The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

 

Ida Good Clue

The Adventures
Of Sherlock Holmes
USA 1939 Directed by Sidney Lanfield
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the second and final of the 20th Century Fox produced Sherlock Holmes pictures starring Basil Rathbone in the titular role and Nigel Bruce as his faithful Dr. Watson (but certainly not their last film playing these two), following on from The Hound Of The Baskervilles (reviewed here). This would be the same year that Rathbone and Bruce would commence a long running radio show playing the characters also.

This movie’s plot is credited to being based on a 19th Century stage play of Sherlock Holmes and not one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyles original stories, although it would appear that there was very little of the stage play that made it into the final screenplay either.

Joining Rathbone and Bruce for this one were series regular Mary Gordon as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson, Professor Moriarty (Holmes famous Nemesis) as played by George Zucco and Ida Lupino as the woman whose life and, those of her family, are threatened by Moriarty in a murderous scheme used to distract Holmes while the master criminal, in a quite clever two part heist, attempts to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower Of London. Ida Lupino was a really interesting actress but also, bucking convention a little for the time, a very well respected director too (her uncle was the famous English music hall actor Lupino Lane). Moriarty, of course, only ever appears in one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (although he is certainly mentioned a few times), in a story where he and Holmes fall to their death (Holmes was resurrected by the writer a number of years later as he was just too popular a character to remain dead). In terms of the fourteen Rathbone and Bruce pictures, Moriarty would appear three times, each time played by different actors... and in each one, apparently, he would fall to his death.

The story in this one is pretty much as I summed it up above and there’s not much to elaborate on. However, this is a really interesting movie and the main characters are certainly developing... or should I say evolving. Holmes has already gotten a little more eccentric, plucking his violin to a bunch of houseflies trapped in a glass to try and find the exact note that would affect their behaviour. And, sadly, although Nigel Bruce’s performance as Watson is absolutely brilliant and the reason I always loved these movies, his character has already become somewhat more buffoonish in this one. He doesn’t really make any contribution to solving either of the two parallel Moriarty problems at hand and, indeed, even helps Moriarty gain access to the Crown Jewels as part of the villain’s plan falls into place.

The film also establishes the kind of mutual admiration that the two arch rivals Holmes and Moriarty have for each other. They both find the other one smart and stimulating company and this is certainly how the relationship has been best portrayed on screen over the years. I’m not saying it started here but it would certainly have been popularised by the way it was portrayed in these films.

Other things of interest in the movie are a genuine scene where Holmes, clad in his deerstalker hat and cape for what would be the last time in this series of films, actually conducts a thorough crime scene investigation for five to ten minutes. This one also shows off the versatility of Rathbone in the part when, once again, he wears a disguise and adopts a different personae for one scene, where he plays an entertainer singing ‘Beside the seaside, beside the sea’ at a party. His looks, gait and manner make him absolutely undetectable as Holmes until he reveals himself to Ida Lupino shortly after. It never fails to amaze me just how good the Rathbone disguises are in these movies. If you don’t know the reveals are coming, I’m pretty sure you will be easily fooled on the first watch.

One other interesting thing is the use of music in this film. There’s an evil melody associated with a character Moriarty uses to perform his murders. First we hear it in the underscore as non-diegetic music before we hear it played on the flute by the murderer as diegetic music, where the source of the sound is apparent on screen. The film then continues to use this music in both modes throughout the picture.... which is pretty interesting already for a 1939 film, I think. The score on this one was credited to a number of composers so perhaps a lot of recycling was done for it but... somebody must have written something specifically to go with the source music at some point, I would think.

The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes is abolutely brilliant but, was surprisingly unsuccessful at the time of its initial release and it’s generally believed this was due to the way 20th Century Fox marketed it. So their planned film series of Sherlock Holmes films came to an end with this one. But, the films were obviously well liked by somebody and presumably the radio show was popular enough. So, after a three year period, Basil Rathbone along with Nigel Bruce and Mary Gordon jumped ship, so to speak, finding themselves picked up by Universal for a continuation of the films in thier original roles, for a further 12 movies. There was something a little different about these next ones though which was... oh, wait, I’ll get to that in my next Holmes review.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Dogging The Law

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
USA 1939 Directed by Sidney Lanfield
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Well the time is upon me. I finally get caught up on a rewatch of the classic (and best) series of Sherlock Holmes films on a lovely set of Blu Ray transfers from, judging from this first one in the series, some pretty good prints. Rather than get the expensive, five disc US version I plumped for the Italian/German 7 disc release (since nobody has seen fit to make these available on Blu Ray in the country where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original stories, lived... as yet, for some unfathomable reason). Both sets have all 14 films with the only real difference, from what I can make out since this Italian edition can be easily set for English language, with or without English subtitles in its menus, seems to be that the Italian set is £30 cheaper than the US set and that’s not including any import fees.

And what a film this is. The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first of the original run featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, who were so popular as Holmes and Dr. Watson that they also played them for a number of years on the radio too. This was the first of two Sherlock Holmes films made and released by 20th Century Fox in 1939, the same year that Basil Rathbone and some of the cast of this one shot Son Of Frankenstein for Universal, which I believe was filmed just before this one (and which you can find reviewed by me here). I won’t go over the plot here again because so many people know it (or if they don’t, they don’t want it spoiled) but it takes a few liberties with Conan Doyles original novel (I think I’m right in remembering this was the longest Holmes story he wrote, novel length, as a kind of flashback story in between killing him off in the stories and then, later, snatching him back from death for more money spinning tales).  

Joining the winning team of Rathbone and Bruce (easily my personal favourite Holmes and Watson) was Richard Greene (future TV Robin Hood, star of Sword Of Sherwood Forest, reviewed here and who got top billing above Rathbone), Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Wendy Barrie (who was in a fair few films in The Saint and The Falcon series) and, of course, Mary Gordon as Holmes’ housekeeper Mrs. Hudson, who would stay with the series along with the two male stars when it made the transition, after the first two films. The transition being that, after the two Fox films, which were both set in Victorian times like Conan Doyle’s original stories were, there was a gap of three years before Universal hired the three actors for a continuation of the series, this time contemporising them so that Holmes' adventures were updated for a 1940s wartime setting.

This one is pretty great and it’s wonderful looking back on these fantastic performers and character actors playing in a well oiled mechanism of a film. The direction and camerawork both look great for the roughly 4:3 aspect ratio of the time and, as evidenced by these quite good Blu Ray transfers (so far), all filmed in a very crisp black and white. There’s also a nice sequence near the start, where Atwill’s character is reading from a manuscript to fill in Holmes on the legend of the film’s titular Hound. The flashback is presented as a live action sequences of events but, it’s depicted as a little vignette superimposed into the centre of the manuscript, with the edges of the pages and the text, some overlapping, at the edge of the action. So, yeah, a nice touch.

Rathbone is absolutely amazing as Holmes, not quite emotionless and certainly he injects the required air of authority into the character for sure. And then there’s Watson, as played by Nigel Bruce. This guy is fantastic but I notice he’s not quite as bumbly and stupid as I remembered him to be in these. Maybe that comes later with the transition to the Universal scripts but here, he certainly does take the initiative and seems much smarter than he perhaps ended up as, later in the run. Although he certainly doesn’t penetrate Holmes disguise as the old peddler, hawking his wares around the vicinity of the Grimpen Mire. But you know what? That’s okay because, one of the things I remember very clearly and, it’s certainly the case here, is that unless you are seriously looking for it, the audience isn’t going to easily penetrate Rathbone’s disguises in these films. I remember being fooled quite a lot as a kid when I first watched these (at 5.40pm in the evening, week days on BBC2 in the early to mid 1970s, if memory serves) and looking at them now, if I didn’t half remember them, I would certainly be fooled again. Rathbone is hard to spot as he makes his voice gravelly and stoops behind a fake beard and moustache. It’s great make up and works much better than a lot of the stuff you see actors trying in modern movies, it has to be said.

The sets are fantastic too... especially the outdoor sets which try very hard... and succeed... at looking very much like the Moors on which half the action takes place. You can still tell it’s a big studio set but, certainly, it’s much more lavish and believable than, say, the sets used to stand in as exterior locations that Universal were using for their horror movies at the time. These really work and there are certainly no tell tale creases in the sky as people go about their business.

And, yeah, just a treat of a movie. I won’t say much else about it because you should discover these for yourself, if you don’t already know them but, certainly, The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first in a classic run of much loved and popular films which should be on every film enthusiast’s radar. Definitely one to check out if you’ve not seen it.