loved it especially when Moriarity bit the big one! I hope that guy's gone for good!

This film is an entry in the series of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, two fine British actors during Hollywood's Golden Age. It is a tight plot using gruesome murders of young women in London in the 1940's.The murders are used for the blackmail of wealthy and titled men, but the real object (besides the money) is to bring about a fate-filled encounter between two bitter enemies, one of which is Sherlock Holmes and the other is left for the audience to find out in this bang-up job by the actors, director Roy William Neill and the screenwriter. It is a must-see for fans of Holmes and 1940's films.

at the end of the series, this was one of the last Sherlocks. He was disgusted with portraying the character and felt hamstrung by the character and typecast. A dozen years later he was willing to camp out on Broadway to revive the series, in his early sixties he'd forgotten the youth culture had made it almost impossible of folks of a certain age to get work. But that voice, there was no disguising that voice. John Stanly who did the radio Sherlock after Basil and others, actually sounded more like Basil than, Basil!But those dozen short films, what work it was, tossed off by Fox it wound up in the B series potboiler jungle at the B list under Universal. But before you get all huffy, the Universal B's had better stuff than many A listed flicks. Most were made in the 1942 time frame, but a few flickered on till the end of the war. And, updated for the same time period, Holmes sells, and these reworked and cleaned copies are in better shape than Mom and Dad remember actually in the theatres.Take just the music , Skinner and Salter's Frankenstein and Wolfman themes reworked to a T, and just as engrossing and right for this series.Fabulous and collectible.

The sets and their finish, architecture, custom, costume, haberdashery, language, dialect, grooming, common sense and sensibility all encapsulate neatly in formulaic range on this period acetate, required viewing for every aspiring James Bond. The popular novel in it, the ancient art of acting and the modern stage intersect in subtle transition from their hitherto ritualistic traditional forms to progress ever so slightly with science [in this study of human psychological science in the form of hypnotism, aided by drugs in the form of cannabis japonica -- marijuana], heralded by the modern Socratic iconoclast of rational method [Sherlock Holmes] and his arch nemesis [Professor James Moriarty]. In it, a man in a smoking jacket might morph into dutiful doctor making a house call. The housekeeper might wear an apron, and the valet defer as Sherlock plays highland tunes on his violin with Nero's apparent nonchalance. Having a bath drawn or a buggy called would seem as apropriate as a woman smoking in an evening frock with her hair arranged might seem a bit forward -- or progressive. Was that tobacco early product placement or advertisment? Foiled in the end, Moriarty conveniently escapes [again, having been mentioned early on as the swinging victim of justice on the gallows in Montevideo, Uruguay] in a risky ploy which backfires to become an apparent suicide, when we all know that at some future time when we least suspect it [smile! - like a Star Trek episode] he will return -- quite well, indeed. As all others, please presume this episode to be essential -- as in -- elementary.