least impressive to revisit. It was the only Holmes assignment for screenwriter Roy Chanslor, who had previously pitted Tarzan against the Nazis in TARZAN TRIUMPHS (1943) and who, in 1946, would script STRANGE CONQUEST for SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE VOICE OF TERROR director John Rawlins and adapt Cornell Woolrich’s novel BLACK ANGEL into a clas- sic noir script for Roy William Neill (his final film).


An arresting 4m prologue— presented without dialogue and narrated by Gavin Muir in the manner of MGM’s JOHN NESBITT’S PASSING PA- RADE shorts—introduces us to the members of a group of eccentrics known as The Good Comrades who reside together in a precarious bit of seaside


property called Drearcliff Manor. Each night, their dour-looking housekeeper Mrs. Monteith (Sally Shepherd) comes to the dinner table conveying an envelope slipped under the front door and addressed to one of the men; it always contains five orange pips, allegedly a symbol of death in some cultures, and within twenty- four hours, the recipient suffers a mutilating death, perpetuat- ing the local wisdom that “No man goes whole to his grave.” Holmes, intrigued by the pips and the fact that The Good Comrades include among their number one Dr. Simon Merrivale (who disappeared years earlier, after successfully slipping out of a murder rap), goes with Watson to investigate, and they are soon joined by Den- nis Hoey’s Inspector Lestrade.


The set-up is moody but


mechanical in the extreme, and the curtain could have dropped a good deal quicker had anyone thought to post a man outside the mansion (whose chessboard floor tiles expose recycled sets from SHERLOCK HOLMES FACES DEATH) to watch for late night letter-carriers. Pound for pound, THE HOUSE OF FEAR contains nearly as much humor as mystery; this is the film in which the World’s Great- est Detective can’t deduce where he last left his own pipe tobacco, and the first one in which Watson is played as a hot air buffoon who fancies himself an ace detective by associa- tion—and also as a bit of a bully, hurling various insults at Lestrade, played here as a big- footed clod with a badge.


Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce dig for clues on Universal’s cemetery set in THE HOUSE OF FEAR.


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