Sherlock Holmes (Fox Film Corporation, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following the Lifetime movie I showed Charles a movie I’ve literally wanted to see for decades, and finally got my chance when, like the purloined letter in the Edgar Allan Poe story that so inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes in the first place, the movie turned out to have been hiding in plain sight on YouTube since 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOtpzoGrGQ): Sherlock Holmes, made by director William K. Howard for the Fox Film Corporation in 1932 (three years before the merger that created 20th Century-Fox) from a script by Bertram Millhauser, the writer a lot of Holmes devotees love to hate because he worked on a lot of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce-Roy William Neill Holmes films from Universal in the mid-1940’s and played pretty fast and loose with the Holmes canon. He already was doing that for this film, but the 1932 Sherlock Holmes is actually a quite good movie, albeit with some flaws, and one of the few landmarks in the generally sorry history of pre-Rathbone Holmes films. British actor Clive Brook, already an old hand at both silent and sound films, played Holmes for the third and last time in his career, with Reginald Owen as his Dr. Watson (the next year Owen would play Holmes himself in Edwin L. Marin’s 1933 A Study in Scarlet, a not-bad film but hardly at the quality level of this one).

William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film was somewhat less than thrilled about Brook’s Holmes – “Despite his physical ‘rightness’ for the role, and an undeniable screen ‘presence,’ Clive Brook fell somewhat short of being the ideal movie Holmes. His diction was fine, the detached imperturbability just right, and yet there was an air of condescension to his interpretation, as though the role wasn’t quite worth taking seriously” – but I think he’s one of the better pre-Rathbone Holmeses and I like him considerably better than Everson’s favorite, Arthur Wontner. (Wontner played Holmes in five British films from 1930 to 1937, of which four survive; he was great at the cerebral scenes but too old and underwhelming to be credible as the man of action Conan Doyle also envisioned.) Millhauser’s script is an odd jumble of elements, but the opening scene is unforgettable: silhouettes of authority figures parade up and down a circular window, obviously part of prison, and the scene cuts to Professor James Moriarty (Ernest Torrence) in a courtroom as sentence is about to be pronounced on him. He’s expecting to be sentenced to death for his murder conviction, but he predictably swears that the rope has not been woven that will hang him and he intends to escape and kill, in alphabetical sequence, the three people he holds most responsible for his predicament: prosecutor Erskine; Col. Gore-King of Scotland Yard (Alan Mowbray); and, of course, Sherlock Holmes, whom Moriarty announces that he will disgrace before he dies.

Then, in an exciting silent action sequence with effective musical accompaniment (in its heavy use of underscoring by composers R. H. Bassett and Hugo Friedhofer, Sherlock Holmes often looks and sounds like a film from the mid- to late-1930’s instead of 1932), Moriarty makes good his threat to escape, leaving behind a graffito message on the wall of his empty cell, “Tell Sherlock Holmes I’m OUT – Moriarty.” Moriarty immediately sets about making good on his threats by using a carnival as a front to recruit an all-star group of assassins (they gain admission to his secret redoubt by scoring heavily on a shooting-gallery game, thereby proving their markspersonship and worthiness in joining Moriarty’s all-star crime club): Hans Dreiaugen (Lucien Prival) of Germany – the last name literally means “three eyes” – Gaston Roux of France (Robert Graves) – one wonders if the name was based on Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera – Manuel Lopez of Spain (Roy D’Arcy, Prince Mirko in the 1925 Erich von Stroheim film The Merry Widow); and Homer Jones of the U.S. Jones quickly becomes the most important of Moriarty’s new associates as he proposes to introduce the protection racket to the U.K. and bombs at least four of London’s most prominent pubs to show he and Moriarty’s gang mean business. One of them is owned by George (Herbert Mundin), whose part is so prominent he’s billed above Reginald Owen as Dr. Watson. Indeed, Watson is so unimportant to this story Holmes actually spends more time on screen with his servant boy Billy (Howard Leeds in a role the very young Charlie Chaplin played when William Gillette, the actor who wrote the first Holmes play based on an early draft by Conan Doyle, came to Britain from the U.S. to play the role in Holmes’ homeland), who takes over from Watson as Holmes’ main assistant.

At the start of the movie Holmes is planning to retire from crime-fighting and, as a parting gift, is about to present Col. Gore-King and his superior at Scotland Yard, Sir Albert Hastings (Claude King) with a new invention he’s whipped up in his laboratory (using some of the same lab equipment Kenneth Strickfaden devised and most famously rented out to Universal for the Frankenstein movies) that will allow the police to short-circuit the motor of any getaway car as soon as they get within 200 yards of it. (The fact that such a gizmo would also short-circuit any innocent motorist that happened to be in range at the same time as the crooks doesn’t seem to occur to anybody in the film.) Holmes’ girlfriend Alice Faulkner (Miriam Jordan, who’s second-billed but doesn’t have much to do) has persuaded him to retire from crime-fighting and become a gentleman farmer (what, not a bee-keeper?), but of course Moriarty’s escape and his threats propel Holmes out of retirement. In addition to launching an American-style protection racket in London, Moriarty and his international gang of thugs are also pulling a caper by which they plan to tunnel underground into the vaults of the bank owned by Alice Faulkner’s father – and they’ve somehow been able to blackmail Faulkner père to go along with them. What’s more, Moriarty plans to murder Col. Gore-King and frame Holmes for it – only Holmes figures out what Moriarty’s plan is and gets Gore-King to play dead. The climax is a big action scene in the bank vault in which Moriarty is killed (at least temporarily, sequelae and series being what they are) that is directed with so many oblique angles and shadows in the lighting it looks like they’re robbing The Bank Vault of Dr. Caligari.

Indeed, the most interesting and watchable aspect of this film is the so-called “German look” of the visuals: all those stylized cityscapes straight out of Fritz Lang’s M, all those chase scenes in which the people throw long shadows, all those oblique angles and that overall sense of a lawless nightmare buried barely under the service of a normal London environment. When I first read Tag Gallagher’s biography of John Ford I had been skeptical of his claim that the arrival of German director F. W. Murnau on the Fox lot in 1927 had moved a lot of U.S.-born directors like Ford, William K. Howard, Frank Borzage and David Butler to adopt more shadowy, Expressionistic lighting in the Weimar era German style, but as I’ve seen more Fox films from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in which the “German style” shows up as extensively as it does here (or in remarkable Code-benders like 1931’s musical Delicious, directed by David Butler; or the marvelous Clara Bow vehicle Call Her Savage from 1932, directed by John Francis Dillon) the more I’ve come to the conclusion that Gallagher was right. The marvelous German-style scenes of darkness and shadow help make up for the relative dullness of some of the more straightforward dialogue scenes and in particular the misfire of casting Herbert Mundin and giving him so much screen time for so-called “comic relief.” Also on the “down” side of this film – and this I wasn’t expecting – is Ernest Torrence as Moriarty: as good as he was at lower-class villainy (including his final film, as the conscience-stricken immigrant smuggler in James Cruze’s 1933 film I Cover the Waterfront), he’s really not that good at Moriarty’s more aristocratic sort of villainy. My favorite Moriartys remain the first two from the Rathbone series: George Zucco in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (which if pressed I’d name as my favorite Holmes film ever, even though it has precious little to do with the canon) and Lionel Atwill in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – but overall the 1932 Sherlock Holmes is a superb film, nowhere near film noir thematically but awfully close to it visually and a good deal of fun to watch for reasons that have little or nothing to do with its status as a Sherlock Holmes movie.