Original half-sheet poster.
a darker, worse-looking print, this detail would have been all but impossible to notice. Many old TV prints of THE WOMAN IN GREEN simply lopped off the prefatory CID scene and picked up with Holmes and Gregson in the mortuary, which is where MPI’s restoration begins to look as handsome and nega- tive-sourced as one wishes the entire film did. The earlier foot- age is a bit soft and possibly cropped quite a bit, judging from a shot of a young woman walk- ing at night which occurs at 3:56, which initially crops her across her eyeline and then, suddenly on a splice, presents her with quite a bit of additional head- room. (We recommend stepping through the shot to derive an il- lustration of how the films in these sets were reassembled
32
from multiple sources, some quite poor.) The picture quality that follows is consistently fault- less, so much so that the Lon- don view visible from Marlowe’s terrace is easily pegged as a cy- clorama. The mono sound is a bit thin but benefits from bass- boosting and is nicely detailed. As with the previous volumes, the English subtitles are a joke; our favorites are the transcrip- tions of Holmes’ chiding of Watson’s appetite (“You and your fleshpots,” which becomes “You and your fish, Watson”) and his description of a peddler who eventually “left [Watson] for someone who looked like better pickings,” who is con- fused for “someone who looked like Phillip the King”! What is even more amazing is that who- ever did the subtitles knew the
correct spelling of the Latin “cannabis japonica”—the “Ori- ental soporific” used by Marlowe to predispose her subjects to hypnosis!
The next film, PURSUIT TO ALGIERS is one of those mys- teries that lead you quite con- tentedly by the nose until the end, then collapses like a house of cards on re-examination. While preparing for a fishing vacation to Scotland (the one at the beginning of THE SPIDER WOMAN?), and trying to ignore headlines of the Duchess of Brookdale’s stolen emeralds, Holmes and Watson are approached by a series of strangers on the street at night. One offers them a newspaper they haven’t dropped, another recommends they try the fish- and-chips at the Soho Oyster
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
