Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943)
Sherlock Holmes races to stop Professor Moriarty and Nazi agents from seizing Dr. Franz Tobel's new bombsight, a weapon that could turn the war. When Tobel vanishes after splitting the device's plans among four trusted colleagues and hiding the pieces behind a stick-figure cipher, Holmes must break the code before Moriarty does.
Loosely hung on Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” — really only the cipher survives the transplant — Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon was the second of Universal’s wartime updates dropping Holmes into contemporary espionage plots, and the only entry to pit Basil Rathbone against Lionel Atwill’s take on Professor Moriarty.
Background
This was the second film in Universal’s series, and it brought Holmes into the middle of the Second World War. The plot follows Dr Franz Tobel, a Swiss scientist whose new bombsight has the Nazis and Moriarty desperate to steal it. Lionel Atwill plays Moriarty as a smooth, unhurried schemer, a contrast to the more frantic version seen elsewhere in the series. The film borrows its cipher from Conan Doyle’s story about dancing stick figures.
What to watch for
Roy William Neill’s direction keeps the film brisk at only 66 minutes, and the atmospheric London sets use the same backlot-and-shadows style that the studio had honed on its horror pictures. Rathbone and Bruce are already comfortable in their roles, and their partnership is the reason the series works. The wartime setting dates it, and the propaganda is less subtle than you might like, but this is a good place to sample the series.
