Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Following Fox’s first Holmes movie with the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce double act rather quickly, this second movie is already the end of the short Fox cycle featuring these two. The studio apparently had problems wrangling the rights for further movies out of the Doyle estate, and perhaps not as much interest in continuing the series anyway.

Probably making negotiations less important for the studio that this film was neither much loved by the studio bosses nor – apparently – audiences, so fighting Adrian Doyle might not have been worth it to them in any case.

The Adventures doesn’t attempt to adapt any particular Holmes tale, but spins a complicated yarn about a plot of Professor Moriarty (who is much more common in adaptations than in the canon, and here played by the typically fun George Zucco) to thwart and humiliate Holmes and get rich in the process.

Not being a studio boss or a 1939 audience, I prefer this second Fox Holmes to the Hound. The plot is more lively, Alfred L. Werker’s direction is workmanlike but at least effective and from time to time even atmospheric, and Rathbone and Bruce really have gotten a grip on the character they are never really going to lose for as long as they will continue to play these characters (as much as I loathe Watson as an idiot, but you know that already). Unlike in the first movie, there’s also at least one memorable part among the younger actors surrounding our heroes – Ida Lupino (early in her career here) imbues her theoretically typical heiress in distress with as much personality and backbone as she can get away with, which does wonders for much of the plot she is involved in.

This – like most of Hollywood Holmes – is very much Holmes in pulp mode, so expect as much action as ratiocination, and delightful moments like the scene in which Moriarty’s butler has forgotten to water the man’s beloved plants and faces the ensuing threats of death and doom with the most movie butlerish face ever encountered. It is all very good fun. Apart from the actual jokes, of course, but that’s par for the course.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Victorian England. Consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and his friend and partner Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are asked to help ensure the safety of Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene), who has come to England to take possession of his inheritance in the Great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoor. Rumours of a supernatural hound haunting his lineage abound, and many secrets are kept on the moors.

This first in its series of Sherlock Holmes movie produced by Fox , in this case directed by Sidney Lanfield, was a major hit in its time. Apart from the natural and perennial popularity of Holmes, this is certainly thanks to the casting of Basil Rathbone in the role, who has the accent, the profile, the energy and the acting chops to pull off an interesting Great Detective; he also has great chemistry with his Watson, real-life friend Nigel Bruce.

I’ve never liked the Bruce Watson much – he’s too stupid to be believable as a doctor, a military veteran that survived anything more dangerous than stepping over a puddle or as a friend to Holmes. In fact, in his worst moments – most of them to come in later films of the duo – this too stupid Watson tends to damage his Holmes, because this version of Holmes apparently needs to travel with the dumbest person alive to feel properly clever and is the kind of guy who drags around the learning disabled to berate them for being “bunglers”.

My tastes in Watsons aside, while The Hound is the most popular, and certainly the best, of the Holmes novels, it is a curious case to start a series with a particularly weak Watson with. For here, Watson is really meant to take the lead role in the investigation for at least half of the narrative, something Bruce’s character never believably manages in between comedy routines and empty bluster. He isn’t helped at all by being surrounded by the sort of extremely unmemorable actors Old Hollywood loved as their young romantic leads. Only Lionel Atwill provides some memorable moments.

The script pretty much makes a hash out of Doyle’s novel, changes everything that might be morally complex even more so than the Production Code would have necessitated, and just barely manages to get in some of the book’s set pieces. Those certainly are made very pretty by the use of some nice looking sets. Sidney Lanfield’s direction is generally unremarkable, and at its most effective whenever he just lets Rathbone or Atwill do their respective thing, which, unfortunately, isn’t all too often.

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Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf, while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word “entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form. The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of lazy.

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

When young Diego Vega (Tyrone Power) is called back by his father from a life of duelling, making merry and a bit of soldiering in Spain to Spanish California, he finds out his Dad Don Alejandro (Montagu Love) isn’t the governor of the province around beautiful Los Angeles anymore. The just, fair and incredibly law abiding Don Alejandro has been replaced by the cruel, greedy, snivelling and all-around unpleasant Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg) who shares the spoils of oppressing the peasantry with his not exactly beloved partner in crime and captain of the local soldiery, Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone).

Diego is not at all happy with this sort of thing but he knows his father won’t approve of any extra-legal attempts to get rid of Quintero, Pasquale and their minions, so he decides to pretend to be the wimpiest fop ever to have spent time in Spain and secretly fight them under the guise of the masked rider Zorro in a campaign of finely placed needle pricks. If all goes to plan Zorro’s activities should bring Quintero to resignation, and get him to name Don Alejandro as his replacement to avoid having one bad apple replaced by another one. While he’s at it, Diego also finds the time to romance Quintero’s niece, the extremely virginal Lolita Quintero (Linda Darnell) out of love, as well as Quintero’s wife Inez (Gale Sondergaard) as part of his plans.

Rouben Mamoulian’s movie version of Johnston McCulley’s pulp character Zorro is pretty much the epitome of a great old-style Hollywood swashbuckling film. It’s crisply paced – having already established its characters and situation and started its hero on his mission by minute twenty-one – going from sharp, genuinely funny dialogue scenes to still exciting action to a cute romance and back again with aplomb and a generous spirit that should put a smile on everyone’s face.

Power is the perfect Zorro as well as the perfect Don Diego, diving in the pretend-foppishness with the same verve he shows when he (well, or his fencing double) is donning his costume, milking every fun little barb the script gives him for the best effect and – obviously, giving the sort of film this is and the time it comes from – cutting the appropriately dashing figure. I also find him genuinely likeable because he gets the rather difficult balancing act between charming and rogue just right and therefore never comes over as a self-loving prick. And we all know how Basil Rathbone excelled at being the villain in this kind of piece, as well as at the fencing.

Mamoulian is a director I really more connected with musicals, and wouldn’t have expected to be quite this good at letting the swash buckle. Though swashbucklers and musicals do of course share an emphasis on elegant movement, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised by how perfectly Mamoulian handles the material here. There’s a joyfulness of movement (and therefore physicality) not only to the action scenes but also to much of the dialogue sequences, with little in Mamoulian’s direction that seems routine or in the least bit willing to ever look boring or bland. The director’s hand is so strong, he even gets away with a central fencing match between Diego and Pasquale that doesn’t take place in an open space or very large room but in what amounts to a somewhat larger office room. The strong choreography by Fred Cavens - responsible for a lot of the more impressive looking fencing you’ll see in classic Hollywood films – for that decisive duel is pretty remarkable, too, using the cramped space brilliantly and inventively.

The whole thing’s also beautiful to look at, with sets that are certainly not authentic to the time and place they are supposed to belong to but which feel like the proper environments for the story taking place in them.  Arthur C. Miller’s photography is shadow-rich and atmospheric, never looking anything less than perfect for any given moment.

If all this sounds as if I enjoyed The Mark of Zorro a lot, and think it’s one of the best swashbucklers and adventure movies ever to have come out of classic sound film Hollywood, then I’ve done my job here exactly right.

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone), the son of the original monster-creating genius, returns with his wife Elsa (Josephine Hutchinson) and his incredibly annoying little son Peter (Donnie Dunagan), to his father’s old haunts – Castle Frankenstein in the village of Frankenstein. The Frankensteinians are not at all happy with their new neighbours and are only a small step from turning into a torch-wielding mob already. Fortunately, Krogh (Lionel Atwill), the one-armed chief of police of the village (and this place must have quite the crime rate, given that he’s the chief of police instead of the lone village cop), is a rather reasonable man, so things still might turn out well for everyone involved.

Of course, Wolf seems a bit too fascinated by his father’s experiments right from the start; that state of mind doesn’t improve when he meets Dad’s old assistant Ygor (Bela Lugosi) who has no trouble walking around with neck broken when he was hanged for his work for Frankenstein senior. Ygor shows Wolf the body of his father’s Creature (Boris Karloff) who has been lying in a coma for some weeks now, after it was hit by lightning, and easily convinces the scientist to revive it again. Curiously, Ygor fails to explain that he has some sort of mental hold on the Creature (implied to be connected to some fine woodwind playing), and that he has used it to kill the people involved in his hanging. Nor does Ygor mention he’s planning to continue the killing spree.

Soon, the son of Frankenstein is in a bit of trouble, and the never very peaceful village of Frankenstein is riled up again.

The usual narrative among us horror fans is that the Frankenstein films lost their lustre as quickly as the other Universal horror series, too soon descending in self-parody and the kind of films seemingly made by people who loathed the horror genre as much as they did their audience. This narrative’s not completely wrong, but too easily, a film as wonderful as Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein gets put down on the side of the increasingly bad films Universal made during its second wave of horror films, though I suggest Universal horror lost its enthusiasm a few years after the start of that wave, shortly after The Wolfman. Still Son carries a bit of a stigma with it in some circles, despite it being just as good as its two predecessors, if very different from them.

For most of its running time, Son feels a lot like an effort to outdo the two James Whale movies that came before in as many ways as possible. To some, this might sound sacrilegious, yet I think In some ways, the film is even quite successful with this project. Sure, Son doesn’t quite have the poetry of the best moments of Whale’s films, nor is it as thematically resonant as they are but it does probably win out when it comes to plotting and characterization by eschewing the slightly episodic feel of the first two Frankenstein films in favour of a surprisingly tight plot full of comparatively complex characters with actual motivations for their behaviour. Not that the behaviour itself makes much sense in the ways of reason and logic, mind you, but then, Frankenstein isn’t the place where these things would actually have a proper place.

One of the film’s many joys is the interplay between Rathbone’s increasingly crazed and frightened Wolf and Atwill’s stiff and distrustful but basically kind Krogh, culminating in a game of darts of all things.

I also just adore Lugosi’s performance here that sees the great man doing much of what he does best – the curious and threatening pronunciation of certain WORDS nobody around HIM seems to NOTICE, the grand overacting, the joyfully glittering eyes whenever the macabre or the grotesque rear their heads. And in this particular Frankenstein movie, the grotesque and the macabre are nearly always present. Even the comic relief tonally fits into the movie this time around, not really working as a relief but strengthening the audience’s conviction that Universal’s Backlot Europe is a place where nothing ever isn’t macabre and/or grotesque, not even the funny people.

This is after all a place where no angle ever is just a right one, where no stair step is shaped like the one next to it, and where people dine in nearly empty, starkly shadowed rooms dominated by giant somewhat cubist looking boar heads. In fact, where the visual style in the earlier Universal horrors seemed inspired by German expressionism, many of the (brilliant) sets here are expressionism pure, completely ignoring any idea of naturalism, and turning every place the characters dwell in into a part of a dream world, or, if you’re so inclined, places where the subconscious is right on the surface of things, and where it seems perfectly natural that men with broken necks walk, life can be created out of death, people pretend Bela Lugosi’s Ygor seems harmless, and the very same people are only very mildly concerned when six of the eight men responsible for a hanging wind up dead by exploding heart.

It’s all a pure joy to watch and witness, the sort of movie that makes a lot of weird decisions but then follows them through so well and so (un-)naturally, they make up a perfectly fitting whole.

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Gantz - Perfect Answer (2011): In the second Gantz movie (that in truth is the second half of one very long movie) Director Shinsuke Sato still ignores the fanservice part of the manga he is adapting, and concentrates on the characters and a lot of melodrama that's from time to time broken up by pretty fantastic fight scenes, as well as by a handful of pleasantly weird flourishes. The general tenor in reviews of the film seems to be that there just aren't enough of the fight scenes, but I really prefer the two tour-de-force set-pieces the film does have to the "more blood, more tits" approach; you know, there's nothing wrong with trying to stay classy. The problem the film has in my eyes is one of pacing - it takes a bit too much time to get going (and a bit too much time to actually end once the plot is over and done with), and then hasn't quite enough time left to develop the huge swathes of manga it has decided to adapt. I still enjoy the two Gantz films quite a bit more than most films of the blockbuster league, though.

The Black Sleep (1956): In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea to make a Gothic horror movie about the usual mad science stuff featuring Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and a heartbreakingly ill looking Bela Lugosi. In practice, it's one of those films where most of the old stars are just carted out for a few minutes to remind the audience of better films, and the only one of them with a substantial role - Rathbone as the mad scientist - has the difficult job to not upstage Herbert Rudley too much while still acting like the prototype of Cushing's Baron Frankenstein.

The film's main problem is that there really isn't anything remarkable about it except for Rathbone's performance - the script is tame and lacking in imagination, Reginald Le Borg's direction is characteristically bland, and little happens that could not have happened in a film twenty years earlier in exactly the same way. "Pure retro" was an approach to art with as little power in 1956 as it has today.

Investigation Into The Invisible World (2002): I know, it's an incongruous position for someone like me, who always praises Werner Herzog's documentaries for their respect for even the strangest people and ideas, to take, but I find the same approach taken by Jean-Michel Roux talking to a bunch of eso crackpots and schizophrenics in Iceland pretty offensive. It might have something to do with Roux's visual style too, or rather the way he tries to turn Iceland into the cover of an Enya record (though at least the film's score by Biosphere and Hector Zazou is much above the Enya-level) using post-production effects so aggressively manipulative I was at first thinking something was wrong with my DVD player. To me, the whole project feels like kitsch with pretentions to be art, which is always the worst kind of kitsch as well as the worst kind of art.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,french movies,in short,sf,action,horror,gothic,documentary,shinsuke sato,reginald le borg,jean-michel roux,bela lugosi,lon chaney jr,basil rathbone,john carradine