THE WOMAN IN GREEN

Sherlock Holmes is one my top five all time favorite fictional characters. The other four are Doc Savage, James Bond, Superman and Conan the Barbarian. And of all of the many fine actors who have portrayed Holmes over the years in both films and television, Basil Rathbone's portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal sleuth will always be my favorite, primarily because his was the first visual interpretation of the character I encountered, thanks to Saturday afternoon showings of his Holmes films on television when I was a kid.

Rathbone played Holmes, along with co-star Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, in fourteen feature films between 1939 and 1946. The first two films were produced by 20th Century Fox before the rights were acquired by Universal (my favorite Golden Age Hollywood studio) for the remaining twelve films. When Universal took over, the studio decided to move the characters forward in time from the Victorian era to present day, 1940s London. This allowed for Holmes to tangle with Nazis as villains and take advantage of then state-of-the-art technology. Rathbone and Bruce are still the classic Holmes and Watson but I must confess, I prefer Holmes material when it's set in the era in which he was created.

Nonetheless, THE WOMAN IN GREEN (1945), which I watched last night, is a solid little mystery thriller. It was the eleventh film in the Holmes series and features Henry Daniell (in his third Holmes film) as the diabolical Moriarty. The plot involves a series of murders of young woman, all of whom are found with a finger missing. It's a gruesome affair, to be sure, with the detached digits being used in a twisted blackmail scheme by Moriarty and his wicked femme fatale accomplice Lydia Marlowe (Hillary Brooke, also in her third Holmes film). The convoluted plot involves hypnosis and climaxes with a battle of the wills between Marlowe and Holmes as she attempts to hypnotize the intrepid sleuth into committing suicide.

THE WOMAN IN GREEN is directed with brisk efficiency by veteran Roy William Neill, who, in addition to helming several other Holmes films, directed the classic Universal horror film FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943). The screenplay by Bertram Millhauser, borrows material from two of Doyle's original stories, THE FINAL PROBLEM and THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE. A more accurate title for THE WOMAN IN GREEN would have been THE ADVENTURE OF THE SEVERED FINGERS but I doubt that would have gotten past the film censors of the 1940s. As it is, THE WOMAN IN GREEN is a fun film featuring my all time favorite Holmes actor in the role he was born to play.

Thumbs up.