BEFORE: I'm shuffling around 3 of my 5 VCRs today, something I've been meaning to do for a few weeks, but it's just never been a good time. I'm always taping something on one level of the house or the other, and often in all three rooms at once. But my daily TV recording + playback VCR often chooses to not rewind a tape, no matter what I do, which forces me to carry that tape downstairs to a VCR that will record, because the device I have specifically for rewinding tapes gave up years ago. So I'm moving that bedroom "TV show" VCR down to the basement, to be part of the 3 VCR stack that (ideally) can make dubs from DVD to either DVD or VHS, or from VHS to either format. I can still use it to play either format for dubs, and if it chooses to not rewind, I can easily move the tape to another device in the stack. It's being replaced by the living room VCR, which I've been using only to tape movies to dub to DVD in the basement. And the new living room VCR is the one that was on the bottom of the basement stack, which wasn't being used for anything, except to connect to the TV, since it still has a coaxial output. That's being replace by a dead VCR that will not record or playback, it just makes a groaning noise like it wants to die, but since it also has an old coaxial output, I need it to live a little bit longer, just to conduct the signal to the TV.
Yes, I know I should be going all digital and streaming, but I'm not. It's a process, OK? Anyway, it takes 6 to 10 VHS tapes upstairs just to hold the excess runoff from the DVR, because I can only watch so much TV each week, and if I didn't dub things to tape, the DVR would fill up and I'd start to miss stuff. Same goes for the living room "movie" DVR, it has a smaller drive so I have to store some movies on tape while I'm waiting for something to pair them with on a DVD, or else that one will fill up too. I've made strides to watch more things on Netflix and iTunes in the past year, but the old system for taping off cable and burning DVDs is still in place as the main source.
I'm finally at the end of the Basil Rathbone/Sherlock Holmes series. 14 films, so he and Nigel Bruce should win the year easily in a tie. Mary Gordon made 10 appearances as their housekeeper, Dennis Hoey made 6 appearances as Inspector Lestrade, and several other actors kept turning up again and again, so we'll see a bunch of their names in the year-end recap.
THE PLOT: Sherlock Holmes sets out to discover why a trio of murderous villains, including a dangerously attractive female, are desperate to obtain three unassuming and inexpensive little music boxes.
AFTER: I've seen Sherlock Holmes start in the Victorian era, then (somehow) skip over World War I but then get involved with fighting Nazi agents in World War II. He's gone from horse-drawn carriages to motorcars, and tomorrow I'll see him go a step further, into more modern times. But I have to remember these films were set in what used to be modern times, post WW2 London. It was a different time, their economy was just getting back on track, and a simple item like a music box (or what they called "musical box", not sure why the extra syllable, but these are people who say "aluminium", after all...) was apparently something of a prized possession. According to this film, some people collected them, so I guess they were sort of valuable?
And people apparently bought them at auctions, and not just the rare ones, this might be a plothole because the film shows very cheap music boxes being sold at an auction, for just one or two pounds each. (That's another thing I don't understand, old British money, like how many shillings were in a pound? I have no idea.). And the auction house employee said they got several music boxes each week, built by prison inmates. So if they're common, plentiful and cheap, why were they being sold at an auction? Aren't auctions usually for expensive items, like artwork, vases and rare furniture? Why would an auction house sell items for just a couple of pounds, weren't there stores for those kinds of transactions? Didn't they set prices for things in 1946 London, like why not just price the music boxes at two pounds and sell them straight to the customers, instead of wasting everyone's time at the auction.
For that matter, if the auction house had three identical music boxes, why not sell them as a lot, or sell them to the three highest bidders, in order to save time? Instead I have to listen to the auctioneer say "tinkle tinkle tinkle" each time he describes the box's music, and that gets annoying very quickly. Just say, "same as the last item" and start the bidding, already.
But it is important to the story that these three music boxes are special, and in fact they are slightly different, and that's the point. The prisoner who made the music boxes had some valuable information to get to someone on the outside, and this was his method of doing that. There's nothing inside the box, but even though he's only able to put his hands on one of the three boxes, of course Sherlock is able to figure out that there's a sort of code in the musical notes. But this leads me to a real NITPICK POINT, which is that a musical piece is really not a good place to put a letter-based code, because the musical notes already HAVE letters, at least A through G, so imparting a different set of letters on them doesn't make much sense. But I guess if someone just stuck to those letters, it might be hard to engineer a message that didn't use the letters H to Z.
And shame on the auction house for so easily giving up the names and addresses of the people who bought the music boxes. "Sorry, sir, we've got a strict policy against violating the confidentiality of our clients." "Here's five pounds." "OK, I'll get you their names and addresses." Huh? What a breach of data, couldn't the auctioneer possibly foresee that someone would be looking for this information in order to rob or kill those clients?
Also starring Nigel Bruce, Frederick Worlock, Harry Cording (all carrying over from "Terror by Night"), Patricia Morison (last seen in "Song of the Thin Man"), Edmund Breon (last seen in "The Thing from Another World"), Carl Harbord, Holmes Herbert (last seen in "The House of Fear"), Mary Gordon (last seen in "The Woman in Green"), Ian Wolfe (last seen in "The Pearl of Death"), Anita Sharp-Bolster (last seen in "The Thin Man Goes Home").
RATING: 4 out of 10 duck noises
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