Watson invites fellow clubman Major Duncan-Bleek (Alan Mowbray) along for the trainbound mystery TERROR BY NIGHT, to the intrigue of the ever-watchful Holmes.
stealthy movements of Holmes and himself using a stalk of cel- ery and a ball of cheese. It’s a witty allusion to Doyle’s most fa- mous untold story, and the de- cision not to arrest the Lisbon Three for their initial crimes like- wise permits a good deal of witty cat-and-mouse dialogue to con- tinue unabated till the ship docks. But it’s the voyage in this in- stance, not the getting there; Rathbone in especially fine form (witness his shipdeck scene with Riordan as he solves the stolen emeralds case), Bruce gives rare vent to his singing voice with a disarmingly moving “Loch Lomond,” and we also learn that Professor Moriarity, despite his bad qualities, was a virtuoso of the bassoon. Ulti- mately, though it may not play fairly, PURSUIT TO ALGIERS is a likable diversion with much to recommend it.
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As foretold in VOLUME TWO’s Robert Gitt interview, PURSUIT has been brought to DVD in the most blatantly patchwork condi- tion of any title in all three vol- umes. The opening music is heard for several seconds before a particularly wretched-looking Universal globe logo fades in; this then dissolves to a windowboxed title sequence of only average condition. Once the film proper begins, the picture quality settles down to a very fine, crisp, if con- sistently grainy look until the fi- nal shot, which looks noticeably softer and is bridged to a blunt “The End” card (no end credits, no War Bond pitch) by a reck- less, artificially imposed dissolve. It’s almost too chop-a-block to qualify as “restoration,” but it sounds consistently fine through- out. The mono track is so clear, in fact, that the subtitles here are the least error-riddled of all the
MPI titles; the outstanding fudge is perhaps derived from the Prime Minister’s “We have a plane in readiness to leave to- night,” which the subtitler posits in someplace called “Retineus.”
Enjoyable though it is, TERROR BY NIGHT is the cheap- est, flimsiest and shortest of all the Universal Holmes pic- tures: a trainbound whodunit of which perhaps one-sixth con- sists of cutaways to locomotive miniatures and stock train foot- age from movies made at the dawn of the sound era. “Adapted from a story by” Conan Doyle (actually, from bits of business in several), it puts Holmes, Watson and Lestrade (Dennis Hoey, making his last series ap- pearance) on the rails to Edin- burgh, Scotland to watch over “The Star of Rhodesia,” a fabu- lous diamond owned by Lady
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