village where everyone speaks with a British accent, rather than a French one, it’s hard to tell. THE SCARLET CLAW is very likely the series’ finest achieve- ment. The screenplay by Edmund L. Hartmann (SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON) and Roy William Neill, based on a treat- ment by Paul Gangelin and Brenda Weisberg (THE MAD GHOUL), makes up for its derivative nature with solid construction, mythic di- mension and a genuinely slippery killer, whose change of character rather daringly includes one of the earliest (if not the first) cross-dress- ing homicides in film history. Add to this the elegant cinematogra- phy of ace cameraman George Robinson, exceptionally fine John B. Goodman art direction and the special effects dynamite of John P. Fulton, and there is little to com- plain about. Three points of curi- osity, though... First, at 31:36, as the tavern patrons rush toward the moors in search of Holmes, the camera settles on a close-up of Marie (Harding), who begins to say something baleful as the shot dis- solves to the next scene—wouldn’t you love to know what she said? Second, on a similar note, after
quoting Winston Churchill on Canada in the film’s closing mo- ments, Rathbone adds a few ex- tra words that are drowned out by the closing music—wouldn’t you love to know what he said? (In this case, we can help: he says, “God bless him.”) Lastly, seeing the film again for the first time in many years, we were surprised to dis- cover how much the film shares in common with Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY... KILL! [Operazione paura, 1966]: a village held in the grip of superstitious fear; a female who bleeds to death while tolling an unheeded church bell; a ratio- nal outsider who arrives to inves- tigate and disprove the occult associations of the murders; an innkeeper who holds the detectives at bay with a rifle, and his daugh- ter, who dies from a fatal throat wound; even the cross-dressing scene is relevant, considering that Bava’s girl-ghost was played by a little boy in drag. Enough details are shared by the two films for us to imagine that the largely impro- vised script of Bava’s film may have been rooted in someone’s memory of this earlier production. UCLA preservation officer Rob- ert Gitt, who discusses the Holmes
Dr. Watson, vacationing in the cheery hamlet of La Mort Rouge, finds the cadaverous Ted Billings (not Skelton Knaggs!) by his side in THE SCARLET CLAW.
project in PRESERVING SHERLOCK HOLMES (4m 30s, included as a supplement on the CLAW disc though described on the packag- ing as an “Introduction”), mentions THE SCARLET CLAW as one of the few films in the series for which no camera negative appears to ex- ist. There is a very slight softness to the picture, but thanks to the original gloss of Robinson’s cin- ematography, this generations- down transfer retains an inviting look of luxury with deep blacks and no distracting grain levels. Gitt’s talk is interesting, especially when he notes how close some titles came to being unsalvageable— PURSUIT TO ALGIERS (from VOLUME THREE) had so suc- cumbed to vinegar syndrome that it was “just able to get through the printer.” Anyone with an interest in the topic will probably wish that more detail and anecdotes had been shared, along with some before-and-after examples or com- parisons with the previous Key Video transfers, but the Gitt talk is a gesture in the right direction. The SCARLET CLAW disc, though unlabelled as such, con- tains the set’s audio commentary by Holmes scholar David Stuart Davies. Ostensibly about all four films in the set, Davies’ talk focuses almost exclusively on THE SCAR- LET CLAW and (be forewarned) reveals the killer’s identity very early on. Aside from some haphazard editing which sometimes makes it unclear which film Davies is dis- cussing (hear 21:22, for example), he makes a series of unfortunate blunders that strip away some of our trust in his authority on the subject of cinema. At 4:43, he pauses to admire a “lovely crane shot,” though the presence of a balcony railing and subsequent views of the same room prove that the shot was taken from the set’s mezzanine. At 24:15, he intro- duces cadaverous character actor Ted Billings as Skelton Knaggs, a
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