THE WOMAN IN GREEN: Holmes is hypnotized into signing his own death warrant, as Sally Shepherd, Henry Daniell (as Prof. Moriarity), Percival Vivian and Hillary Brooke offer witness.
saw him; also, an attempt on Holmes’ own life establishes that rich men like Fenwick and the men made to assassinate them are being duped with hypnotism, which leads Holmes and Watson to the Mesmer Club, of which Lydia Marlowe is a member. (So is Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, who gets his only Universal se- ries mention in this adventure.) The last Holmes film scripted by Bertram Millhauser, THE WOMAN IN GREEN has tenuous (uncredited) basis in Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the story which brought Holmes back to life after his perceived death at Reichenbach Falls—and therefore is owed an even greater debt by Millhauser’s own script for THE SPIDER WOMAN. (The Doyle story is also of import for
introducing Colonel Sebastian Moran, who plays such an im- portant part in the later TERROR BY NIGHT.) There is an aspect of warmed-over SPIDER WOMAN about THE WOMAN IN GREEN, which reprises its femme fa- tale, the notion of men being knocked-off for their insurance money, Holmes being used as a rifle target, and the scene of the villain (Moriarty/Moriarity in this case) surprising Holmes with a personal visit to Baker Street— but it’s all expertly handled and even somewhat deceptively fresh in appeal. This is due, in part, to the undisguised 1940s resetting of the material (Pembroke House may sound like a classic Holmes haunt, but certainly doesn’t look like one), and also to Virgil Miller’s cinematography, which stretches
out compositionally to brave some unorthodox, almost dream-like angles and framings. The hypnotism scenes, which involve a tabletop pond with flow- ers that float in whirlpool motion, include some enticing optical effects by John P. Fulton, which recall the pool that shows images from the ancient past, which Fulton provided for THE MUMMY (1932). Watching the film a sec- ond time, while auditing David Stuart Davies’ commentary, we noticed a nice bit of foreshad- owing at 8:45, when Marlowe’s housekeeper Crandon (Sally Shepherd) is shown smoking a solitary cigarette on the terrace and extinguishes it on a loose brick in the ledge—the same loose brick that nearly causes Holmes’ death in the last reel. In
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