Sherlock Holmes (1932)

Such a frustrating disappointment

As Good As It Gets

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Am a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and get a lot of enjoyment out of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Also love Basil Rathbone's and especially Jeremy Brett's interpretations to death. So would naturally see any Sherlock Holmes adaptation that comes my way, regardless of its reception.Furthermore, interest in seeing early films based on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and wanting to see as many adaptations of any Sherlock Holmes stories as possible sparked my interest in seeing 'Sherlock Holmes', especially one with such a great idea. Anything with one of literature's most iconic arch-enemies Moriaty is always worth the watch.'Sherlock Holmes' is very problematic and not one of the best Sherlock Holmes adaptations certainly, the best of the Jeremy Brett adaptations and films of Basil Rathone fit under this category. It's also not among the very worst, although one of the lesser ones overall, being better than any of the Matt Frewer films (particularly 'The Sign of Four') and much better than the abominable Peter Cook 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.Ernest Torrence is the best thing about 'Sherlock Holmes', being an effectively sinister Moriaty. Clive Brook is also pretty good and enigmatic as Holmes. There is a suitably spooky and creepy atmosphere in the film, and some scenes come off effectively. Especially the trial and the escape. There are some nice starkly beautifully and eerie shots and the direction has some inspired visual and atmosphere touches. However, the rest of the cast are not great, though Alan Mowbray is okay if not electric. Not just Miriam Jordan's dull Alice and Howard Leeds' grating Billy (who has too much screen time), but Reginald Owen is even stiffer as Watson than he was when he portrayed Holmes in 'A Study in Scarlet', Watson is very underused here which robs us of one of the most legendary partnerships to fully make impression and Owen does very little with what he has. Other than the visual and atmosphere touches, the direction struggles in some of the direction of the actors and giving the mystery consistent momentum. The script is talky and rambling, with some over-played and extraneous comedy that was merely padding. The pace tends to be on the dull side and the tension and suspense too often is lacking in the story, the mystery not fully coming to life and occasionally could have been clearer. Only Moriaty and Holmes are interesting of the characters.To conclude, alright but a long way from exceptional. 5/10 Bethany Cox

The film begins with Professor Moriarty, arch-criminal and personal arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes, being sentenced to death for the many murders he committed - but he swears that before HE'll hang, the three people who helped arrest and convict him will die as well; including Sherlock Holmes, of course...In the meantime, we get to know an entirely 'different' Sherlock Holmes than the pedantic, snobby loner we knew from Conan Doyle's novels and would later find again in Basil Rathbone: Clive Brook (who played the role for the second time; his first appearance as Holmes was in a 1925 silent) is a cheerful, amiable chap - and what's more, he's in love, and he's about to give up sleuthing in order to marry and retire to the country!! But - Moriarty upsets his plans by breaking out of jail, and immediately beginning to take his revenge: he hangs the judge who convicted him in his own house; so, in alphabetical order, as Holmes deduces, the next one will be Colonel Gore-King, with whom Holmes isn't exactly on friendly terms... Moriarty plans to use that grudge for his own plans - while, criminal mastermind as he is, he's working at the same time with the help of Chicago gangsters on the 'reign' over all pubs, American style (protection or 'pineapples' = bombs, for Englishmen) - and on a big-scale robbery at the big bank that belongs to Holmes' future father-in-law... BUT - Holmes has got an equally brilliant mind, and develops his own plans...As we said, we see Sherlock Holmes in an ENTIRELY new light here - and the two most memorable scenes are the one where he disguises in drag, as his father-in-law's 'Aunt Matilda' (!); and the final scene, where we see the great sleuth for once KISS his girl (!!). But, of course, there's enough left of the Holmes we all know - for example, he can't avoid even here using that well-known term of his, 'Elementary!', all the time...For 'strict' Sherlock Holmes fanatics, this movie may be 'against the rules' set by Conan Doyle - but for all others, I believe, it's a wonderfully entertaining, excellently played and directed, enormously suspenseful and VERY clever classic detective movie; and with a good dose of British humor, too!

This film, one of many to be generically titled "Sherlock Holmes," now seems to receive notice most frequently for being the earliest talkie film featuring the detective as the protagonist which is today available for viewing. This was a couple of years into the talking era, though, and there's not really any of the static awkwardness that marred many of the earliest sound movies.Instead, it's a very dark and atmospheric piece of film-making that certainly deserves recognition for this fact. William K. Howard hangs some really spooky or creepy scenes on this pastiche story of the feud between Holmes and Professor Moriarty, including haunting silhouettes headed to the gallows, tense moments waiting in darkened houses, and a great sequence in which we meet a series of gangsters at a fairground by seeing them all score perfectly at the shooting game.I like Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes (giving an encore performance in the role; his first was, confusingly, in "The Return of Sherlock Holmes"). He doesn't inject very much emotional subtlety into the role of the detective, but he's a forceful, intense, charismatic presence in the role who demands attention. Judging from the one surviving audio recording of William Gillette, the most influential Holmes of the era, in the role, Brook seems to have absorbed some of his vocal inflections - to no ill effect.Fun to watch as the lead actor may be, Holmes is in other ways not recognizable as the iconic character we all know. Perhaps it is shame Brook was not the most introspective of Holmeses, as when we meet him at the start of the film he is engaged and seen in flirtatious exchanges with his fiancée. Strangely as this strikes us, it does generate some valid personal struggle, as Holmes must wrestle with the consequences of his promise to give up his life of chasing Moriarty as he gets married. It all leads to a scene between the future Mrs Holmes and Billy the Baker Street Irregular that is actually rather touching.Holmes is updated to the then-present day, as he was in most films in the first half of the twentieth century, so we get the amusing incongruity of the sleuth using 1930s-era slang, even if it isn't disparagingly. He also seems to be a cutting edge inventor who demonstrates his car-related discoveries with little model cars that work exactly like the big ones.In fact, I think it's almost best to think of this as a straight-up tense crime film, with a protagonist who happens to be called Sherlock Holmes. The plot too lends itself better to being a good crime movie rather than a detective picture, with no hint of a whodunnit but a nice twist near the end to increase the stakes of the chase.Reginald Owen gets little to do and does it pretty stiffly as Watson; it remains a mystery to me why he was cast as Holmes in another film the next year, unless the filmmakers wanted to cash in on nae association. Ernest Torrence, though he doesn't really look the part, turns out to be an excellently believable and threatening Professor Moriarty (even if one of his better scenes is marred by some very terrible back projection).The strength of this movie isn't its evocation of the Holmes ethos, though Clive Brook brings his magnetism to the altered Holmes. Instead it's a well-shot, tense, and sometimes macabre crime drama with a human element and a Sherlock Holmes flavor. When all is said and done, this works pretty nicely.

One of the earliest Sherlock Holmes films this is interesting if only for the fact that Holmes is about to get married as the film opens and even dons drag part way through. It may be best not to reflect too much on his relationship with Billy, the Canadian boy who Holmes is training in the arts of criminology. Dr Watson is relegated to an occasional appearance and the arch-villain Moriarty is played with a heavy leering menace that doesn't quite fit with the books. But there's not a lot here that does fit with the books although that does not necessarily detract. The impressive opening, with Moriarty cast in shadows as he proceeds to and from the courtroom for sentencing, sets an appropriate atmosphere which holds throughout. Not a great Sherlock Holmes by any stretch of the imagination, but an interesting example.