Dressed to Kill

A prisoner in Dartmoor hid the stolen printing plates of the Bank of England. He told nobody where; instead he made three music boxes in the prison workshop and hid the information inside the tune they play. The boxes were sold and went to three different buyers. Now a group is collecting them. One of them belongs to a friend of Watson's; the man is killed and the box disappears. Holmes takes an interest in the tune itself. The notes give a sequence and the sequence is an address. Roy William Neill directs. Basil Rathbone plays Holmes and Nigel Bruce plays Watson; Patricia Morison is in the cast. It is the last of the fourteen Holmes films with Rathbone and Bruce; the series closed with it. The narrative takes a cue from a Conan Doyle story but the plot was largely written for the film. The films of the series in this period moved Holmes into the twentieth century; the events take place not in the Victorian era but in the years it was made. The woman at the centre is its strongest side and she misleads Holmes twice. It runs under seventy minutes and the narrative lingers nowhere. Its limit is scale; it was made on a B picture budget and the sets are limited. Another limit is Watson; the character is far from the books and used as comic material. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Holmes films and studio mysteries of the forties. Who it is not for: it is short, the budget shows, and it is distant for anyone expecting Doyle.