Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

Even the date says a lot - September 1942, the dark before the dawn, as the world wondered whether it would ever know freedom again. And into this grim atmosphere, the producers must still try to inject believable propaganda on a shoestring.Reviving Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson for World War II might seem laughable to us now, but when the film ends with Holmes saying "Good old Watson, the one fixed point in a changing age", he is providing what the public desperately needs: fixed points by the bucketload. That word 'elementary', repeated so often, you think Holmes must have got a stutter. The statutory crisis, with "Watson, there's not a moment to lose!" And then, Holmes pointing out the villain's careless mistakes, just as though it was Baker Street in 1890. This could have been a hack job, with no budget for colourful locations or grand costumes. But they exploit their limits by turning it into a drama of the airwaves, clearly referencing the controversial English-language broadcasts from Germany by Lord Haw-Haw (the one who prodded Mosley into going the Hitler route), and the radio-set becomes the star of the show for many long minutes. The mysterious announcer has acquired a terrifying new credibility, predicting attacks on the UK, which follow almost at once. It is left to Holmes to deduce that these broadcasts are not what they seem, and that there is treachery at the top. Only the unmasking of the villain, with a little piece of sub-plot involving plastic surgery, somewhat stretches credulity.Although Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are stuck in their cliché double-act, with creative effects firmly ruled out, there are some surprisingly good performances by the others, especially Thomas Gomez, an unlikely New York Hispanic in his first film (at thirty-seven), acting as an enemy agent, linked to the London underworld, where patriotism is thin on the ground. And when the intelligence team comes under scrutiny, the sinister cad Henry Daniell makes a too-obvious suspect, as events prove.

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.

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.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) ** 1/2 (out of 4) First film in Universal's Holmes series following two previous installments from Fox. This time out the BBC are receiving strange wireless broadcasts from the German's telling of future attacks, which all happen to come out true. Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) are called in to try and track the voice of terror. It takes quite a while to get use to seeing Holmes in the 1940's but overall the film is pretty good, although the Nazi plot had already been done to death by previous films and series. The 65-minute running time flies by in a very quick manor, which isn't normally the case for these types of mysteries. The story itself is somewhat good but again, the German thing had been done to death and this film doesn't really offer up any new slants on the story. The real greatness behind the film certainly belong to Rathbone and Bruce who are simply terrific in their roles. The way the two men play off each other adds a lot of charm to the film and Rathbone is certainly classy enough to fill his role perfectly. Evelyn Ankers gets to shine as an informant and it was nice seeing Henry Daniell and Reginald Denny in their roles. The ending is a tad bit rushed in my opinion and I think they were able to handle the German's a bit too easily but this is still an enjoyable little mystery.