SHERLOCK HOLMES IN WASHINGTON (1943)

Sir Henry Marchmont, a British diplomat, takes a transatlantic flight from London to New York on some kind of official business. He is watched closely by William Easter and two other men, anxious to get their hands on a document he is carrying. But by the time they wind up on a train from New York to Washington, Easter has figured out that Sir Henry was just a decoy and the document is in the possession of a John Grayson (whose name is actually Alfred Pettibone, not that it matters much). In the train's lounge car, Grayson, knowing he's being watched, chats with a handful of folks, finally passing a "V for victory" matchbook into the purse of socialite Nancy Partridge. Grayson vanishes when the train stops, and soon Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are sent to the States to investigate. They are supposed to stay at the British embassy, but Holmes is sent a reservation at the Hotel Metropole from an unknown source. When he arrives at the hotel, a trunk is delivered to his room which contains the dead body of Grayson. As Holmes has been known to say in other circumstances, the game is afoot. Easter and his men, assuming they are looking for a legal paper-size document, manage to search the homes of most of the lounge car passengers that Grayson had contact with, but we discover that Grayson had shrunk the pages onto microfilm and hidden them in the matchbook. By process of elimination, both Holmes and Easter wind up at Nancy Partridge's engagement party and soon the innocent little matchbook winds up in the hands of the villainous bigwig behind Easter, Richard Stanley, an antiques dealer, though he doesn’t know its importance at first. Nancy is kidnapped, Holmes plays a cat-and-mouse game with Stanley, and the police get involved before everything is sorted out and the document is saved.

The third in the Universal series of Sherlock Holmes movies set during WWII is a little less of a flag waver than the first two, but it's still more a spy story than a detective story, though Holmes does get to use physical clues to obtain information (for example, how he figures out that the spies are headquartered at an antiques shop). Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce continue to work together well as Holmes and Watson, though this film continues Watson's slide into dottiness that began in SECRET WEAPON. George Zucco, so good as Moriarty in ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, is the chief villain and Marjorie Lord (later Danny Thomas's wife on his popular sitcom) is adequate as Nancy, A strong supporting cast includes Henry Daniell (who would play Moriarty later in The Woman in Green) as Easter, John Archer (who was married to Lord) as Nancy's fiancé, and Gavin Muir and Edmund MacDonald as cops, with MacDonald in particular (pictured with Rathbone) functioning as a kind of American Watson. There is a sequence at the engagement party in which we see the "V" matchbook get transferred about the room to different people, none knowing its importance, but it ends up right where it started, so it seems to have been just an elaborate visual gag. The train car scene is nicely played. This is the first of the Rathbone films not to be credited as based on a specific Doyle story. [DVD]