Dressed to Kill (1946)

Dressed to Kill is an American thriller film first released in 1946, directed by Roy William Neill.  The film stars Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Patricia Morison, Edmund Breon and Frederick Worlock.  It has also been released under the title: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


When one of Dr Watson’s old friends, Stinky Emery, is murdered at his home in London, Sherlock Holmes is intrigued – not so much by the killing but by the theft of an ordinary wooden music box which Emery purchased shortly before his death.  Holmes discovers that the box was acquired at an auction house, one of three boxes that were sold, each made by inmates at Dartmoor prison.  Holmes manages to trace the owners of the other two boxes, but his unknown opponents steal one of the boxes before he can act.  He does, however, succeed in recovering one of the boxes.  He deduces that the tune played by the music box is a secret code, one that will reveal the location of a set of stolen Bank of England printing plates.  Will he be able to crack the code from the one piece of the puzzle he has in his possession?

Dressed to Kill was the last of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films featuring Basil Rathbone as the famed Baker Street detective and Nigel Bruce as his trusty companion Dr Watson.  Having played Holmes on radio and film for seven years, Rathbone was not sorry to give up the part, although Bruce still relished playing Watson and would continue portraying the character on radio for another year, with Tom Conway taking over the mantle of Holmes.  This was not, however, Rathbone’s final association with the great detective.  He would appear as Holmes in a half-hour American television drama, The Adventure of the Black Baronet, in 1953, and then in a short-lived stage play that same year.  This play was intended to feature Bruce in the role of Watson, but the actor was too ill to work at the time and died when the play was in rehearsal.

With its carefully constructed plot and Holmes’s reliance on deductive reasoning to solve the mystery, Dressed to Kill feels like a genuine Conan Doyle story, far more so than many other entries in the series.  In fact, the plot is loosely based on the writer’s short story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, which had previously been adapted for an earlier film in the series The Pearl of Death (1944).  There are numerous references to other Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, notably A Scandal in Bohemia.  The film may not be as imaginatively directed or shot as some of the films that preceded it, some may cringe at Nigel Bruce’s attempt at a Donald Duck impression, but overall this is a satisfying piece of escapist fun, and a respectable swansong for Basil Rathbone’s exemplary Sherlock Holmes.

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