Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.