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Sherlock Holmes
USA 1932
produced by William K. Howard for Fox Film
directed by William K. Howard
starring Clive Brook, Miriam Jordan, Ernest Torrence, Herbert Mundin, Reginald Owen, Howard Leeds, Alan Mowbray, C.Montague Shaw, Frank Atkinson, Ivan F.Simpson, Stanley Fields, Lucien Prival, Roy D'Arcy, Edward Dillon, Robert Graves, Claude King, Brandon Hurst, Arnold Lucy
screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, based on the play by William Gillette, characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle, music by R.H. Bassett, Hugo Friedhofer, musical director: George Lipschultz
Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Even upon being convicted to death, villain Moriarty (Ernest Torrence)
won't quit making threats, like killing the judge who convicted him
(C.Montague Shaw), Gore-King (Alan Mowbray), the Scotland Yard man who
arrested him, and of course Sherlock Holmes (Clive Brook), the man who
tracked him down. But of course, nobody takes him serious, and Holmes even
quits private-eyeing altogether to move to the country with his sweetheart
Alice (Miriam Jordan), who he plans to marry. But then, the judge turns up
dead and Moriarty has apparently escaped from prison - and suddenly
everything looks very grim again ... Moriarty invites a bunch of foreign
talent to London to make the town his, running an American-style
protection racket ... and he has made up a foolproof plan to get rid of
Holmes and Gore-King in one go - make Holmes shoot Gore-King believing
he is one of Moriarty's men ... and the plan succeeds too - or at
least so Moriarty thinks, because Holmes has staged the whole thing just
to keep a clear back when trying to stop Moriarty. Eventually, Holmes
finds out Moriarty is trying to rob the bank of his father-in-law-to-be
(Ivan F.Simpson), and he even holds Holmes' fiancée and ward Billy
(Howard Leeds) hostage to see that nothing happens to his plan - but
Holmes manages to infiltrate the gang by assuming the identity of one of
Moriarty's gang (Lucien Prival) and breaking the gang open from the inside
- before Scotland Yard, led by Gore-King, the man Holmes was supposed to
have killed, arrives to save the day. And in the end, Holmes even gets
the girl ... A bit of an unusual Sherlock Holmes-film:
Its sets are contemporary and the film makes many references to (then)
modern technoclogies, Watson only is an insignificant supporting
character, instead Holmes is engaged and accompanied by a juvenile ward,
American gangsterisms replace British gentleman crooks, and so on and so
forth ... in all, this is far from your typical Sherlock Holmes
film and actually doesn't work all that well as such - but if you watch
the film as a rather conventional crime thriller, it's quite ok, nothing
special, that's for sure, but not half-bad either. And it has a scene
with Sherlock Holmes in drag ...
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