The Woman in Green (1945)
A killer is severing the forefingers of young women across London, and Sherlock Holmes suspects the seemingly respectable Lydia Marlowe is using hypnosis to frame innocent men for the murders. Behind her scheme lurks Holmes's oldest enemy, back from the dead to destroy him once and for all.
Nominally spun from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” The Woman in Green resurrects Moriarty for a rematch with Rathbone’s Holmes despite the character’s apparent death in Secret Weapon two years earlier — one of several liberties taken as the Holmes series stretched the original stories across fourteen features, only twelve of them made by Universal.
Background
This is the ninth of Universal’s twelve Holmes pictures, and it has an unusually macabre premise, with murdered women found with a single finger cut off. Henry Daniell plays Moriarty, and Hillary Brooke is the elegant Lydia Marlowe, who uses hypnosis in the plot. The film borrows only a few elements from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House”.
What to watch for
It is often ranked among the best of the series. The pacing is brisk, Daniell is a sinister and self-possessed Moriarty, and the climax is one of the more dramatic of the run. Roy William Neill’s use of shadow and fog is at its best here. Nigel Bruce’s Watson is also given more to do than in some of the earlier entries, which makes the partnership feel more genuine.
