Basil Rathbone’s second outing as Sherlock Holmes was his last for 20th Century Fox. You wonder why that studio didn’t decide to made a B picture series out of the character – maybe they were worried about the cost - but Universal stepped into the breach a few years later. This is not based on a Conan Doyle story but on a play.
It has Holmes battling Moriarty, played by ever reliable George Zucco – Zucco didn’t belong to the top rank of screen villains (he was no Rathbone, George Sanders, Claude Rains or Henry Daniell, he lacked their spark, perhaps a bit too gentle), but he comfortably sat on the second tier and is still pretty good. It starts with Moriarty getting off a murder charge and telling Holmes that he will break him through committing a big crime. And I’ve got to say it’s a really clever plan – he pulls a double bluff, killing someone and setting up a fake family curse, and doing a dodgy robbery, both to hide his real goal.
Rathbone is front and centre in this one so we see him do a lot more detecting – poking around at footprints in mud, that sort of thing. Ida Lupino specialised in playing tough, driven dames so she’s not very convincingly scared as a damsel in distress, worried that her brother is going to be killed. However, she is very pretty. Her drip boyfriend, who doesn’t believe there’s anything to it, is played by Alan Marshall. Actually, Marshall’s drippiness works well since part of the plot hinges on Lupino thinking that he wants to kill her.
There are forerunners to the later Universal movies: Nigel Bruce’s Watson, who was quite useful in Hound of the Baskervilles, is more of a buffoon here (eg he doesn’t recognise Moriarty at a key moment); there is a dopey inspector (E E Clive) similar to the later Inspector Lestrade; Terry Kilburn as Billy is a fore-runner to the Baker Street Boys.
There’s a great scene where Moriarty gets up his butler for not watering his flowers and Holmes plucking on his violin. But the best is with Holmes, in disguise, sings ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. (You’re not meant to know this until later in the film, but trust me it’s more fun knowing that it’s really Rathbone in the straw hat hamming it up dreadfully like no one’s business.)
There’s also an effective sequence with Lupino being chased through the fog by a Gaucho assassin, who could be straight out of the Doyle stories (which featured pygmy assassins). I remember years ago not liking this as much as Hound of the Baskervilles but on watching it again, it’s just as much fun.
It mightn’t be as spooky and Baskervilles has the slightly stronger cast (though this one has Henry Stephenson), but this is still pretty good. It has more Rathbone (very much in action man mode, shooting guns and brawling), and an exciting climax with Zucco plunging to his death off the top of the tower (although we don't see him actually die).
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