BEFORE: I was all set to brag about how I've managed to get my watchlist down from 160 to 150, and doubling up a few times this year certainly helped with that, but just as I got proud of myself, I found that there's a channel running a bunch of animated Superman films this week, so I just had to add those, and just like that, the list is back up to 153, and I have to start whittling away at it again. Of course, there's a secondary watchlist that has all the films that I'd LIKE to add to my watchlist, and right now that contains another 123 films - those are films available on the Netflix and on Academy screeners that I can borrow, so I guess in a way I'm fooling myself when I say my watchlist contains 153 films, if you put the two lists together, it's really 276. Progress is not being made very quickly, what can I say?
This is the eighth film where Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes, and I've had it pretty easy this past week, since these films are all relatively short, but for some reason they're not holding my attention as much as I thought they might, so I still find myself falling asleep sometimes before making it through the whole film, forcing me to complete the film the next morning. That's not a great system, because it takes longer overall, but it proves I'd rather be watching longer movies that have more action in them, which tend to hold my attention longer.
THE PLOT: When a woman in Quebec is found dead with her throat torn out, the villagers blame a supernatural monster. But Sherlock Holmes, who gets drawn into the case, suspects a human murderer.
AFTER: There's no connection to World War II in this film, which seems a bit odd to me since it was released in 1944, and the war was still going on. Perhaps by this time people in the U.K. felt that victory was assured, or else the filmmakers were tired of shoehorning patriotic messages into detective movies and were desperate to move on, to get back to good old-fashioned murder mysteries.
Either way, Sherlock Holmes seems to have departed war-torn Europe for Canada, where he and Watson attend a symposium on the occult. Well, at least they've got their priorities straight. While there, a man at the conference receives word that his wife has died, and soon after, Holmes receives a letter from the same dead wife, who had a premonition she was going to die, and tried to hire Holmes by telegram. Such were the perils of communication back in the day - by the time someone received your message, you might already be dead. Though things still don't really add up here, did the wife peek at the guest list for the conference her husband was going to attend? Even if that's the case, it seems like a big coincidence that the detective she wanted to hire would be so close to her home.
Holmes and Watson arrive, and find that the woman has not been buried yet, and that her throat was slashed by something akin to a wild animal's paw, or perhaps a gardener's claw. Another coincidence, Holmes recognizes the dead woman, since she used to be a famous actress. (It's awfully curious, Holmes can recognize a decomposing face from a movie or play he saw, but he doesn't notice that the house's butler looks exactly the same as the man who ran the antiques shop when he visited Washington, DC a few films ago...).
Why does the local innkeeper act so skittish, and why was he packing a bag? What's the connection between the dead woman and the old judge who's in a wheelchair? And why do the townspeople believe in a glowing monster who lives in the marsh? It's not exactly a remake of "The Hound of the Baskervilles", but fans did notice some similarities between the two stories.
Also starring Nigel Bruce (carrying over), Gerald Hamer (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death"), Paul Cavanagh, Arthur Hohl (also carrying over from "The Spider Woman"), Miles Mander (last seen in "The Private Life of Henry VIII"), Kay Harding, David Clyde, Victoria Horne (last seen in "Harvey"), Charles Francis, Ian Wolfe (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes in Washington").
RATING: 4 out of 10 missing sheep
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