After a number of years, Universal lured Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce over to their studio and ushered in a series of popular Sherlock Holmes movies. They were set in the present day, and often had Holmes and Watson fighting Axis agents, and would end with Holmes making some pro-Allied speech.
In this one, Holmes tracks down a Lord Haw Haw type broadcaster who has links to fifth columnists. Fifth columnists were highly popular topic for filmmakers during America’s early years in the war, but it died down when fifth columnism turned out to be not that serious a problem in Britain and America.
This has the benefit of a strong support cast, including Henry Daniell, Montagu Love, Thomas Gomez and Evelyn Ankers. Ankers is very beautiful (lots of close ups with key light – a big feature of this movie) but perhaps not quite realistic as a working class cockney, an implied hooker; she agrees to become a mistress to the agent in order to nab him. Of course, this means she must die. It’s quite clever to have Daniell as a government minister because you automatically assume that he’s going to be the traitor – but it turns out to be someone else.
For most of the film Holmes’ detecting doesn’t seem to be that crash hot. He fails to catch a Nazi agent despite being right there, is almost killed and has to be rescued, and most of the hard work is done by Ankers and her fellow criminal cronies. However, in good Holmes form he knew what was happening all along.
I love how a person turns up to their apartment with a knife in their back and collapses. Holmes asks Watson if he’s dead and Watson says yes. Great doctoring there, Watson! The final speech is taken from ‘The Last Bow’, a Sherlock Holmes World War One story, about a wind blowing that’s going to result in a better England. (Not really true in the case of World War One – maybe World War Two though).
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