Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

"The cut-throats of the world menace us all -- you can help stop this savagery," Holmes tells the heroine of Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror early in the film, thus setting a tone of seriousness and immediacy that was hard to ignore in early 1942. The first and most serious of Universal's Sherlock Holmes movies, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror was also the boldest in purpose, intended to re-introduce into the present day (i.e., 1942) Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the roles of Holmes and Watson, which they had portrayed previously in a pair of superb period thrillers at 20th Century Fox. Strangely enough, virtually all of the Holmes films made up to that time, except for the two Fox films starring Rathbone and Bruce, had placed the detective in the present day, but Universal evidently felt that wartime London would be a stretch for audiences. The studio could not have had a better script with which to do the job, for Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror placed the Victorian-spawned detective right in the middle of the Second World War; in their first exterior shot of the film (albeit one done entirely in the studio), Holmes and Watson move about a London braced for German attack and ringed by barriers and patrols. It was a high-risk strategy that worked, principally because of the chemistry of the two lead actors, a script that had a lot of depth as well as enough action for two movies, and a superb supporting cast. Ostensibly based on the Conan Doyle story "His Last Bow," Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror only quoted from the latter book in its final scene, transposing its meaning to World War II. Otherwise, screenwriters Robert Hardy Andrews, John Bright, and Lynn Riggs came up with a surprisingly sophisticated script, in which even well-intentioned allies were depicted as obstructionist at times, the principal villain Meade (Thomas Gomez) sported a complex streak of megalomania, and the heroine (Evelyn Ankers) was willing to compromise herself and her virtue, and sacrifice herself to see justice done. One must resist the tendency to laugh at part of the denouement -- the suggestion that German intelligence planted an agent in England in 1918, in advance preparation for World War II -- and the script may have one too many moments that sound like speeches, but it all works in the context of the time; beyond the note-perfect performances, the photography by Woody Bredell was suffused in deep shadows and an ominous look, broken only at the end in the beautifully wrought setting of a bombed-out church at sunrise. There would be better, more sophisticated, and more subtly drawn films to follow in the series that were truer to the Conan Doyle stories, but this was about as strong a start as the makers of the new cycle of films could ask for. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide