r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that I screened Charles the final film in an even longer-running series, the 14th and last movie with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. John H. Watson. The film was called Dressed to Kill, and according to imdb.com there have been four films called Dressed to Kill. One was a 1928 Fox Film silent with Edward Lowe and Mary Astor, directed by Irving Cummings, in which Edmund Lowe and Mary Astor star ini a tale of a criminal gang that becomes suspicious of their leaders’s new girlfriend, who may or may not be a police agent working undercover. One was a 1941 entry in the Michael Shayne detective series with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne. One was the notorious 1980 Brian de Palma thriller with Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson, and one was this one. Basically Dressed to Kill is a reworking of the previous Holmes film with Rathbome andBruce, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, with bits of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia” thrown in to satisfy the requirement of Universal’s contract with the Conan Doyle estate that every Holmes film they made make some reference to “the canon” – the 56 Holmes short stories and four novels Conan Doyle actually wrote with the character. After the sheer boredom of the last two entries in the Rathbome-Bruce Holmes series, Pursuit to Algiers (which took place mostly on a ship) and Terror by Night (which took place mostly on a train), Dressed to Kill was a welcome return to form and a fitting climax to the series. Like Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, Dressed to Kill is a race between heroes and villains for possession of clues to a valuable secret.
In this case, the clues are contained in three music boxes made by John Davidsion (probably Cyril Delevant) who used to work at the Bank of England until he decided to steal actual plates for printing five-pound notes. Now he’s in prison but he joins a program for amateur crafts-makers and constructs a series of three music boxes, each of which plays a variation on an Australian folk song called “The Swagman,” but the tunes are a code to communicate to his confederates where he hid the stolen plates in the 15 minutes between his theft and his arrest. The heroes are Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone),Dr.Watson (Nigel Bruce), Inspector Stanley Hopkins of Scotland Yard (Carl Harbord) – who’s mentioned in a couple of the Conan Doyle Holmes stories as a Holmes protégé whom Holmes criticizes for his lack of imagination – and the Scotland Yard Commissioner (Ian Wolfe). The bad people are Hilda Courtney (Patricia Morison), Col. Cavanaugh (Frederic Worlock) and Hamid (Harry Cording), Mrs. Courtney’s chauffeur, who’s in unrequited love with her. Holmes gets involved in the case when Julian “Stinky” Emery (Edmond Breon), an old college friend of Dr. Watson’s, complains that a small music box he had recently acquired for his collection was stolen by a burglar who knocked him out. Emery tells Holmes that the music box that was stolen looked very much like one he’d just bought at an auction, and when he plays that box for Holmes, Our Hero instantly memorizes the tune after hearing it just once. The crooks get the manager of the auction house to tell them where the three music boxes from Dartmoor went, and in a series of scenes that anticipate the off-handed brutality of the crooks in the 1958 movie The Lineup (in which the items the crooks are after are a series of four dolls which contained heroin, hidden there by drug smugglers who turned ordinary people into their unwitting mules) the bad guys contain two of the three boxes.
One is Emery’s, which Hilda Courtney is about to obtain byu seduction when Hamid has a fit of jealousy and throws a knife in his back, killing him. One belongs to the seven-year-old daughter (Topsy Glyn) of a family named Kilgour until Hilda visits her while her parents are out, knocks her and throws her into the closet, then disguises herself as a charwoman and walks out with the box in her grocery basket while Holmes and Watson make the mistake of letting her go. The third was bought by an antique dealer and Holmes buys it from her, then tries to break the code with the boxes he has. He’s stumped until Watson remembers a piano teacher whom he had as a child and says he was so unmusical she resorted to numbering the keys to show him where they were – and Holmes realizes that that’s the key to the code. Then Watson unwittingly helps Homles again when it comes to filling out the missing part of the messagewhich references a “secretary” belonging to “Dr. S.” Watson quotes Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Holmes immediately realizes that the plates are hidden in the museum of Samuel Johnson’s old home in London. There’s an exciting climax in which the three bad people show up at the Johnson museum (with a typically officious tour guide leading a group through the property and delivering the spiel). They find the “secretary” –º actually a book cabinet – and spill all dr. Johnson’s old books on the floor in their haste to get the plates. Their faces light up with almost orgasmic joy when they get the plates, only their joy doesn’t last long because they’re immediately arrested by the police, led there by Holmes’ and Watson’s deductions.
The obligatory canonical reference is to the Holmes sotry “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which has just been published in The Strand magazine, and which Mrs. Courtney has apparently read since she uses the same stratagem Holmes used in that story to literally “smoke out” the location of a hidden object, setting off a smoke bomb. There’s also a startlingly topical reference to theHolocaust as the gangsters capture Holmes and try to kill him with a gas they explain was recently used by the Nazis to kill people they considered “undesirable.” Dressed to Kill is actually a pretty good movie and a fitting climax to the Rathbone-Bruce Holmes series – to me, as I’ve said before (paraphrasing the opening of “A Scandal in Bohemia”), Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes – though he portrayed Holmes one more time, in a Broadway play in 1951. Unfortunately, Nigel Bruce died just before the play opened and Rathbone was forced to accept Martyn Green as a replacement Watson – and he was so broken up at the loss of his good friend and frequent co-star his performance suffered big-time and the play closed within weeks. Dressed to Kill was also a turning point for Patricia Morison, who ran out her Universal contract because she had hoped for more varied roles and instead got cast as one femme fatale after another. She returned to New York and acted as the female lead in the premiere production of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, playing a hot-tempered diva about as far removed from the icy dark-haired villainess of Dressed to Kill as you could imagine.
