For the
eighth of Universal’s fourteen popular Sherlock
Holmes films producer-director Roy William Neill helmed what many believe
is the best in the series. Up till that point, his version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (reviewed
here) earned that recommendation and indeed the plot of The Scarlet Claw bears many similarities to it: the misty atmospheric
moorland, a master of disguise at work to compete with Basil Rathbone’s Holmes,
a phosphorescently glowing villain, Holmes’ stated disappearance while he secretly
stays on to apprehend the killer, even a fearsome guard dog and much more are
all reworked elements bolstering its chances.
The Scarlet Claw is good fun, working by now to a
well-established formula led by Rathbone’s clipped, intrepid gravity
contrasting nicely with Nigel Bruce’s cosy avuncular comic-relief incarnation
of Dr Watson. Attending a meeting in Quebec of the Royal Canadian Occult Society,
Holmes’s trusty reliance on fact as the basis for all crime-solving locks horns
with the more supernaturally-bewitched Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanagh). Their differing
approaches are then brought into further awkward proximity when the locals of
Penrose’s village, La Mort Rouge, (there’s a name waiting for infamy) telephone
him that his wife Lady Penrose has been murdered, clinging to the bell-rope as
she tried tolling a warning to the folk after a series of terrible
throat-ripped sheep murders in the area.
Holmes’ offer
of help is spurned by his Lordship until the master detective discovers a
pre-emptive letter Lady Penrose had sent him in fear of her life. Holmes and
Watson are then given permission to take the case and head to the village,
Holmes noting the tragic irony that “For the first time, we’ve been retained by
a corpse!”.
At La Mort
Rouge, they encounter a fruity collection of imported non-local colour,
including the sunny-dispositioned Cockney postman Potts and a Highland Scots police
Sergeant Thompson (David Clyde, Sergeant Bates in the same year’s The Lodger as already covered). Thompson shows Holmes a version of the murder
weapon used, a five-pronged garden weeder that simulates the claw of the film’s
lurid title.
The same
quirky humour is evident as in the other sequels. Holmes teases Watson with
good-natured intimacy:
“Don’t you
ever think of anything besides your stomach?”
“No, not
really”.
There’s also
an amusing sequence where Watson’s attempt at discretely sussing out background
from the inn crowd is anything but. He makes obvious notebook entries on overhearing
morsels and stares with undisguised revulsion at a grizzled, bearded chap
sharing his table.
In the hands
of Neil, the movie doesn’t stint on solid thrills and intrigue though. Aside
from his writing, script duties were also shared with Edmund L. Hartmann (a
long-time gag writer for Bob Hope), Brenda Weisberg whose horror credits
included adapting The Boogie Man will Get
You (1942) and scripting The Mad
Ghoul (1943) and Paul Gangelin.
We get to see
Rathbone pursued across the moors, as aforementioned, by a phosphorescent phantom.
After firing impotently at the shape, Holmes soon has to rescue klutzy Watson
from being knocked into a bog by the same figure that “came at me like a rolling
furnace spitting fire in all directions”. This seems a slight embellishment by
the much-loved old duffer since the almost cuddly glowing form is too benignly
reminiscent of Caspar the Friendly Ghost to frighten anyone.
There are
even moments of steel beneath Watson’s woolly light-heartedness such as when he
remonstrates with Arthur Hohl’s innkeeper Emil Journet for slapping his
loose-talking daughter Marie: “Disgraceful – hitting a child”. In the cameo
role of Marie, Kay Harding had a busy year, appearing also in The Mummy’s Curse and Weird Woman (covered in these pages).
The fun to
be had in The Scarlet Claw is in
seeing the deft switch of suspicion between various suspects like Journet and Judge
Brisson (Miles Mander) whose wheelchair infirmity Holmes craftily rumbles by an
‘accidentally’ dropped letter. An added layer to capture our imagination is the
human hiding place taken by the clever master of disguise murderer, the jealously
possessive actor Alistair Ramson (Gerald Hamer who had already assumed other
identities for 1943 sequels Sherlock
Holmes in Washington and Faces Death).
He masquerades as a bearded old sea-dog at the dockside in a well-staged
pursuit, and an even better-filmed murder of Brisson, worthy of Hitchcock in
the tense build-up obscuring in shadow the assumed face of housekeeper Nora (Victoria
Horne).
Ultimately the
climax becomes a literal face-off between Holmes disguised as Journet and
Ramson who all this time had been playing postman Potts. Their true identities
cause a manhunt for the fleeing Ramson who is aptly offed by Journet with the
killer’s own instrument of horticultural death – leaving Holmes once more to
fish the bumbling Watson out of a bog.
The epilogue
is a bit of a misfire after the sure-footedness of the rest of the film.
Driving away, Holmes makes a mawkish and heavy-handed speech extolling the
virtues of Canada’s relationship to the other Allies: “The link that joins
together these two great branches of the human family”. Rathbone looks uneasy
in delivering this unnecessary hymn to surely understood war-time relations.
No
matter, for in the remaining Universal adventures for the dynamic duo the game was afoot…
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