BEFORE: I think it took about 6 months last year for me to assemble all 14 of the Sherlock Holmes films and dub them to DVD - most of them ran on this channel called Movies! which I wouldn't ordinarily pay attention to, because they run commercials, but this was the easiest way for me to get them all for free. I think Starz ran "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon", but the rest were mostly relegated to this commercial channel. Six months to track them all down, and now two weeks to watch them all in order. Anyway, I'm over the hump now and I just have to run out the clock this week, then I can get back to modern times. Film #9 in a row for Basil Rathbone & co. today.
THE PLOT: When a valuable pearl with a sinister reputation is stolen, Sherlock Holmes must investigate its link to a series of brutal murders.
AFTER: By 1944 it seems they were really churning out these Sherlock Holmes movies, one was released every few months or so - so they were a bit like the modern superhero movies (6 Marvel movies released in one year? Aren't they a bit afraid of burning out the trend?) or I don't know, maybe the "Fast & Furious" films. THREE Sherlock Holmes films came out in 1944, and another three in 1945. And the films kept getting shorter and shorter, most of these later ones seem to run just over an hour each.
And they were drawing from a pool of only about 20 actors, again and again, so the same people popped up in multiple roles, and nobody seemed to mind. Ian Wolfe was in four of them, always playing some kind of shopkeeper whose business kept getting interrupted by Holmes' investigations, like that actor (Clifton James) who played a Southern sheriff in TWO James Bond films, and several other movies, or that other guy (Fritz Feld) who played a waiter or maitre d' in over 100 movies...
"The Pearl of Death" opens with the theft of the title item aboard a cruise ship, and the woman who steals it is worried about being nabbed at customs, so she asks this kindly older gentleman to hold on to a package for her, telling him that it's film that she doesn't want to be exposed. Which sounds a bit odd, I mean, this was before customs officials were using x-ray machines to check people's bags - plus, why would the officials expose the film of a younger woman, but not the film of an older man? Of course, the older man is really our hero in disguise, because he somehow predicted the theft before it happened - so the thief manages to hand over the stolen item right into Sherlock's hands. Boom, story over in just 10 minutes' time.
Only it's not the end - after delivering the pearl to the Royal Museum, Holmes has to go and prove how easy it is to disable the museum's newfangled electric security system, just to make a point, and the thief takes advantage of the resulting lapse in security to steal the pearl again. Now Holmes has to get the pearl back, because he's sort of responsible for it being stolen in the first place. Er, second place.
Soon after, there's another string of murders, where each victim has their back broken, along with all of the dinnerware in the house. The M.O. of the murder suggests the Hoxton Creeper, but why is he smashing up everyone's china? Hint: this is based on the Conan Doyle short story "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons".
Also starring Nigel Bruce, Miles Mander, Ian Wolfe, Charles Francis (all carrying over from "The Scarlet Claw"), Dennis Hoey (last seen in "The Spider Woman"), Mary Gordon (ditto), Evelyn Ankers (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror"), Holmes Herbert (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes in Washington"), Richard Aherne, Rondo Hatton, Billy Bevan (last seen in "Mrs. Miniver"), Harry Cording (also last seen in "The Spider Woman").
RATING: 4 out of 10 newspaper headlines
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