Sherlock Holmes Faces Death

The opening world turning and the Universal anthem playing and then the foggy cut to Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as the great Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Watson staring at us telling us that yet another one of their adventures lies before us always sent shivers of joy down my spine and engendered the greatest anticipation when I was young. These films hold up remarkably well considering,well, everything. The stories are not always the best, the scripts sometimes make too many assumptions about what they feel the audience knows or should know. The acting is very decent but like the script and direction - very formulaic and predictable. But somehow all of it works and we have little screen gems to be viewed again and again. Director Roy William Neill does yet again a fine,workmanlike job in this tale of Dr. Watson working in a convalescent home when murder and the the Musgrave Ritual collide. Though based on the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, the screenwriter takes several liberties here. Firstly, we are in the present time rather than Victorian England. After the first two films in the Rathbone-Bruce series, Universal(when they took the series over from Twentieth Century Fox) changed the venue for cost reasons. They also had Holmes as a fighter against Nazism and such. This sixth film in the series makes a dramatic departure from that and goes back to the mystery roots delved into in the first two films. Wisely done. The story here concerns a ritual and people dying when the clock chimes thirteen bells. The real heart of these films is the performances of Rathbone and Bruce. they are not great. There is no pathos. No great acting scenes. But each man imbues his character with warmth and solidity that breeds confidence in what they are doing. Rathbone seems so earnest at times yet always has a way with words and a clever phrase. Bruce embodies the almost cartoonish buffoon with a heart of gold and loyal to the core. Character actors of great ability surround them. Dennis Hoey is always fun as Inspector Lestrade and his wit fencing with Watson is great fun. This film also has a gem of a performance by Halliwell Hobbes as Brunton the butler. He is comic perfection in his scenes particularly in his drunken one. Look for Gunsmoke's Milburn Stone(Doc) as Capatain Vickery. Like all the later Holmes pictures by Universal during WWII - look for the heavy-handed(No argument here as it being a necessary one)message delivered between Holmes and Watson. This is good stuff.