To me, this movie is perfection.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Among the pluses in this movie:We get two top English character actors, George Zucco and Henry Daniell, who both appeared in other Rathbone-Bruce Holmes films.The script offers Holmes some witty rejoinders to the lovable but slightly dim Watson, which Rathbone delivers with wonderful dryness.Fans of the films will notice British actor Gerald Hamer among the cast. Hamer appeared in no less than five of these Holmes films!The plot is fast moving, and there are no "slow" moments.The chemistry between Holmes and Watson is superb, as always.

Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes once again crosses swords (or at least gunfire) with Professor Moriarty, or at least the actor who played the role several years before, villain extraordinaire, George Zucco. In modernizing Holmes, the setting is switched to modern day London, ultimately leading Rathbone and Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson to Washington DC where they seek to protect an important document from getting into Nazi hands. By integrating the Holmes stories with current events, the writers made the character not only timely but eternal, and other writers have followed suit in putting detectives of certain eras in modern settings to make them more relevant. In Holmes' case, it's a first visit to the land of baseball and apple pie, where a shot of the Lincoln memorial sets the theme for democratic ideals, always worth fighting for to preserve. Ironically, Rathbone and Bruce are decked out in their period costumes while everybody else is in modern dress. In addition to the villainy of Zucco, there's also the prickly Henry Danielle as another nasty Nazi and veteran character actor Bradley Page, here a reporter rather than the American criminals he usually played. Zucco shows up as the proprietor of a Washington D.C. antique shop (with Ian Wolfe as his well spoken but suspicious assistant), reminding me of Conrad Veidt and Judith Anderson as Nazis who ran an auction shop in "All Through the Night". Of course, in keeping with the pro democracy propaganda, Rathbone ends the film with a little speech on the values of freedom, followed by the theater's promotion of war bonds as money lent, not spent.

Just like the two previous 'Sherlock Holmes' adventures produced by Universal, this one is also a real wartime flag waver - hailing the Anglo-American Alliance this time, as the title already suggests... A document of vital importance for the Allies against Nazi Germany has to be transported from London to Washington; and, of course, gets lost in the process and the agent murdered. But Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson take over this very delicate and important case, traveling for the first time to the USA...Apart from the propaganda, at least this time we get to see some of Holmes' good old sleuthing: he very cleverly discovers that the document isn't a letter at all, but has been transformed into a microfilm - the size of an ordinary stamp... And there's an ironic sort of suspense throughout the movie: the microfilm changes hands literally dozens of times without anybody noticing it! For those who can stand the constant declarations of Anglo-American friendship 'under the circumstances', it's a political time document; for crime fans, it's simply a quite neatly made, suspenseful old thriller...

Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) are sent to Washington to retrieve a top secret document hidden inside a book of matches before it falls into the hands of an international spy ring led by evil German Heinrich Hinckel (George Zucco).The third in Holmes's rather tedious wartime adventures, this film is one of the weakest in the entire Rathbone/Bruce series with very little intrigue and not nearly enough suspense to sustain interest, even over a scant 71 minutes run-time. It's a full twelve minutes before Rathbone even appears on screen, even longer before he gets to Washington, and once in the capital of the good-old US of A, he's given a guided tour of the city, taking in all of its landmarks (this bit's more like a travelogue than a thriller).Finally, the action begins proper, but it's far from exciting stuff, with a clue leading Holmes' to trawl Washington antique shops in search of the bad guys' lair. Meanwhile, the matchbook is passed from person to person, all of whom are unaware of the secrets it contains, eventually landing in the lap of Hinckel, who also remains oblivious to the microfilm within. When Holmes at last arrives on the scene, he must try and get the matchbook from the evil German without giving the game away. Yawn!Little more than a flag-waving exercise for the allies during WWII, Sherlock Holmes in Washington marks an all-time low for the series; thankfully, this would be the last film to pit Rathbone's Holmes against the threat of the Third Reich, the great detective getting back to solving domestic crimes in his next outing.4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.