This one pits Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner) and his sidekick, Dr. Watson (Ian Fleming), directly against Professor Moriarty (Norman McKinnel). The Napoleon of Crime blackmails a high-end card shark into participating in some scheme to produce counterfeit notes. When Wontner interferes, McKinnel tries to kill him and is caught in the act. The feckless writers left no room for a sequel.
Nobody can watch this movie without comparing Wontner to Basil Rathbone. I mean, let's face facts. Wontner probably looks as much like Sidney Paget's illustrations of Holmes for the Strand Magazine as Basil Rathbone did. There, the resemblance pretty much ends.
Wontner, in fact, looks disturbingly like General Douglas MacArthur from some angles. But, more than that, he's not as TALL and commanding as Rathbone. Wontner moves slowly and a little stiffly, a door on rusted hinges. And he speaks at a much slower pace than Rathbone. His delivery is at about the same number of precise syllables per minute as Boris Karloff, if you know what I mean.
He does do Holmes about as well as the script gives him a chance to. I couldn't count the number of times we get to hear, "Elementary, my dear Watson." And he makes those cutting little by-the-way deductions about little things like Watson having had to crank his car that morning.
Fleming is not the stereotypical comic associate that Nigel Bruce was to become. He does make an occasional laugh-getting mistake in aping Wontner's methods but he's by no means stupid and he's never the butt of Wontner's jokes.
The plot rips off an incident from Conan-Doyle's "The Empty House" -- the air gun and the plaster bust -- but otherwise, aside from some odd touches in the dialog, it's a B movie plot. The protagonist might as well have been Boston Blackie or The Falcon or Philo Vance.
The direction is pedestrian but I'll give it a pass on that score. Considering that this was 1931, the things you could do with blimp-sized cameras and microphones hidden in the meat loaf were limited.
It's not an insult to Conan-Doyle or to the central figure. But it's just barely interesting and doesn't really engage the viewer.
Nobody can watch this movie without comparing Wontner to Basil Rathbone. I mean, let's face facts. Wontner probably looks as much like Sidney Paget's illustrations of Holmes for the Strand Magazine as Basil Rathbone did. There, the resemblance pretty much ends.
Wontner, in fact, looks disturbingly like General Douglas MacArthur from some angles. But, more than that, he's not as TALL and commanding as Rathbone. Wontner moves slowly and a little stiffly, a door on rusted hinges. And he speaks at a much slower pace than Rathbone. His delivery is at about the same number of precise syllables per minute as Boris Karloff, if you know what I mean.
He does do Holmes about as well as the script gives him a chance to. I couldn't count the number of times we get to hear, "Elementary, my dear Watson." And he makes those cutting little by-the-way deductions about little things like Watson having had to crank his car that morning.
Fleming is not the stereotypical comic associate that Nigel Bruce was to become. He does make an occasional laugh-getting mistake in aping Wontner's methods but he's by no means stupid and he's never the butt of Wontner's jokes.
The plot rips off an incident from Conan-Doyle's "The Empty House" -- the air gun and the plaster bust -- but otherwise, aside from some odd touches in the dialog, it's a B movie plot. The protagonist might as well have been Boston Blackie or The Falcon or Philo Vance.
The direction is pedestrian but I'll give it a pass on that score. Considering that this was 1931, the things you could do with blimp-sized cameras and microphones hidden in the meat loaf were limited.
It's not an insult to Conan-Doyle or to the central figure. But it's just barely interesting and doesn't really engage the viewer.