Dressed To Kill

DVD, Dressed To Kill (1946) film

It's a shame to come to the end of these Sherlock Holmes films, although many of them weren't particularly great in themselves, the camaraderie and characters of Holmes and Watson have shone through in their unique Rathbone and Bruce guise, making the experience a pleasure. This final film in the series doesn't exactly go out on a high, but does make for a reasonable installment, as usual taking bits and pieces from various stories and slapping a 'based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle' tag on them. It reminds me of 'The Red-Headed League' which was about counterfeiters, but I have a feeling there might have been a story about jewellery boxes, though it shares similarities with 'The Six Napoleans'.

There are plenty of references, including one or two titles of stories, Watson and Holmes even commenting on the Strand magazine in which a tale has just appeared from the pen of the Doctor. Hopkins is there in place of Lestrade, and Irene Adler gets a nostalgic remembrance, perhaps in anticipation of the female mastermind behind this latest plot. Unfortunately she doesn't come across as great an adversary as to rival Adler, or even the Spider Woman of this series, though certainly she was adequate enough to trap Holmes. In fact she does remind me of the actress who played the Spider Woman, and there's a host of familiar faces in different roles, most notably Hamid, the actor who played him having been in the majority of the series.

The story rattles along nicely, the message is cleverly hidden, and the duo are their usual pleasant company. Some continuity has been reintroduced - the shots fired at the wall in a 'V' shape behind the door, missing in one of the films, are now visible again, so unless Holmes regularly fires into it and then plasters over again, someone was paying some kind of attention. I feel that they could have gone on to do many more films, but this was it, and for many, no matter how dissimilar they are to the exact letter of the books, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce embody the best loved version of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes and his good friend Dr. Watson.

**