Cast:
Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Nigel Bruce (Dr. John H. Watson), Patricia Morison (Hilda Courtney/Charwoman), Edmund Breon ("Stinky" Emery), Frederick Worlock (Colonel Cavanaugh), Carl Harbord (Inspector Hopkins), Patricia Cameron (Evelyn Clifford), Holmes Herbert (Ebenezer Crabtree), Harry Cording (Hamid), Leyland Hodgson (Tour Guide), and Mary Gordon (Mrs. Hudson) Directed by Roy William Neill (#846 - Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, #873 - Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, #925 - Sherlock Holmes in Washington, #936 - Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, #1021 - The Spider Woman, #1040 - The Scarlet Claw, #1056 - The Pearl of Death, #1161 - The House of Fear, #1216 - The Woman in Green, #1262 - Pursuit to Algiers, #1620 - Terror by Night)
Review:
It has been said that Basil Rathbone wondered aloud on the set with one vocal question: "Why am I doing this?" Dressed to Kill is the fourteenth and final installment of the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes series. If one had to play a character for seven years that had three notable phases, one can probably see where Rathbone's quandary comes in. At least the shift from to B-movie didn't hinder the look of these movies, because even when Universal Pictures aimed them for the war-time crowd, the movies managed to retain a basic sense of enjoyable mystery. Four of the twelve Universal films had managed to fall into the public domain (with this being one of them, although searching for the others isn't too hard) because of a lack of copyright renewal, and they were even released with digital restoration and colorization (by computers). It is only in recent years that one can enjoy these movies in proper DVD/Blu-Ray releases, for which can credit the UCLA Film and Television Archive (who restored the movies from 1993 to 2001, with funding coming from UCLA, Hugh Hefner, and later Warner Bros). Prints don't always survive in great condition, so imagine having to come up with something where the best possible prints are from 16-millimeter transfers. At any rate, this movie was written by Frank Gruber and Leonard Lee, with the former writer responsible for the previous film with Terror by Night. This time around, the plot involves music boxes with printing plates put in them that are...ripe enough for murder. It basically is a cat-and-mouse game to figure out what the boxes and plates mean before one side can get all three boxes. It might seem a bit familiar to The Pearl of Death (1944), which involved a thief putting a stolen pearl into one of a select group of Napoleon busts that hired a killer to find the bust at the cost of the folks with the busts, and that movie credited the 1904 story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons as its inspiration. It also borrows an aspect used in previous movies with a femme fatale as one of the key adversaries. One can credit the fact that these movies don't become a parody of themselves and have a remarkable consistency that while not exactly better than average is at the very least one to respect with craftsmanship.
It all helps to have a few offbeat moments. Rathbone gets to fall under danger with a whole thing about gas that seems quite silly when paired with an earlier scene about comparing notes of the music box with a friend (of course hearing that box over and over doesn't help) and Bruce gets to make duck noises...somehow there is a context to that (i.e. a girl getting beat up for a music box that cries when found by the duo). Ah but that isn't quite fair to him, because they the exact chemistry needed to make this series roll as it needs to, and one only wonders how the radio series must have felt for folks back then. Honestly this is an okay way to end the series. It lacks a a proper climax, and it seems a bit familiar, but it maintains the consistency that this series has had without being a putrid way to close out what generally worked best in those little moments (i.e. like the ones I mentioned earlier). 72 minutes isn't too much to ask with a familiar group of actors fit for a familiar style of movie. Rathbone and Bruce play their parts with what is needed in the textbook style of detectives that are definitive without looking stiffly bored in the proceedings, no matter if you've watched one or all of these before seeing this. Morison leads the group of adversaries with worthy energy that makes a capable threat to match the heroes without looking like a copy of the folks from before, able to match in diverting energy, and this works best in a scene paired with Breon, in which they share a few lines with each other that ends with a quality ambush. Worlock plays the other part of the threat just fine (this was his fifth appearance in the series) while Harbord plays things with stock calmness of a character that actually had appeared in a few of the original stories (in this series, it is Lestrade that got the attention with six appearances). At any rate, there is a general causal quality that Neill has honed without trouble. This was the penultimate film he directed (Black Angel came out just two months after this film), as he died later that year at the age of 59, having directed over a hundred movies. If you've seen one, you've nearly seen all the other films, but Dressed to Kill maintains itself to serve as the logical conclusion to a series that more often than not generated useful mystery and workable performances to make it worthy enough for those who are curious for what it managed to do in the span of seven years and fourteen films.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
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