Nigel Bruce

In thirteen of the twenty-nine films the catalogue holds, Nigel Bruce does the same job: Dr Watson at the side of Basil Rathbone's Holmes. The AFI records Sidney Lanfield's The Hound of the Baskervilles of 1939 as the pair's first Holmes film and writes that they made fourteen Holmes films in all; the catalogue lists thirteen of that series, eleven of them signed by Roy William Neill, with Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon among them. Watson's function is plain in the first film: Holmes sends him out onto the Dartmoor moors to protect Sir Henry while he himself waits in the background in disguise. In Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion he played Beaky, and in the AFI's telling a toast nearly kills him, he reacts allergically to brandy, Johnnie says that drink will be the end of him, and days afterwards the police come to ask Lina about Beaky's death in Paris. In Rebecca he is Major Giles Lacy, and in Victor Fleming's Treasure Island of 1934 he is Squire Trelawney, who raises the money for the voyage to the treasure island.