1943 was a busy year for director Roy William Neill and the Sherlock Holmes series he’d taken over at Universal the previous year. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon had been in cinemas on 12 February 1943, Sherlock Holmes in Washington on 30 April 1943 and Sherlock Holmes Faces Death on 17 September 1943 and he somehow managed to squeeze in The Spider Woman which was released on 10 December. It marked a significant return to the horrors last seen in the Twentieth Century Fox film that had launched the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce pairing, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939). It owed more, perhaps, to the Universal school of horror film than it did to Conan Doyle, a trend that would continue with the year’s other offerings The Scarlet Claw and The Pearl of Death.
Though not based on a specific story, the film’s screenwriter Bertram Millhauser happily ransacks the canon in search of bits and pieces to fit together into a rollicking mystery that Neill directs at breakneck speed. It opens with a tip of the hat to The Final Problem as Holmes seemingly falls to his death over a waterfall while on a fishing holiday in Scotland with Watson. Back in London, as his friends mourn his death, the city is still gripped by a series of strange suicides of wealthy men who have fallen on hard financial times due to their gambling addictions. Holmes isn’t dead of course, merely creating a space to lure out the culprit, Adrea Spedding (a brilliant and positively glacial Gale Sondergaard) who has been poisoning her victims with a spider and cashing in on the insurance policies she’s persuaded them to sign over to her.
The Empty House, The Speckled Band, The Sign of the Four, The Copper Beeches and, in a brief dialogue mention, The Devil’s Foot all get stirred into the wild and relentless plot. There’s not an ounce of flab on Millhauser’s script which thunders through the increasingly macabre storyline, propelled by Neill’s brisk, no-nonsense direction, at reckless speed. There’s an awful lot going on in the film’s 62 minutes, so much so that you don’t really get a chance to draw breath let alone worry about the more puzzling aspects of the plot (Spedding’s scheme requires an awful lot of patience from someone wanting to get rich the quick and easy way for example).
There are moments that will certainly raise a few eyebrows today. Although Holmes speaks with grudging admiration of Spedding, dubbing her “the female Moriarty” (although never referenced, there are also clear echoes of “the woman”, Irene Adler), some of the dialogue exchanges about women are less than enlightened. And it’s impossible to believe that Holmes “blacking up” to disguise himself as an Indian military officer, Rajni Singh, would pass muster today. A good deal of accepting that things were very different back then will be needed for some to buy into The Spider Woman.
But elsewhere there’s plenty of hopefully less contentious material to enjoy. There’s a brief but exciting chase and gunfight across the London rooftops and Watson’s mistaking of a genuine visitor for another of Holmes’ disguises gives Nigel Bruce arguably his funniest moment in the entire series. Holmes’ battle of wits with Spedding, both knowing who the other really is but never actually letting on, is magnificent and was there ever a creepier supporting character in the entire Rathbone Holmes series than the seven-year-old Larry (an uncredited Teddy Infuhr) who never says a word on his short visit to 221B Baker Street with his Aunt Adrea but is happy enough to capture and listen to flies? If the climax is somewhat contrived (bound and gagged, Holmes is strapped behind a large caricature of Hitler on a carnival shooting range with Watson and Lestrade (Dennis Hoey, as ever) taking aim, unaware of what’s really behind their target) it is undeniably tense and one of Neill’s most suspenseful sequences.
The show is stolen at every turn by Sondergaard whose charming, confident and calculating Adrea Spedding comes as close as anyone to proving Holmes’ undoing. She was so good (deservedly being singled out by critics as one of the film’s greatest assets) that Universal decided to try her out in her own mystery/horror franchise. Sadly, in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946) she’s playing one Zenobia Dollard and not Adrea Spedding and the film is related to the Holmes film by title only. Universal sadly didn’t pursue the idea and it remained the sole outing for Dollard. Sondergaard’s career was subsequently derailed when she and her husband, writer/director Herbert Biberman, were summoned in October 1947 to appear before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. When Biberman was found guilty of having Communist sympathies and jailed as one of the “Hollywood Ten”, Sondergaard became persona non grata and she disappeared from the screen for two decades after 1949’s crime drama East Side, West Side.
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