DRESSED TO KILL (1946)

In Dartmoor Prison, an inmate, John Davidson, is working at his job of making music boxes to be sold at auction. Davidson is serving time for counterfeiting, and a fellow inmate asks him why he doesn’t go for an early release by telling the authorities where he hid the five-pound plates. He doesn't say but he clearly has a plan. At Gaylord's auction house, the three innocuous music boxes are sold fairly cheaply to three people: an upper class fellow nicknamed Stinky who collects music boxes, a middle class man named Kilgour who buys it for his little daughter, and Evelyn Clifford who plans to offer it for sale at her toy shop. After the auction, Col. Cavanaugh shows up, wanting to buy the music boxes. Being too late, he bribes the clerk into giving him the names and addresses of the buyers. At 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes is playing "Danny Boy" on his violin and Dr. Watson is celebrating the publication in the Strand Magazine of his latest Holmes adventure, "A Scandal in Bohemia." Watson's old friend Stinky shows up to chat and tells of being knocked unconscious by a burglar. Despite all the fancy music boxes he owns, the burglar took only a cheap, plain one. However, when Holmes and Watson visit, we discover that the stolen box is not the one that Stinky bought at auction, though it looked similar. Holmes admires the box's unusual tune and memorizes it. Later, Stinky has another late night visitor, the lovely Hilda Courtney who nonchalantly offers to buy the auctioned music box. He refuses and Hilda's brutish chauffeur Hamid throws a knife at Stinky and kills him. Investigating the scene of the crime, Holmes notices the music box gone, goes to the auction house, and gets the names of the other two buyers. When he and Watson go to the Kilgour home, Mom and Dad are gone but they run into a housemaid leaving on an errand who invites them to stay and wait. Eventually, they discover the little Kilgour daughter tied up in a closet. Sure enough, the housemaid was actually Hilda in disguise and she has taken the music box. A cat and mouse game ensues as Holmes tracks down the toy store box. Hilda and Cavanaugh have boxes #1 and #2 and Holmes has box #3 and the memory of box #1's tune. He discovers that, though 1 and 3 play the same tune, there are small differences, and that the music must be coded somehow to reveal the whereabouts of the counterfeit plates. Will Holmes get ahold of #2 before Hilda can get #3, and can either one figure out the code?

We’ve come to the twelfth and final Sherlock Holmes film from Universal, and while it’s not the best of the batch, it's perfectly respectable. It doesn't have the thick atmosphere of some of the earlier ones (like HOUSE OF FEAR) but it's not a spy story (SECRET WEAPON) or a security guard story (like the previous one, TERROR BY NIGHT). In fact, the plot feels a lot like a traditional Holmes story as written by Doyle. It's not based directly on one, but the shoutout to "A Scandal in Bohemia" is fun. Patricia Morison, as Hilda, is perhaps the best femme fatale after SPIDER-WOMAN's Gale Sondargaard. Despite the title, she doesn't actually kill anyone, though she almost kills Holmes (a good scene), but she's a strong antagonist. Edmund Breon is fun as Stinky, though no one else really makes much of an impression. Mary Gordon puts in her last appearance as Mrs. Hudson, as do Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson. Some series regulars, such as Ian Wolfe, Harry Cording, and Olaf Hytten, show up. Rathbone may have gotten tired of the job, but it's nice that the series goes out with movies that are still worth watching. Pictured is Nigel Bruce, a bit flummoxed by a pop-up bunny toy. [DVD]