Monday 12 June 2017

SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE SCARLET CLAW (1944)

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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