The ninth of the Universal Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes mystery thrillers continued down the darker path that the series had been on since The Spider Woman (1944), as informed by Universal’s horror films as by anything from Conan Doyle. Directed as ever by Roy William Neill and scripted by Bertram Millhauser (his last contribution to the series – he’d been writing the Holmes films since Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)), it was the last of the Universal’s to even tip a hat towards an original Conan Doyle story (the story is largely newly minted but traces can be found of The Adventures of the Dying Detective, The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House).
Holmes and Watson are engaged by Inspector Gregson (Matthew Boulton) – Dennis Hoey’s Inspector Lestrade would be missing from the series until making a one-off return in Terror by Night (1946) – who is baffled by a series of murders of young women, the victims found with their forefingers severed, Initially, wealthy widower Sir George Fenwick (Paul Cavanagh) is the prime suspect and, after waking after a night out with femme fatale Lydia Marlowe (Hillary Brooke) with no memory of the night before, he believes himself that he may be the killer. But Fenwick has been hypnotised into believing that he’s the killer and his daughter Maude (Eve Amber) also seeks the advice of Holmes and Watson. Their investigations bring them into conflict again with their old nemesis Professor Moriarty (Henry Daniell).
The film begins with the tantalising promise that we’re going to see Holmes clash with a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer (the Whitechapel murderer is explicitly name-checked) and although the later stages shy away from this angle it’s still a pretty creepy affair, with its young women being stalked through thick London fogs, severed fingers discovered in coat pockets and that special brand of hypnotism that only exists in horror films, wherein the subject/victim can be compelled to murder against their will. Sadly, the hypnotism is also played for laughs when, inevitably, Watson is put in a trance and made to act even more buffoonishly than usual.
Daniell was Rathbone’s favourite Moriarty (“There were other Moriartys,” he wrote in his autobiography In and Out of Character, “but none so delectably dangerous”) but its a curiously cold and detached performance, fitting perhaps for the “Napoelon of crime” but he’s not really a patch on the series’ previous Moriartys, George Zucco (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)) and Lionel Atwill (Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)). His finest moments are in the climax when he taunts and torments an apparently hypnotised Holmes, sadistically making him walk along a high ledge before meeting his own end, appropriately enough falling to his death while trying to make good his escape. Rathbone and Watson are their usual wonderful selves – no matter what you think of Bruce’s portrayal of Watson, he’s always fun to watch and Rathbone had fine tuned his Holmes to perfection by this stage. But the show is comprehensively stolen by Hillary Brooke as the duplicitous Lydia, less Moriaty’s sidekick than his equal. Her marvellous performance as the seductive temptress is in marked contrast to the more demure character of Sally Musgrave that she’d previously played in the series in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943).
Darker even than the more overtly horror-tinged entries that preceded it (Millhauser’s early drafts, under the title Invitation to Death, featuring the killer dispatching pre-pubescent girls, an idea firmly stomped on by the Hayes Office necessitating a last minute re-write), The Woman in Green is a nicely sombre and gloomy affair in its first half but gets more sprightly – and more outrageous – as it goes along. The hypnotism guff is as unconvincing as it always is in this sort of thing and Moriarty’s plot, as ever, doesn’t really bear too much scrutiny. But Brooke is worth the price of admission alone and even at their worst (the less than inspiring Pursuit to Algiers was only four months away…) the Universal Holmes are always fun and were blessed with two always highly watchable lead roles.
The title, incidentally, has nothing to do with the actual plot and seems a peculiar choice anyway – in a black and white film, Lydia (who we assume to be the eponymous woman) could have been wearing a dress of any dark colour for all the impact it makes. It may explain why a horrible (is there any other kind?) colourised version of the film has been made available. Avoid it at all possible.
The EOFFTV Review 