Watson fails to debunk the absurd practice of hypnosis in THE WOMAN IN GREEN.
All of VOLUME THREE’s sup- plementary items, including David Stuart Davies’ audio commen- tary, are found on the WOMAN IN GREEN disc, and MPI identi- fies the placement of these ex- tras on the label for the first time. This set offers the best of Davies’ three talks; except for one refer- ence to a “typical” Roy William Neill shot, he wisely steers clear of guesswork on the technical side of filmmaking. He shares a fair amount of production detail, keeps everything onscreen tied to Conan Doyle as much as pos- sible, and spends a fair amount of time on the series’ various Moriartys, noting that Henry Daniell was Rathbone’s own per- sonal favorite and parrying some- what with that choice. He also chronicles WOMAN IN GREEN’s script problems with the censors, who rankled at its depiction of very young, prepubescent girls as the victims of the “finger mur- ders.” (There is a morgue scene between Holmes and Inspector
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Gregson in which the dialogue suggests they are viewing a child’s corpse, anyway.) There is one “oops” moment when Davies finds fault with the film’s writing because only Sir George Fenwick is shown being made to do Lydia’s bidding through hypno- sis—mere seconds before the character of Corporal Williams (Tom Bryson) is introduced as Holmes’ hypnotized, would-be assassin. Only limited lip service is paid to the other three films in the set, with Davies pegging PURSUIT TO ALGIERS as the worst of the bunch, noting that Holmes appears to be travelling by many different kinds of train in TERROR BY NIGHT’s care- lessly matched stock footage (while otherwise paying it more praise than it really deserves), and saying little about DRESSED TO KILL.
The poster and photo gallery (2m 39s) suffers from the same rush-through as on the previ- ous volumes; again, the disc
producers seem unwilling to show any single image in its en- tirety, rapidly dissolving from one rostrum shot to the next before they can be properly admired. Worse still is a film clip of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a 1m 20s excerpt from a British Movietone newsreel that announced his passing. It is perhaps not the fault of MPI, but this footage exists elsewhere in more complete form and shows the grand old gentle- man—in his only film appear- ance—speaking about his famous character and his newfound in- terest in spiritualism. Whether MPI presented the newsreel in its entirety or cut it down to per- ceived essentials we do not know, but this clip hacks out any non- Holmes-related content as irrel- evant (even the opening shot of Doyle walking to his seat); more offensive still is its projection speed, which is too fast, crank- ing-up Doyle’s true speaking voice into near-chipmunkery. Anyone familiar with this footage
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