Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

Dir: Roy William Neill

1943

***

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon is the fourth of fourteen in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film series and already certain cracks were starting to show within the franchise. The series is warmly regarded and I also love it but there are serious issues with the story, continuity and the overall fact that hardly any of it is the actual work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon incorporates an idea featured in the short story 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' but apart from the famous dancing men code, it's absolutely nothing like it. Made in the early forties, The Secret Weapon sees Holmes contributing to the war effort, as only Holmes can. The initial scene sees Holmes travel to Switzerland to help smuggle out a brilliant Scientist who has agreed to help the British with a revolutionary bomb sight he has developed. Holmes adopts the guise of an elderly German bookseller (taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock short The Adventure of the Empty House, which was famously parodied in 1963's The Pink Panther), tricks the Nazis and makes it back to London. There is a spy element to the story that isn't really present in the Sherlock Holmes books, it works in the beginning but soon gets tired and a little silly. When the Scientist goes missing, Holmes follows the clues to his whereabouts and discovers that his old foe Professor Moriarty is also searching for the bomb sight that he plans on selling to the Nazis. Now Professor Moriarty is lots of things but i can't say I ever saw him as a Nazi sympathizer. Like many fictional characters of the era, they were developed to take sides, which I understand but I don't think it really worked. Fascinating looking back at it now though but those continuity errors really do let it down. For starters, Professor Moriarty died in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which was only made four years previous and was only two films before in the series. To confuse things further, Professor Moriarty is played by Lionel Atwill, who played Dr Mortimer in 1939's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first film of the series. While Basil Rathbone was on fine form, I'm afraid the same can't be said of Nigel Bruce, although his Dr. Watson has a particularly poor script this time round. The climax is pretty ridiculous, which almost undoes the suspense of the code cracking story line. I'm rather fond of the series and I'm being kind with my rating but all in all, these films were rushed, there wasn't enough care taken with them and it really shows and they haven't dated well.