BEFORE: This seems like it might be appropriate for the first day of spring, which was yesterday, or perhaps St. Patrick's Day, which was four days ago. But according to the poster, it looks like Sherlock Holmes will be facing off against the Wicked Witch of the West from "The Wizard of Oz", so who knows? Guess I have to watch it and find out - this is Basil Rathbone's 11th appearance in a row here.
14 appearances in a film series isn't even a record, by the way. I looked it up, and although Rathbone and Bruce are, like, solid top 5, their filmography as Holmes and Watson is only half that of the actors who appeared in the "Blondie and Dagwood" series of films that started in 1938 - 28 films starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, in just a 12-year period!
THE PLOT: Sherlock Holmes investigates when young women around London turn up murdered, each with a finger cut off. Scotland Yard suspects a madman, but Holmes believes the killings to be part of a diabolical plot.
AFTER: OK, so the "Woman in Green" wasn't really green, like she didn't have green skin after all. She might have been wearing a green dress or something, but since this was still a black and white film, I don't know how that was supposed to come across. I don't know why some films from 1945 were still black and white, I mean, they HAD color film by then, were some companies just too cheap to spring for it? Did this have something to do with war rationing?
Anyway, it's all an evil plot by a certain criminal mastermind, making his third appearance in this film series, though played by three different actors who looked nothing alike, continuity be damned. Women are being killed all across London, and the killer is quite annoyingly not sticking to one class or women or one neighborhood, as Jack the Ripper had the "courtesy" to do. Serial killers apparently all get stuck with one M.O., and don't tend to deviate from that, apparently. So the very lack of a pattern suggests to Holmes that something else is going on here - and why do all the corpses lack their forefingers?
It's at this point in the Sherlock Holmes franchise, however, that the filmmakers apparently no longer cared whether the actors could believably deliver their lines, or in the case of the actress who plays the young Maude Fenwick, whether they could speak coherently at all. I simply could not understand a word she was saying, from the context I had to figure out that she believed her own father was a killer, because she saw him in their garden, burying what looked to be a woman's finger. This was an important clue, so it was kind of crucial that this actress should have been able to speak clearly and get her point across, only she could only mumble, as if her mouth wouldn't open or something. It's bad enough that Watson has talked throughout the series like he's half-drunk all the time - but I assumed that was just part of his back-story.
Anyway, the trail leads Holmes & Watson to the Mesmer Club, which points out that hypnotism was something of a cool fad in the 1940's, before people really understood what it was or what its limits were. But man, filmmakers jumped on the trend and started making films like "The Manchurian candidate" that treated it like a form of brainwashing, with the ability to turn men into programmed killers. There's a little bit like that here, with a military man acting as a pawn to try and take Holmes out. But I've been told that people under hypnosis can't be made to do things that they wouldn't normally do in their regular lives.
But Holmes has to play along with the woman in green if he's going to uncover the scheme. Big NITPICK POINT here, whenever we see the images of people being hypnotized in her bowl of water, the reflections are never backwards, as they should be. It seems someone couldn't figure out how to reverse the film's image when it was superimposed on the water. Couldn't they just have the two characters reverse positions on the couch, and/or turn the camera upside-down?
Also starring Nigel Bruce, Paul Cavanagh, Sally Shepherd (all carrying over from "The House of Fear"), Hillary Brooke (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death"), Frederick Worlock (ditto), Henry Daniell (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes in Washington"), Matthew Boulton (last seen in "Shall We Dance", Eve Amber, Tom Bryson, Mary Gordon (last seen in "The Pearl of Death")
RATING: 4 out of 10 incorrect pronunciations of the capital of Uruguay
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