This was based on a play by William Gillette, who played Sherlock Holmes innumerable times on the stage. Much of our image of the world's foremost consulting detective we owe to Gillette, who incorporated the deerstalker hat (unmentioned in the stories, but used in an original magazine illustration by Sidney Paget) and the non-canonical calabash pipe into his performances. These introduced variations wouldn't have bothered Conan-Doyle, who grew to hate Holmes. Holmes, he thought, was a cash cow who stood between him and the literary fame that a Great Novel would have brought him.
The Rathbone/Bruce combination as Holmes/Watson is carried over from their first appearance on film, "The Hound of the Baskervilles." They're both fine in the roles. Rathbone in particular had an uncanny resemblance to the Holmes of Paget's drawings. He was, though, an actor of limited range -- stern, distant, authoritative. He was a great Mr. Murdstone in "David Copperfield" and a splendid villain in Errol Flynn swashbucklers. The fact that, like Rathbone, Holmes was also distant and dispassionate was just a shot that hit the pot. Off the screen, of course, Rathbone was polite and charming and had a spendthrift wife.
Nigel Bruce departs considerably from the role as conceived by Conan-Doyle. In the stories he's intelligent and sensible, even if he is sometimes the butt of Holmes' attempts at joking. In this movie he's more of a buffoon, stumbling, bumbling, and indignant. That's not the kiss of death for the movie. His character brings a touch of humor to the production.
The plot LOOKS a little like something Conan-Doyle might have written, what with its exotic murder weapon and Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, creeping around in the background fog. But, as written, it suffers from the same weakness as Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely." Holmes is asked by the Minister of Interior Treasures and Jewelries of the the Cabinet of the Royal Buckingham Museum and Archival Artifacts to privately guard the arrival of the fabulous Star of Delhi, a huge diamond to be added to the Crown Jewels. Then that thread gets dropped for the longest while, as Holmes devotes himself to a second case involving Ida Lupino, that turns out to be a snare.
There are a couple of plot holes. I'll mention two. How did a dwarf Chilean miner come to be familiar with Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? And at the end, when Moriarty has the jewels in his pocket, instead of slipping out the open door of the Tower of London, he decides to pursue an armed Holmes up a winding staircase. Well -- a third hole. How come it takes Holmes so long to figure out the bird is an albatross?
It's done in period -- maybe 1895. ALL the stories should have been done in period, unlike the Warner Brothers series with the same lead duo, which made the stories a mosaic of Conan-Doyle's elements and brought them into the 1940s. Holmes simply doesn't look right when dressed in contemporary clothes.
I particularly enjoyed George Zucco's Moriarty. In the stories he was usually off stage. But here he lovingly snips away at his exotic plants and dreams of retiring and, perhaps, devoting his life to science. Many will guffaw at the notion of his becoming a scientist late in life. I mean, no equipment, no laboratory -- no white coat! But, then, why not? You don't need all that junk. Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize by discovering the waggle dance of honeybees, by which they communicated to each other (wordlessly) the direction and distance of a good source of pollen. You know how he did it? He cut a beehive in half, sat down with a notebook, and WATCHED the bees for endless hours. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt established the patterns of nocturnal behavior for domestic cats by just following them around at night. Did THEY have white coats? No, they did not have white coats. Hard to imagine a distinguished Austrian scientist clambering over back yard fences and falling into garbage cans at two in the morning? Try to imagine Professor Moriarty retired and mooning over his hothouse orchids. It's much easier.
The Rathbone/Bruce combination as Holmes/Watson is carried over from their first appearance on film, "The Hound of the Baskervilles." They're both fine in the roles. Rathbone in particular had an uncanny resemblance to the Holmes of Paget's drawings. He was, though, an actor of limited range -- stern, distant, authoritative. He was a great Mr. Murdstone in "David Copperfield" and a splendid villain in Errol Flynn swashbucklers. The fact that, like Rathbone, Holmes was also distant and dispassionate was just a shot that hit the pot. Off the screen, of course, Rathbone was polite and charming and had a spendthrift wife.
Nigel Bruce departs considerably from the role as conceived by Conan-Doyle. In the stories he's intelligent and sensible, even if he is sometimes the butt of Holmes' attempts at joking. In this movie he's more of a buffoon, stumbling, bumbling, and indignant. That's not the kiss of death for the movie. His character brings a touch of humor to the production.
The plot LOOKS a little like something Conan-Doyle might have written, what with its exotic murder weapon and Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, creeping around in the background fog. But, as written, it suffers from the same weakness as Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely." Holmes is asked by the Minister of Interior Treasures and Jewelries of the the Cabinet of the Royal Buckingham Museum and Archival Artifacts to privately guard the arrival of the fabulous Star of Delhi, a huge diamond to be added to the Crown Jewels. Then that thread gets dropped for the longest while, as Holmes devotes himself to a second case involving Ida Lupino, that turns out to be a snare.
There are a couple of plot holes. I'll mention two. How did a dwarf Chilean miner come to be familiar with Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? And at the end, when Moriarty has the jewels in his pocket, instead of slipping out the open door of the Tower of London, he decides to pursue an armed Holmes up a winding staircase. Well -- a third hole. How come it takes Holmes so long to figure out the bird is an albatross?
It's done in period -- maybe 1895. ALL the stories should have been done in period, unlike the Warner Brothers series with the same lead duo, which made the stories a mosaic of Conan-Doyle's elements and brought them into the 1940s. Holmes simply doesn't look right when dressed in contemporary clothes.
I particularly enjoyed George Zucco's Moriarty. In the stories he was usually off stage. But here he lovingly snips away at his exotic plants and dreams of retiring and, perhaps, devoting his life to science. Many will guffaw at the notion of his becoming a scientist late in life. I mean, no equipment, no laboratory -- no white coat! But, then, why not? You don't need all that junk. Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize by discovering the waggle dance of honeybees, by which they communicated to each other (wordlessly) the direction and distance of a good source of pollen. You know how he did it? He cut a beehive in half, sat down with a notebook, and WATCHED the bees for endless hours. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt established the patterns of nocturnal behavior for domestic cats by just following them around at night. Did THEY have white coats? No, they did not have white coats. Hard to imagine a distinguished Austrian scientist clambering over back yard fences and falling into garbage cans at two in the morning? Try to imagine Professor Moriarty retired and mooning over his hothouse orchids. It's much easier.