while... and having seen him in a fair number of Falcon movies and a few other things... that might not have been a bad choice. They also considered recasting the films with him in them and continuing the series but... well, I don’t know why that didn’t happen but, perhaps it possibly had something to do with the fact that the producer/director of the majority of the series, Roy William Neill, dropped dead of a heart attack seven months after the release of this film. I don’t know.

All I do know for sure is that Dressed To Kill is another high point in the series and that Rathbone and Bruce certainly went out on a good one. Heavily recommended and a fitting, if early end, to one of the greatest film sequences in cinematic history. And that's me finished with the Rathbone Holmes reviews but, fear not, more Sherlock Holmes reviews will be coming to this very blog in the not too distant future.