Despite a rather simplistic plot – based more faithfully than most of the Universal Sherlock Holmes series on Conan Doyle – The Pearl of Death is one of the best of the Basil Rathbone Holmes series, directed at a cracking pace by Universal veteran R. William Neill. It may not be as concisely engineered and as moodily lit as the previous entry, Neill’s outstanding The Scarlet Claw (1944) but it remains an effective enough piece nonetheless.

The straightforward plot is, in many ways, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943), but the film is none the worse for following such a linear route. Neill puts his experience on Universal’s horror movies (he’d previously directed The Black Room (1935), Dr Syn (1937) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)) to good use, particularly in the scenes involving the Creeper (Rondo Hatton), who for the most part we only ever see as an indistinct figure lurking in the shadows. Though the relationship between the Creeper and Naomi Drake (Evelyn Ankers) is perhaps the weakest and least well defined aspect of the script (it was invented by screenwriter Bertram Millhouser and does not appear in Conan Doyle’s original story, The Six Napoleons), Hatton’s wordless, shuffling performance is genuinely disturbing and he was to put it to good use playing similar roles in a number of B horror movies over the next few years.

There are many excellent moments in The Pearl of Death that rate as among the most memorable in the series – chief villain Giles Conover’s (Miles Mander) duping of Watson (played, as ever, by Nigel Bruce) when he calls on 221b Baker Street in disguise and his vicious ‘gift’ of a booby-trapped book, a trap which Holmes escapes thanks to his intimate knowledge of tobacco ash; the discovery of the catatonic housekeeper at the scene of the first murder; and Holmes’ climactic confrontation with Conover which gives Rathbone some marvellous dialogue (“I don’t like your work, Conover. I’ve seen quite a bit of it both here in London and elsewhere on the continent. I don’t like the smell of you either, that underground smell, the sick sweetness of decay”). Then too there are the fine performances, Mander being particular notable in his sadly few appearances as the appalling Giles Conover.

In retrospect, The Pearl of Death might be seen as the last gasp of genuine creativity for the series before it descended into a mediocrity born of undue haste – Universal were turning the Sherlock Holmes films out at a tremendous rate (there had already been two other films in 1944 and there were to be a further three the following year) and the pace was beginning to take its toll on the quality. The Pearl of Death may have its faults but it certainly eclipses the routine thrillers that were to follow.