Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Expected more

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I'm finding it hard to believe how badly the story fell apart when the reveal comes near the end of the picture. For the 'Voice of Terror' to have attained it's goals, the viewer is asked to accept that a German agent killed a British soldier TWENTY FOUR years earlier!! and assumed his identity, working his way into the British Intelligence Inner Council!! Man, I've heard of undercover operations before but this one takes the proverbial cake. It's just not very credible at all.Up till then, the story had a nicely mysterious quality as Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) is brought into the British government's inner circle by it's leader, Sir Evan Barham (Reginald Denny). We don't know it at the time, but Barham is really German Heindrich Von Boch, secretly pulling strings for the Nazis and setting up British targets for assault by the German war machine. When you think about it, Von Bach/Barham made the bonehead blunder of his life by inviting Holmes to the table to unmask the Voice of Terror. In the confrontation in which the German agent is revealed, Von Boch explains that it was his arrogant conceit that made him think he could outwit Holmes with this masquerade. I guess he never read Arthur Conan Doyle.I'd like to say more about the picture but I think it all becomes a moot exercise, almost like one of those stories that ends up being a dream sequence. One thing did strike me though relative to the movie's release date. England was already engaged in World War II at the time, so a remark Sherlock Holmes makes to his partner Watson (Nigel Bruce) was strikingly prescient - "There's an East Wind coming...". The picture ends on a patriotic note heralding a victory against the Nazis that no one could have predicted accurately at the time, not even Sherlock Holmes for all his brilliant deductive reasoning.

I really like this film. It is filled with forgotten actors and actresses that are great in their roles. I especially enjoy Thomas Gomez as the head bad guy. I have no problems with the updating of the stories to modern times. I enjoy Rathbone and Bruce interacting together in their roles.I know a lot of people, especially critics constantly criticize Nigel Bruce. I find he is fine in his role. You can see that in this series Holmes and Watson care about each other. Dr. Watson also shows some observations that pivotal to the case. You can also see that holmes and watson have a sense of humor. They are not afraid to show it. I think these are three dimensional. I have watch the Brett series, (and others), but they seem to be distant to each other. The only other portrayals that i think comes this close in Plummer and Mason in Murder by Decree.

To anyone who has been - and is - an avid fan of Conan Doyle's detective, this movie is hardly inspiration. Although created in typical B&W during the cash-strapped war years, like most of the Basil Rathbone works, it is deplorably underfunded. And there really is no excuse for this. As a flagrant piece of nationalist propaganda it should have enjoyed the same support as some of the other crowd-rousers, like Coward's 'In Which We Serve' for example.However - it didn't. And instead, a mediocre best is made of almost entirely studio-based set pieces, and a mish-mash script that owes little or nothing to Conan Doyle except passing inspiration. Here, they are trying to unmask a 5th-columnist passing intelligence to those beastly Nazis. The two stars do their best, of course - though I must say that Rathbone's hair appears decidedly ill-groomed for the star.In my DVD there's an interesting commentary about restoration and how some adventures have been partly or completely lost. It helps to explain the occasional flaws in sound and vision, though nothing in my copy detracted from the experience.It's an old, very cheaply and not terribly well made attempt to bring the famous duo into a WW2 placing. It just about succeeds, but certainly no cigar.

This entertaining little melodrama does a decent job of moving Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the Victorian comforts of Baker Street into the WWII London of blitzes and blackouts. I have been watching this movie off and on for over 30 years, and it has never looked as crystal clear as it does in UCLA's stunning print on the recent DVD. Sound is sharp and clear, too, with some lines of dialogue understandable to my ears for the very first time. Speaking of dialogue, it's quite an indictment of today's Idiots-R-Us culture that a cheap B-movie from 60 years ago sounds like Shakespeare now. For example, when Basil Rathbone's Holmes reminds Thomas Gomez that the English believe every life has value, the sweaty little Nazi sneers "A quaint notion of an even quainter nation." Not bad. The plot purports to be based on Sir Arthur's wonderful endpaper Holmes story "His Last Bow," but it uses nothing beyond the villain's last name and the great closing lines. In its day, the British were outraged at this movie, with its suggestion of treachery and treason at the highest levels of government, and the country owing its salvation to the noble bravery of a prostitute. Doesn't sound so shocking now, does it?