BEFORE: Day 5 with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes - this is an original story, not taken from the famous novels. But the filmmakers apparently didn't realize that before their franchise character can go to Washington, first he has to go to camp, then he has to be "scared stupid". God, it's like they didn't know the rules about franchises or something. (Right now, Tyler Perry is somewhere working on a screenplay where his Medea character accidentally gets elected as a senator due to Russian election interference, or something...)
THE PLOT: Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson travel to Washington D.C. in order to prevent a secret document from falling into enemy hands.
AFTER: This film concerns some very important documents that needed to be transported from the U.K. to Washington D.C. - you might think that those documents had something to do with the U.S. entering World War II, only by the time the film was completed, that had already happened, so I guess it can't be that. Look, they're just important documents, OK, their contents aren't important. What's important is that they arrive safely, and WHO is carrying them - it's not the emissary from the British government, because that would be too obvious. They send another man undercover ON THE SAME PLANE (umm, terrible idea) who's pretending to be an ineffectual, unassuming lawyer of no importance, and he has the documents. But as a decoy, he chooses to introduce himself to everyone on the plane as a man of little importance who's certainly not doing anything important in Washington, or carrying anything of any importance. (Perhaps he oversold it.)
Somehow the enemy agents realize that it would be too obvious to send the message with the official messenger, so they start thinking about who would be the best decoy, and they determine that the least likely person on the plane is actually the MOST likely to be carrying the documents. Ah, if only espionage were that easy to figure out in the real world...so the decoy is intercepted, only the agents can't find the documents on him.
It turns out the medium is the message, and once Holmes is called in to track down the missing agent, he determines that the man must have used this newfangled technology called "microfilm" to take pictures of the 2 pages, and this microfilm would be so small that it could be easily hidden, say, between the layers of cardboard in a matchbook cover. So, therefore, logically, that MUST be what happened, right? This seems like a big leap in logic, though - whatever happened to Sherlock Holmes eliminating all the impossible scenarios, leaving only the improbable one that therefore MUST be true?
The agent must have passed this matchbook to another passenger on the train from New York to Washington. Oh, yeah, this was filmed back in the day, when you simply could not fly a plane from London to Washington, DC - you had to land in New York City and take a train the rest of the way, so DON'T even ask why the plane couldn't fly all the way to Washington. Obviously, there was no commercial airport near Washington DC until after World War II, everyone knows that - it's not like it was an important city before then...
Holmes and Watson fly to America (they're on a military plane, so they don't have to stop in NYC first, apparently...) and begin the process of elimination to determine who the missing agent must have passed the matchbook to. Meanwhile the enemy agents are doing the same thing, only their process of elimination is a bit more deadly. Nobody really figures out that this matchbook is special, and the camera follows it as it gets passed around at a party, because people in those days had MANNERS, they didn't just put a matchbook in their pocket for later, they kept it on the waiter's serving tray in case someone else needed it. Because nearly everyone smoked, they actually believed it was a healthy thing to do...
(Thankfully, even though everyone smoked in the 1940's, men, women and children, that still wasn't enough to use up all the matches in the matchbook, otherwise the microfilm would have ended up in the trash.)
Things get even more confusing near the end when Holmes comes face-to-face with the man who's trying to get ahold of the important documents, and he's played by the actor who played Moriarty in film #2, only here he's not playing Moriarty, but a different man. After all, we saw Moriarty last in film #4, and he was played by a different actor than the one who played him in film #2. Basically, there's very little consistent continuity throughout this film series, once you get beyond the two main actors and the woman who plays their housekeeper.
Also starring Nigel Bruce (also carrying over), Marjorie Lord, Henry Daniell (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror"), Gavin Muir (ditto), George Zucco (last seen in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), John Archer (last seen in "White Heat"), Edmund MacDonald, Don Terry (last seen in "Hold That Ghost"), Bradley Page (last seen in "The Big Store"), Holmes Herbert (also carrying over from "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon"), Mary Gordon (ditto), Thurston Hall, Gerald Hamer, Clarence Muse, Gilbert Emery, Alice Fleming, Mary Forbes (last seen in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"), Ian Wolfe (last seen in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers").
RATING: 4 out of 10 broken antiques
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