Dressed to Kill - 1946

“Dressed to Kill” (1946) is the final “Sherlock Holmes” film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, capping a series of 14 movies. That’s enough reason watch, but you may find watching difficult as copies of this public domain movie are not in great condition.

I’ll not go too deep into the plot as anything is likely to be a spoiler in a mystery. The story unfolds, however, in a nice way that lets us see the clues at the same time Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson do. In a lot of mysteries, movies as well as books, there are facts not revealed to us until the end, but the deduction has a real-time feel here. We know as much as they do. Mr. Rathbone is the cerebral and unemotional Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Bruce is the jovial Dr. Watson, who chronicles Sherlock’s exploits in the Strand.

A prison inmate makes plain wooden music boxes, and they are sold at auction to collectors and toy store owners. We eventually discover that the music boxes contain clues to hidden plates that were used in a forgery scheme. His gang on the outside are retrieving the music boxes to get the clues, to get the plates.

Though the series was fun, I was never quite reconciled to placing Sherlock outside his Victorian era. The only time we see his deerstalker hat in this movie is a brief glimpse in the background, resting on a wig stand. It looks a little sad.

Dr. Watson, again, provides the comic relief, particularly when comforting a little girl they’ve rescued. He is left to babysit and tries to amuse her by making duck sounds. This distresses her more.

His old school chum “Stinky”, played by Edmund Breon, drops by. He happens to be a music box collector and so finds himself tangled in the mystery. Dr. Watson may have the friend with the funny name, but Stinky is Public School and patrician all the same, despite his goofiness.

Sherlock, on the other hand, has friends in lower society, such as the busker in the pub for street singers who helps him trace a tune from a music box as a clue. He’s a scruffy-looking fellow, but all business and with far more dignity than the clownish Stinky.

The title of the movie, which doesn’t sound like a Sherlock Holmes story at all (unless somebody was murdered during Fashion Week in NYC), comes from the villain’s wearing disguises to commit crimes.

Patricia Morison plays a music box buyer who visits their bachelor pad, and becomes a problem, as women will be, particularly with bachelors.

Mary Gordon is back as Mrs. Hudson, their housekeeper at 221B Baker Street.

The plot moves briskly along, and at one point Basil Rathbone must work his way out of a “certain death” trap like Houdini. This scene is actually the most chilling in the movie; not for his struggle to escape, but because the bad guys who tie him up leave him in a room with a canister of poison gas. He is told, “The Germans used it with gratifying results in removing their undesirables.”

This was early 1946, when the horrors of the Nazi regime were still raw and still being uncovered. A startling and somewhat sickening line.

For a generation, and generations afterward, Basil Rathbone WAS Sherlock Holmes. For a look at the man who held the title before him, visit my New England Travels blog for Tuesday’s post on William Gillette, who played Sherlock on stage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He coined many of the attributes we think of when we think of Sherlock Holmes, and built an extraordinary castle on the Connecticut River.