BEFORE: It's already been a big year for European-based films - I had the 3-day layover in Greece with "Mamma Mia!", "My Life in Ruins" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2", and a few films have been set in France, like "Beauty and the Beast", "Le Divorce", "Daddy Long Legs" and "Silk Stockings". Oh, and "Youth" was set in the Swiss alps.
But for films set outside the U.S., nearly everything else has been set somewhere in the U.K. "Albert Nobbs", "Leap Year", "Once" and "Sing Street" were set in Ireland, "The Man Who Knew Infinity", "Alice Through the Looking Glass", "Like Minds", "A Monster Calls", "Atonement", "Royal Wedding", "Miss Potter", "Bridget Jones's Baby", "The V.I.P.s", "Anne of the Thousand Days" and "The Private Life of Henry VIII" were all set in England. Now, of course, that's where most of the Sherlock Holmes stories are set, too - so that's at least a quarter of this year's films taking place in the U.K., with more on the way.
Today it's Basil Rathbone's fourth film as Sherlock, and he's still fighting Nazis during World War II. My money's on Britain and her Allies in this fight...
THE PLOT: Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson must protect a Swiss inventor of an advanced bomb sight from falling into German hands.
AFTER: Professor Moriarty is back, after appearing to die in the second film, and no surprise, he's working on the side of the Axis powers, because it probably benefits him to do so. He's played by a different actor, though, so he's kind of like the Blofeld of this series - only this actor played a different character in the first Sherlock film, so for extra fun you can watch "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and pretend that his character there is really Moriarty in disguise, I suppose.
The main plot concerns a new bomb sight that somehow uses sonic beams to help with its targeting - I'm pretty sure that's not a thing, but I suppose in 1942 they really couldn't talk about how bomb sights work in movies, because that was classified information. Right? This is possibly just sloppy screenwriting, although I suppose if the Nazis watched a movie where the RAF had sonic-beam bomb sights, that would send them off to try to develop their own to compete, and they might then spend a lot of money and effort on something impossible to invent.
Sherlock disguises himself as an old bookseller in order to get the bombsight's inventor, Dr. Tobel, from Switzerland to London. Tobel's put in Dr. Watson's care, and he immediately sneaks away to get a message to his fiancée, with instructions for her to deliver it to Holmes in case anything happens to him. Umm, wouldn't it have been easier for Tobel to give this message to Holmes in the first place? And then, on the way back, something happens to him! Jeez, the guy was safe in Watson's house, he should have just stayed there!
Later on, when this message is important, Holmes opens the envelope to instead find a message from Moriarty, which reads, and I quote, "Neener Neener Neener." Moriarty must have found a way to switch out the message, only we never see that happen. But Holmes is able to recover the message by finding the pad the message's paper was torn from, then soaking the pad in fluorescent salts and exposing it to ultraviolet light. Apparently the great genius Sherlock Holmes never learned that trick where you rub a pencil on a notepad to see the impressions left when someone wrote something on the previous missing page.
When the chemicals do their work, the message is in code, and it's the stick-figure code used in the Conan Doyle story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men". Of course, it's a simple substitution cipher, where each different stick figure stands for a different letter. But big NITPICK POINT here for code-breakers, just because "E" is the most frequently-used English letter (followed by "T, A, O, I and N" in that order) that doesn't mean you can just replace the most common cipher symbol with "E", the 2nd-most frequent symbol with "T" and proceed from there. Ciphers and codes are a bit more tricky than that. It's very easy to write a message where "E" is NOT the most frequent letter, especially if you know that's how someone's going to try and break the code. And if the information in the cipher turns out to be people's names or place names, then you're really not going to break the code by frequency. (Plus, who says the message is going to be in English? If it's a Nazi code, or a cipher made by a Swiss man, it could easily be in German or French, and different frequency rules apply...)
Tobel had given various parts of the bomb-sight to four different Swiss scientists, figuring that was the best way to keep the item safe, however, Moriarty breaks the code and tracks down and kills three of them, so much for safety. Holmes disguises himself as the fourth scientist, but this only puts Holmes in the clutches of Moriarty once again - fortunately this arch-villain (as the template for all future James Bond and comic-book villains) decides to kill Holmes very slowly, which allows enough time for him to be rescued. Well, at least the world's greatest criminal mastermind is willing to give his enemy a sporting chance.
NITPICK POINT #2: When the bomb-sight is being tested for the British government, the footage of bombs hitting the ground looks to be stock footage of bombs being dropped in a desert landscape, most likely somewhere in Nevada or California. Definitely not England, no deserts there.
Also starring Nigel Bruce (also carrying over), Lionel Atwill (last seen in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"), Kaaren Verne (last seen in "Silk Stockings"), William Post Jr. (last seen in "Call Northside 777"), Dennis Hoey (last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Holmes Herbert (last seen in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes") Mary Gordon (also carrying over from "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror"), Harry Cording (ditto), Henry Victor, Paul Fix (last seen in "Hold That Ghost").
RATING: 4 out of 10 paint drops
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