The House of Fear

A house on the Scottish coast. Seven men live in it; men who want to be left alone, unalike, and they call themselves the Good Comrades. They have formed a club and each of their lives is insured in favour of the others. Then one of them dies. Before the death an envelope had come for him in the post; there were orange pips inside. The number gives how many are left. There is another death. The bodies are unrecognisable. The insurance company sends for Sherlock Holmes. Roy William Neill directs. Basil Rathbone plays Holmes and Nigel Bruce plays Watson; Aubrey Mather and Paul Cavanagh are in the cast. It is an American production, made in 1945. The film is part of Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, which ran to fourteen films with Rathbone and Bruce. The narrative takes only a motif from Conan Doyle's story The Five Orange Pips; the plot is entirely different. Most of the other films in the series were moved to the present day; this one takes place in a house out of time. The narrative is a closed room puzzle; the number of suspects is fixed and falls with each death. Watson unusually takes part in the investigation here and does work on his own. The film is short; it runs about an hour. Its limit is the production; the narrative is simple, the solution easy, and the tension low. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Sherlock Holmes films and forties crime pictures. Who it is not for: it is old, simple, and the ending easy.