Last night
Charles and I watched a
1949 episode of the Lucky Strike-sponsored TV show Your Show Time, a half-hour drama anthology series that in this
episode adapted (quite well, all things considered) the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This is one of the
classic stories from the early days of Holmes (before Conan Doyle’s boredom
with the character set in) and pitted Holmes (a surprisingly effective Alan
Napier) and his client, Helen Stoner (Evelyn Ankers in one of her typical
damsel-in-distress roles), a young woman whose parents died and left her in the
dubious care of her stepfather, against said stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott
(a quite effective Edgar Barrier). Dr. Roylott retired after his wife died and
left him an income, partially for his own support and partially to take care of
Helen and her sister Jean (dead two years before our part of the story begins
but played in a flashback by Gail Roberts), but with the proviso that once the
women got married their part of the estate would be transferred to them and
their husbands. Jean got engaged to John Armitage (Richard Fraser, who comes
off as simply annoying — one wonders what either of the Stoner girls sees in
him, and how producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson got Fraser to deliver
a quietly effective performance in Bedlam when he’s so infuriating in his other roles), only just before they
were married she died in a bizarre way, simply collapsing in her bedroom,
though before she expired she made it out of her doorway and told Helen, “The
speckled band!”
Despite a red herring — a nearby band of gypsies — Holmes
deduces that Dr. Roylott somehow murdered Jean and is now targeting Helen (especially
since he’s moved her from her old room to the one her sister was using when she
died) so he can keep the part of his late wife’s fortune that was supposed to
support her daughters after they married, and Helen is now engaged to John
Armitage — that’s right, the same man whom Jean was engaged to when she died.
As all Holmes mavens will remember, Dr. Roylott had an extensive collection of
wildlife from India (screenwriter Walter Doniger and director Sobey Martin have
a lot of fun with a chattering monkey that jumps around a lot and at least
twice lands on Watson’s shoulder), including a particularly deadly sort of
snake called a swamp adder, whose skin makes it look like (you guessed it) a
speckled band. Roylott trained the snake to crawl through a ventilator shaft
and down a bell-pull (the ventilator shaft doesn’t ventilate and the bell-pull
isn’t actually connected to a bell), whereupon it would land on the bed of his
intended victim and bite her, injecting her with its venom and killing her. (To
make sure she’d be in the right position for the snake to attack, he also
bolted the bed to the floor so it could not be moved.) The night Dr. Roylott is
going to attack Helen, Holmes and Watson (Melville Cooper, alas playing the
part as the comic-relief foil of Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone Holmes
movies) decide to stand watch in the murder room (while she sleeps in her old
one) and see just how Dr. Roylott plans to attack — and when the snake emerges
from the ventilator shaft, Holmes uses a poker to drive it back and thereby
inadvertently kills Dr. Roylott, who’s bitten by the snake when it returns from
whence he sent it.
I hadn’t realized it before but “The Speckled Band” is a
locked-room mystery story (I suspect Doniger’s screenplay makes that even clearer
than Conan Doyle’s story did) and Dr. Roylott is a fascinating villain, a
simple bully but one whose murder scheme is decidedly imaginative — and this
film retains the famous scene from the story in which Roylott tries to warn
Holmes off the case by bending a fireplace poker, and, after he’s left, Holmes
proves he’s as strong as Roylott by bending the poker back to its original
shape. (This scene doesn’t appear in the currently available version of the
1931 movie The Speckied Band, starring Raymond Massey as Holmes, though since the extant print is
missing a reel I’m sure it was in the original release.) This 1949 TV version
of The Speckled Band is
actually quite good technically — it helped that, unlike most TV shows then, it
was done on film (at the old Hal Roach studios, with a side trip to RKO since
some of the sets were recycled from the 1948 Joan of Arc, with Ingrid Bergman) instead of live, and
director Martin keeps the camera moving and does some highly successful
suspense and even horror editing (his cinematographer was William Bradford and
his editor was Daniel Cahn). It’s also generally well acted, though I could
have done without Arthur Shields as the narrator (called “The Bookshop Man” in
the credits — apparently the conceit was that he was an old bookseller who
would pick out a story and tell it to you after having come across it while
browsing in his own shop). Alan Napier is a surprisingly good Holmes — tall,
aquiline, authoritative; he’s taken a lot of flack over the years for having
starred in The Mole People but he was good enough for Orson Welles to cast him as the “Holy
Father” in his film of Macbeth and he made a late-in-life comeback as Alfred the butler in the 1960’s Batman TV series.
