User reviews

This , despite the title wasn't the first film about Sexton Blake, a cut price Sherlock Holmes.i'd never heard of this film and after watching it i realise why,it's an extremely hokey and hoary and outdated atrocity.There are many scenes supposedly set at night, so dark you can hardly see what's going on, there are in fairness a couple of intentional smiles but it's mostly embarrassing in it's ineptness. Plays like an old radio programme episode transferred to film.Terrible, avoid.

That old hero of the Penny Dreadfuls and Boys' Papers, Sexton Blake, the Poor Man's Sherlock Holmes, joins the effort to save the British way of life in this entertaining potboiler. We start out with a hair-raising murder of a man with a cut off hand and head on from there in a wonderful little murder drama, full of quickly made deductions.

This looks a lot like those old Sherlock Holmes movies made by Roy Williams Neill starring Rathbone and Bruce. There is some fine cinematography by Geoffrey Faithful and the acting is certainly adequate to the job. Keep a look out for a very young Jean Simmons in her second year of film acting.