Dressed to Kill (1946)
Sherlock Holmes discovers that three seemingly worthless music boxes, sold at auction and scattered among unsuspecting buyers, actually conceal a coded message pointing to a hidden cache of stolen Bank of England printing plates. As a ruthless gang races to reassemble the boxes, Holmes must decode their secret first.
Dressed to Kill closed out Universal’s twelve-film run of Rathbone-and-Bruce Holmes pictures, sending the detective after a code hidden in music-box chimes — a cipher-driven plot that echoes the studio’s own earlier riff on Conan Doyle’s “Dancing Men” one last time before the series ended.
Background
By 1946 Basil Rathbone had played Holmes in fourteen films across two studios, and he was ready to stop; this was his last turn in the deerstalker, and he did not return to the role on screen. Roy William Neill directed most of Universal’s series, and here he handles a clue-hunting plot with the same economical style: a gang, three music boxes, and the printing plates hidden in the tune each one plays.
What to watch for
Patricia Morison gives the film its best performance as the calculating Hilda Courtney, one of the most self-assured villains the series had. It was also released in the US as Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code, which is an accurate description of the plot. If you have seen the earlier entries, it is a good example of how the series settled into a comfortable formula of fog, cheap sets and Nigel Bruce’s bumbling Watson, and it shows why audiences kept coming back for the whole run.
