With only a one picture hiatus in between ('Secret Weapon'), Universal revisited a plot element from "Sherlock Holmes and The Voice of Terror", in as much as the lead villain here was a German masquerading as an American antiques dealer. It's only slightly more credible in this story, since Heinrich Hinckel, posing as Richard Stanley (George Zucco) arrived in the U.S. in 1914 and could have assumed his new identity at any point along the way. In 'Terror', a German agent killed a British diplomat in 1918 and impersonated him for another twenty four years!! Sherlock Holmes was pretty reliable uncovering these impostors, but boy, did things have to fall into place for him to get there.
In this story for instance, Holmes deduces that a secret document that originated in England with a British courier was placed on microfilm and hidden inside a matchbook cover. All this after visiting the British agent's home and investigating various articles laying around amid a treasure trove of collectors' items. Which by the way seemed rather suspect in itself; the agent's mother simply allowed Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) to snoop around her son's room for no other reason than they asked her to. Okay, she knew them when they arrived, but who does that really?
Well there's some intriguing suspense with that matchbook cover, particularly when it shows up at a lavish engagement party attended by Stanley's main henchman William Easter (Henry Danielle) and his cohorts. It's done quite cleverly too, with the doo-dad skipping along from smoker to smoker and alighting on a handful of serving trays. Holmes is more than clever by half when he insists that the person who eventually has it doesn't even know it.
The kicker for me in this picture was catching an old favorite in the lead female role. I've only seen Marjorie Lord as Danny Thomas's wife in the mid-Fifties TV series "Make Room For Daddy", so having her pop up here was kind of cool. Fortunately her kidnapping by the bad guys occurred off screen so you didn't have to watch her rolled up inside a rug. I imagine she survived the ordeal since Holmes solved the case, but it could have been a lot worse if he didn't know about the old 'sword inside a spring trap cabinet' trick.
In this story for instance, Holmes deduces that a secret document that originated in England with a British courier was placed on microfilm and hidden inside a matchbook cover. All this after visiting the British agent's home and investigating various articles laying around amid a treasure trove of collectors' items. Which by the way seemed rather suspect in itself; the agent's mother simply allowed Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) to snoop around her son's room for no other reason than they asked her to. Okay, she knew them when they arrived, but who does that really?
Well there's some intriguing suspense with that matchbook cover, particularly when it shows up at a lavish engagement party attended by Stanley's main henchman William Easter (Henry Danielle) and his cohorts. It's done quite cleverly too, with the doo-dad skipping along from smoker to smoker and alighting on a handful of serving trays. Holmes is more than clever by half when he insists that the person who eventually has it doesn't even know it.
The kicker for me in this picture was catching an old favorite in the lead female role. I've only seen Marjorie Lord as Danny Thomas's wife in the mid-Fifties TV series "Make Room For Daddy", so having her pop up here was kind of cool. Fortunately her kidnapping by the bad guys occurred off screen so you didn't have to watch her rolled up inside a rug. I imagine she survived the ordeal since Holmes solved the case, but it could have been a lot worse if he didn't know about the old 'sword inside a spring trap cabinet' trick.