SHERLOCK HOLMES:
Terror By Night / The Secret Weapon
So many actors have played Sherlock Holmes, but to most people Basil Rathbone is the ultimate Holmes. Between 1939 and 1946 Rathbone portrayed Holmes in no less than 15 movies. Two of those movies now find their place in the Kurtodrome Vault. Dressed To Kill may be Rathbone’s best-known film, but the Kurtodrome chose two other Holmes films. And the best news is that you can watch these films online after reading the reviews.
Terror By Night (1946)
The first part of this double bill is a more classic rendering of one of Conan Doyle’s stories and has a big plus for a movie adaptation: the story takes place on a train.
Holmes has been asked to protect a famous jewel, the Star of Rhodesia, while the owner, Lady Margaret Carstairs, takes the train from London to Edinburgh. Of course Holmes cannot prevent the theft, nor is the thief (and murderer) able to get off the train. This is why train stories are among the best settings for a whodunnit: all the suspects are in their own compartments, noone can get off the train and, unlike a whodunnit in a closed room, the detective has more freedom to interrogate the suspects one by one.
Of course, the whodunnits on train trips bring their own set of clichés: you can bet that someone will try and kill the detective by pushing him or her out of the train. Sadly Terror By Night isn’t without those clichés and, what’s worse, gives Nigel Bruce (as Holmes’s sidekick Watson) too many chances to spoil the movie by cracking unfunny jokes.
Terror By Night only lasts 60 minutes, so the pace is fast enough to keep the viewer interested and the movie entertaining. The movie is in the skilled directing hands of Roy William Neill, who shot this film shortly before he died of a heart attack. Neill directed more than 100 films between 1917 and 1946, of which ten Sherlock Holmes films and movies with intriguing titles as Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) and The Good Bad Girl. Apart from helming two Holmes films (this one and Dressed To Kill) he also directed the much praised film noir Black Angel (starring Peter Lorre) in the last year he lived. At least Roy William Neill left the planet in glory, a worthy end of a man who was born on a ship off the coasts of Ireland.
WATCH Terror By Night ONLINE
The Secret Weapon (1942)
Before joining director Neill on the set of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man as the Mayor, Lionel Atwill played the archrival of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Moriarty, in this 1942 film. Atwill is a actor who can be admired in classic films as The Vampire Bat (1933), Mysteries of the Wax Museum (1933), Mark of the Vampire (1935) and To Be Or Not To Be (1942) to name but four. Atwill was an actor on stage as well as on the white screen, just like Basil Rathbone. Rathbone combined stage and screen work till he felt that his identification with the character of Sherlock Holmes was killing his film career: he went back to New York and the stage in 1946. Apart from a few narrations he only returned four times to a movie set in the next fifteen years. In 1962 Rathbone joined other legends Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in Roger Corman’s classic Poe adaptation, Tales of Terror. A handful of films followed until his death in 1967, an uneasy mixture of classics (Tourneur’s Comedy of Terrors in 1964) and bubblegum pulp (The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini in 1966).
The Secret Weapon isn’t set in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s times: the story is transferred to the 1940s and Holmes finds himself battling both Moriarty and the Nazis. This is rather weird at first, both because you don’t expect Sherlock Holmes in the 20th century and because you don’t want to confuse your detective entertainment with war propaganda. The propaganda scenes (especially the one at the end of the movie) sometimes harm the movie, but not as much as they harmed an earlier attempt to transfer Holmes to the 1940s (Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror). All in all it’s living proof that the Sherlock Holmes stories can be timeless.
WATCH The Secret Weapon ONLINE
Both Sherlock Holmes films are available on VHS (PAL & NTSC) and DVD (Region 1 & 2). Visit the usual sites for more details. Movieflix is a great site where you can watch movies online (all you need is Real Player). Not all movies are free, but their selection is worth a visit.
The Kurtodrome Vault is part of the Kurtodrome.