La femme aux araignées

This might rate as the most entertaining of all the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, which I still think are the best renditions on film of the famous detective.

This has a surprising amount of action and is simply a fun story to watch. Packed into just one hour are such scenes as Holmes faking his death, a near-poisoning of he and Dr. Watson by gas, a strange little boy who hops around a room, tarantulas on the loose, on and on.

Nigel Bruce is his normally funny Dr. Watson and Gale Sondergaard makes an excellent villain. Credibility is stretched in the beginning and ending scenes but it's an enjoyable ride all the way through.

The "hopping boy" with cat-quick reflexes is one of the most unusual and unsettling figures of the decade. I don't think I've ever seen such an imaginative and offbeat use of a young person in any other movie. The film itself has many imaginative touches, but among them, it's that bizarre little "hop" (never explained, and neither is the boy) that's so memorable. He's a perfect adjunct to the leeringly evil Adrea (Sondergaard) who looks like she's having a delicious time playing cat-and-mouse with the tricky Sherlock (Rathbone). In fact, their devious encounters are models of beautifully "layered" acting as each has several things going on internally at the same time. She's a perfect foil for the master detective, with a flashy smile that says one thing while her eyes say another. Too bad the imperious Sondergaard was lost to the blacklist of the early 50's.

I never did figure out just how the pygmy (Angelo Rossito in blackface) fit into the suicide scheme, but that's okay because the movie has so many intriguing touches, including the highly contrived but suspenseful climax. Even Hoey's Inspector Lestrade is wisely restrained, and when he walks off proudly arm-in-arm with the eye-catching Adrea at the end, it's a rather charming little moment. I guess my only complaint is with the poorly done process shot of the raging river that contrasts starkly with the well-stocked foreground. Nonetheless, this is one of the most imaginative entries of any detective series of the period.

With an involved, detailed mystery and an elegant adversary played by Gale Sondergaard, this is one of the most entertaining features in the Sherlock Holmes series of movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. The story gets a little far-fetched, but it is quite interesting. It is loaded with plot devices pulled from several different Arthur Conan Doyle stories, and it's interesting to see how many you can catch. It also features the usual pleasant camaraderie between Rathbone and Bruce, plus Dennis Hoey as Inspector Lestrade.

As "The Spider Woman", Sondergaard creates a memorable opponent for Holmes. The slightly exaggerated role cannot have been much of a challenge for such a fine actress, but she puts her heart into it, and looks as if she is enjoying herself - as her character certainly is. By creating such a dynamic character, she also helps make the complicated story seem more plausible, and it creates a worthy challenge for Holmes.

The movie also contains the amusing bits of dialogue and detail that characterized so many of the movies in the series. The climactic sequence, in particular, is a very good combination of suspense and wit. It is a fitting way to cap off an enjoyable entry in the popular series.

The 1942-43 Holmes/Watson films are often pathetic nonsense involving Nazi spies and have Holmes dashing all over the place firing guns at all and sundry, which doesn't work at all.

Yes, this is wartime, and the targets in the fairground shooting gallery are Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, but this is a proper detective story about mysterious murders.

It's an amalgam of Conan Doyle's original stories The Sign of Four and The Final Problem rather than a farrago of cod secret agents, and it works pretty well as a mystery.

Gale Sondergaard makes a marvellous villain, and plays excellently opposite Rathbone's Holmes.

Well worth while

In wartime Britain, a series of well-known men commit suicide - their only connection being the fact that they are all gamblers. This happens while Holmes and Watson are holidaying in Scotland when this is happening and Holmes fakes his own death to be able to go back to London in disguise and work on the case. He finds the killer with ease but not the method or motive for the murders.

The interesting set up of graphic suicides (or at least graphic for the time) had me from the start but the film didn't manage to hold me throughout the running time although it got better towards the end. The usual `he's dead - oh, he's not' thing didn't really work for me but happily the film didn't labour this ruse too long. The plot does have certainly `different' aspects to it, they may not be supernatural as such but they are certainly different from the usual fare. There isn't anything too wrong about this but I didn't totally get won over by it.

The film does have some fine moments to it - the scene where Watson unwittingly is made to try and kill Holmes, very tense and enjoyable and ends with a Holmes line that Bond himself would have been proud of: `I was just going round and round but my heart wasn't really in it'! The confrontations between Holmes and Spedding are enjoyable - she is an extraordinary villain and she matches Holmes well.

Rathbone does good work and he does bring out a reasonable chemistry with Sondergaard that helps the fact that they are meant to be against each other. Bruce is good and seems to be growing in confidence (or at least what the film allows him to do) with some good quips of his own. Hoey is always a welcome addition to the cast and he is a good comic relief that takes the pressure off Bruce somewhat.

Overall, the plot didn't totally hang together for me and it lacked a little bit of logic as a result of the slightly unusal nature of the murders and the criminals involved but it is still very enjoyable and the conclusion in the fairground is a lot tenser than a B-movie deserves to be!