Rathbone Holmes: Wartime to Finale

Roy William Neill directed all fourteen of Universal’s Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes pictures, and steering the character from topical wartime spy plot to full gothic horror to franchise mythology to a quiet close is its own kind of achievement. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon opens this stretch in 1943 with Holmes and Nazi agents racing for a stolen bombsight, its plans split among four colleagues and hidden behind a cipher, with Lionel Atwill making his only appearance in the series as Professor Moriarty. The Pearl of Death trades espionage for atmosphere: a stolen pearl hidden inside one of six identical plaster busts, and a hulking accomplice nicknamed the Hoxton Creeper working his way through their unsuspecting new owners, at the point where Neill had fully shaped the series’ visual style. The Woman in Green swaps Nazis for hypnosis — a killer severing the fingers of young women across London, a suspect using hypnotism to frame innocent men — and, despite his apparent death two entries earlier, brings Moriarty back for a rematch. Dressed to Kill closes the run in 1946 with Holmes decoding a message hidden in the chimes of three music boxes scattered among unsuspecting buyers, a cipher plot that knowingly echoes the studio’s own earlier “Dancing Men” riff one last time before the series ended. Four cases, one director, and a franchise that knew exactly how it wanted to go out.