Movie review – Holmes #14 – “Dressed to Kill” (1946) **1/2

The death of director Roy William Neill meant that this was the last of the Rathbone-Bruce Holmes films, although the two actors continued to play the roles on radio and later reprised them on stage. The standard of the series had slipped, but this is an okay entry. Like so many others in the series, it is a chase for a macguffin, in this case three music boxes. In good old bloodthirsty Holmes style, an old mate of Watson’s is murdered over one of the boxes, leading to Holmes getting on the case. The villains are pretty smart, though not no smart as to still leave Holmes hanging awaiting his death and assuming he’s dead instead of simply killing him. Watson quacks like a duck to cheer up a little girl and Aussie views will enjoy the fact that the music box plays “an old Australian waltz” (which I thought was going to be ‘Waltzing Matilda’ but I couldn’t recognise the tune).