Terror By Night (1946)

This time, in number thirteen of the fourteen movies in the series, Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes boards a train to Scotland that is transporting the Star of Rhodesia, a jewel of great value, and although he succeeds in thwarting would-be thieves, a body turns up in one of the carriages.

★★★☆☆

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The Black Cat (1941)

The not very funny jokes come thick and fast in this madcapped romp - a The Cat And The Canary variation more CarryOn comedy than Hammer horror - starring Basil "He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes" Rathbone, Hugh Herbert and Bela Lugosi as just some of the beneficiaries of widow Henrietta Winslow's will, gathered in her gothic mansion full of cats, antiques, secret passages and a growing number of dead bodies (murders committed by a shadowy someone whose identity you don't really have a chance of guessing given everyone appears to be making the plot up as they go).

★★★☆☆

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The Woman In Green (1945)

Anyone wondering exactly when it became acceptable for cinema to treat women as the disposable objects of men who slash and chop them will be dismayed to watch this 1945 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movie (number 11 of 14) because its mystery of attractive women in London turning up dead minus their fingers has the police suspecting a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer but when Sherlock Holmes gets to the bottom of things, the solution he reveals is a grim social indictment that suggests long before the modern slasher women were being slaughtered in cinema for the flimsiest reasons imaginable.

★★★★☆

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Dressed To Kill (UK: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code) (1946)

By 1946, Basil Rathbone had starred as Sherlock Holmes alongside Nigel Bruce's Doctor Watson fourteen times and perhaps some weariness is on display in this last one, Dressed To Kill, but to be fair, the plot about a criminal gang's race to obtain three identical wooden music boxes, based on Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, gives Sherlock Holmes no opportunity to dazzle with his brilliant methods of deduction because the audience knows pretty much what it needs to know right from the beginning and remains always several steps ahead of the great detective.

★★☆☆☆

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

It is still good fun but Sherlock Holmes is not at his best in this second of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies and in fact spends most of the 80-minute runtime being taken for a fool by his arch-rival Professor Moriarty - he brings to mind Frasier here the way his ego leaves him looking a fool - but even worse, when in the final moments he finally twigs and realises what we the audience have known all along from the very beginning, his out-loud logic to a bewildered Watson brings to mind the sort of childish panto one hears between Adam West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin!

★★★☆☆

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The House of Fear (1945)

As in Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips, the arrival of a series of envelopes containing orange pips portends the grisly death of each recipient but where there are three deaths in the Openshaw family in the short story, there is a body count of seven in this film - a lot for a movie with a runtime of 69 minutes - and although it's good fun and Basil Rathbone is Sidney Paget's illustration of Sherlock Holmes come-to-life, and although the movie is deliciously spooky and the murders unspeakably gruesome - details that murder mystery fans will relish - the rush of deliveries of 'orange pip letters' one after the other after the other to a diminishing group of members of the Good Comrades Club seated night after night at their dining table in the gothic Drearcliff House gets a touch repetitive and ridiculous after, say, the first three.

★★★★☆

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The Scarlet Claw (1944)

The opening credits attribute the "original" story to a pair of plagiarists, suggesting they've only based their plot on the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but anyone can see the debt this eighth of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies owes The Hound of the Baskervilles with its murder on the foggy moors committed by a phosphorescent monster; however, before you groan at having watched it all before, remember Basil Rathbone in black-and-white is Sidney Paget's illustrations come-to-life, and here Holmes - on the hunt for a villain as diabolical as any seen in cinema to 1944 - becomes involved in some deliciously creepy scenes including one so good it was used again by Scorsese in his Cape Fear 47 years later.

★★★★☆

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