What carries the film is char- acter. The Good Comrades are a motley bunch who seem to deliberately die in dull-to-most- interesting order, with the cheery and childlike Alastair (Aubrey Mather), the tattooed pipe-smoking sea Captain John Simpson (Harry Cording) and suave mystery buff Merrivale (Paul Cavanagh) at the high end.
As with VOLUME ONE, SCARLET STREET’s Richard Valley has written the liner notes for the col- lection. To Valley’s credit, there are far fewer errors here than in the previous set but, bewilder- ingly, the films under discussion are discussed almost not at all— a mean feat to sustain over a twelve-page spread. Aside from a single paragraph plot recapitu- lation, Valley’s notes on THE PEARL OF DEATH wander off into a 1927 STRAND Magazine contest (guess the dozen stories Conan Doyle selected as the best of the canon), the IMDb minu- tiae of Miles Mander, Evelyn Ankers and Rondo Hatton, and even a Frank Zappa anecdote (!) before he runs out of space. THE SCARLET CLAW fares better, at least managing to get dis- cussed—with spoilers aplenty and an Ian Wolfe interview byte—despite an early topical emphasis on Universal’s now- hard-to-see MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET (1942), whose French setting he credits as a “possible” reason for the film being set in French Canada. (Actually, only a few signs in the film are visibly French, and none were carried over from MARIE ROGET; a gar- den weeder that serves as the murder weapon in both films probably was, but it is not con- spicuously French.) Valley’s notes on THE SPIDER WOMAN are the best of the bunch, being a well-deserved tribute to Gale Sondergaard and her Spider
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Woman persona, which he traces from her designation as a Black Widow in the Preston Sturges- scripted Bob Hope comedy NEVER SAY DIE (1939) to an in- terview quote about KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (filmed in 1985, the year of Sondergaard’s death). The notes on HOUSE OF FEAR spend the equivalent of two out of three pages sort- ing through the inadequacies of Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips” and the influences of Agatha Christie and Robert Louis Steven- son before devoting some clos- ing words of comment to the actual movie and its screenwriter. MPI’s still and poster gallery,
as with VOLUME ONE, unreels too hastily, with no single image appearing in full onscreen before it begins to dissolve in and out from another incompletely seen poster or photo. The materials themselves are handsome, but they are given short shrift by their hurried presentation.
For any seasoned home video collector, the third of MPI Home Video’s Sherlock Holmes Collec- tions is likely to be the least at- tractive purchase. Of the four movies it offers, three—THE WOMAN IN GREEN, TERROR BY NIGHT and DRESSED TO KILL—are virtually synonymous with the term “public domain,” having been released by count- less budget-line labels since the dawn of Beta and VHS, and in better-than-decent-looking trans- fers. The MPI set does restore their original Universal titles, but most buyers will acquire VOL- UME THREE out of a desire to complete the set rather than out of real need.
THE WOMAN IN GREEN is a captivating if not particularly mysterious Holmes mystery, mostly remarkable for its undis- guised modernity and the unex- pected return of Holmes’ greatest
adversary. It opens with a nearly 5m prologue of a meeting of police inspectors at CID Head- quarters, where they are dressed- down by their Commissioner for failing to solve a series of three mutilation murders—all young women, all forfeiting a finger to their killer. Holmes and Watson are brought into the baffling case by Inspector Gregson (Matthew Boulton), a competent and so- ber-minded copper filling in for Dennis Hoey. Holmes is saved the trouble of actually deducing anything by merely being obser- vant: while having a post-autopsy drink with Gregson at a festive dance club called Pembroke House, he exchanges nods of recognition with Sir George Fenwick (Paul Cavanagh in his third and final Holmes picture), who is having champagne with a striking blonde (the excellent Hillary Brooke), later identified as Lydia Marlowe. (She wears black rather than green.) When Fenwick awakens the morning after his date in a cheap flop- house with no memory of how he got there or how he acquired the severed finger in his pocket, he returns to Marlowe’s apart- ment where he is blackmailed by her partner-in-crime, Pro- fessor “Moriarity” (evidently Universal’s preferred spell- ing)—who supposedly fell to his death at the end of SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON but who is here de- scribed as having been hung in Montevidéo. The robust Lionel Atwill is here replaced by a cod- eyed, bow-tied and generally unimpressed-looking Henry Daniell (THE BODY SNATCHER). When Fenwick is found shot dead at point-blank range with a Pembroke House matchbook clutched in his fist, Holmes real- izes the gesture was meant to implicate the woman in whose company the detective previously
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