Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw (1944, USA)

 

(Spoilers.) In general, this installment of the classic Basil Rathborn/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson series, The Scarlet Claw, is commonly sited as one of the best of the series, if not the best. And, indeed, the programmer truly does live up to its reputation — with the caveat, of course, that you are one of the continually dwindling population that have a penchant (and the patience) for old movies of the prior century.

If so, well, of the eleven Sherlock Holmes films director Roy William Neill (4 Sep 1887 — 14 Dec 1946) made, this one, the sixth of the Holmes & Watson films made at Universal, is definitely the most atmospheric, coming across at times more like a classic Universal Horror film than simply another entry in a popular, low-budget detective programmer. But while The Scarlet Claw has all the trappings of an old monster-on-the-loose film, in the end the murderer proves to be something more human and mundane than, say, a mad ghoul or man-killing gorilla or reanimated monster or swamp creature...

Trailer to

Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw:

Much of the movie's success must go to the cinematographer George Robinson (2 Apr 1890 – 30 Aug 1958), who shot a total of seven films for Neill, including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943 / trailer), but The Scarlet Claw is their only joint Holmes & Watson project. Like most people involved in the detective series, Robinson was a true B-film factory worker with streamline experience, and he ultimately worked on more than 150 movies, mostly at Universal. Well-practiced knack aside, it is probably due to the sheer number of his projects that there is more than one horror classic or semi-classic to be found in his oeuvre, including the Spanish version of Dracula (1931 / scene), the latently lesbian Dracula's Daughter (1936 / trailer) and the unjustly underappreciated Son of Frankenstein (1939 / trailer) — not to mention, much later in his career, the forever entertaining Tarantula (1955 / trailer). Robinson handles the film's deep focuses, odd angles and long tracking shots with a finesse that can only be put to experience; combined with Neill's assured direction, the result is a pleasure to watch. 

Likewise, it is always a pleasure to see Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson as something more than just a simple doofus — true, he is still a bit verbose, pompous, clumsy and laughable, but he is at least likable and is given enough to do for one to understand why Holmes bothers to have him around — much in contrast to his part in the following year's The Woman In Green (1945), in which he comes across simply as an incompetent buffoon.

The Scarlet Claw is not officially credited as an adaptation of any of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original short stories or books, but mildly attentive viewers will probably note that the two industry stalwarts that came up with the story, Paul Gangelin (7 Nov 1898 – 25 Sept 1961) and Brenda Weisberg (6 Apr 1899 – 1 May 1996), owe many aspects of their tale to Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.* (A case that Watson directly refers to early in the movie.) Director Neill and Edmund L. Hartmann** (23 Sept 1911 – 28 Nov 2003), who a few years earlier helped write the lesser Holmes entry The Secret Weapon (1942), translated the narrative into the working script.

* The only other known combined project of the two, done the previous year, in 1943, is the oddly overlooked and immensely watchable early proto-zombie movie, The Mad Ghoul [trailer]. Gangelin, who also helped scribe the classic They Drive by Night (1938 / trailer) as well as the anti-classic The Giant Claw (1957), stayed in the scriptwriting biz till his death, but Weisberg, whose credits include Weird Woman (1944 / trailer) and The Mummy's Ghost (1944 / trailer), retired — like so many women — when she got married, leaving Hollyweird for Phoenix and her husband Morris Meckler.

** As we mentioned in our review of The Secret Weapon, "Hartmann possibly achieved greatest respectability (and the most money) as the producer of TV shows — My Three Sons (1962-72), anyone? — but we here at a wasted life respect him for his work on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1943 / trailer, with Turhan Bey), Black Friday (1940 / trailer) and William Beaudine's The Face of Marble (1946 / full film)."

The Scarlet Claw places the British odd couple in Canada, where they are taking part in an occult congress when the lead speaker, Lord William Penrose (Paul Cavanagh [8 Dec 1888 – 15 Mar 1964], of too many other fun films to mention, in the first of the three Holmes films he made with Neill) is called back to his remote marshland manor* due to the death of his wife, Lady Lillian Gentry Penrose (an uncredited Gertrude Astor [9 Nov 1887 – 9 Nov 1977]), who has been found in the local church with her throat ripped open. Penrose insists that her death is due to the supernatural creature* believed to be running wild in the moors around the bleak and forlorn village where he lives. Suspiciously enough, he refuses to cooperate with the disbelieving Holmes, who decides to investigate despite the Lord's disapproval. It doesn't take long for Holmes to find a connection between the dead Lady Penrose, the local Innkeeper Jounet (Arthur Hohl [21 Max 1889 – 10 Mar 1964] of The Island of Lost Souls [1932] and The Devil Doll [1936 / trailer]) and the town's crippled recluse, Judge Brisson (Miles Mander [14 May 1888 – 8 Feb 1946]**). It seems that all three had sometime in the past crossed paths with a psychopathic actor (Gerald Hamer [16 Nov 1886 – 6 Jul 1972], in the third of the five Holmes films he was to work in for Neill) who had escaped from jail* and disappeared some time before. Obviously out to kill all those he hated, the big question faced by Holmes is who amongst the inhabitants of the village is the murdering actor?* Indeed, a master of disguise, he turns out to be more than just one person...

* Some of the shades of The Hound of the Baskervilles...

** Miles Mander is an interesting figure: a scion of the Mander Family, the now-unsung Hollywood character actor was a pioneer aviator, an avid ballooner, captain in the military during WWI, a sheep farmer in New Zealand and more — all prior to becoming an occasional director and avid actor, first in England and then in the USA. He also wrote plays and novels, and was at one point married to an Indian princess, Prativa Sundari Devi Narayan (22 Nov 1891 – 23 Jul 1923). He appeared in over 100 films prior to his death, including numerous classics, such as Murder, My Sweet (1944 / trailer), To Be or Not To Be (1942 / trailer), Wuthering Heights (1939 / trailer), Five Graves In Cairo (1943 / trailer) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945 / trailer). Amidst his rather long list of other intriguing projects is the early and now lost (check your attic) non-Rathborn/Bruce Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Rembrandt (1932), the second of five oddly overlooked Sherlock Holmes movies starring Arthur Wontner (21 Jan 1875 – 10 Jul 1960) as Sherlock Holmes, the others being: Murder at the Baskervilles / Silver Blaze (1937), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), The Sign of the Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case (1932) and Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour / The Sleeping Cardinal (1931).

 

All in all, Holmes does do a bit more actual detecting in The Scarlet Claw than he does in many of the other films, but, as normal, the bad guy slips through his fingers more than once. And while the murder of Marie (Kay Harding*), the young and pathetic daughter of the innkeeper, serves to underscore just how nasty the bad guy is, one cannot help but feel that Holmes failed to take some obvious precautionary steps that anyone with a brain would have taken that would've (probably) prevented the murder. Those minor gripes aside, The Scarlet Claw is nonetheless a tight, well-paced, occasionally almost scary and always entertaining movie. Not only that, but at the end of The Scarlet Claw, the murderer's final identity is an actual surprise, even if the actual identity of the man he is following isn't (a reveal that also mimics that found in The Hound of the Baskervilles).

* Despite the relatively prominent placement of her name on some of the movie's posters, Kay Harding, born and also credited once under the name Jackie Lou Harding (5 Jan 1924 – 15 Mar 1984), had but a short career of barely more than a year. It began as an uncredited receptionist in the truly excellent Phantom Lady (1944), peeked with this movie and The Mummy's Curse (1944 / trailer), and ended as the (uncredited) fourth victim in Sherlock Holmes & the Woman in Green (1945 / trailer). She left the biz for a happy marriage and motherhood, never to divorce her husband Lloyd Patterson. Per Scott Wilson's Resting Places, she died during renal-cancer surgery in Santa Clara, CA., and her cremated remains were scattered by the family.

The full film —

Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw:

Silent Venom (USA, 2009)

Let's hear it for the not-very-famous wrestler Fabulous Freddie Valentine, a man who follows his dreams. Including that of being a filmmaker, which is one of the many things he does under his slightly more familiar name by birth, Fred Olan Ray.

Sure, most of his low to Z-budget movies are not very good — see: Biohazard (1985), Venomous (2001), et alia — but give the man credit: he may be doing what he loves badly (well, "badly" most of the time), but he is doing it and living from it. Remember that the next time you're slinging burgers at McDs or preparing to earn your rent money by wiping the smegma off your john's Oscar Meyer as your own dreams slip further and further away...

We don't know who had the original idea for the movie, director Fabulous Freddie Valentine or regular TV-movie scribe Mark "Amazing Onionhead" Sanderson, but the inspiration is obvious: here, instead of Snakes on a Plane (2006) with a slumming name star having fun, we have snakes on a submarine, with no-name actors and slumming lower-echelon stars desperate to pay their rent.

German trailer to
Silent Venom:

But if Snakes on a Plane fully embraces its low-culture, grindhouse roots (who can possibly forget the well-aimed snake bite to the blonde's naked nipple?) to become dumb exploitation fun, Silent Venom prefers an attempt at low-budget TV-level seriousness and wallows within a sphere that could be described as "family appropriate". (Indeed, despite the singular female character's mania to have a shower on the sub, we never even get a discreet skin scene.*) Much like the older, campier, faster, more violent and far-better science-fiction movie Space Marines (1996), Silent Venom comes across as a kiddie film without kids in the cast. Thus, how much you will enjoy this movie depends on how much you like commonplace TV movies and movies aimed at family audiences.

* Krista Allen, who plays the singular female character, has taken nude showers in other film projects — like in the super cheesy horror movie Haunted Sea (1997 / trailer). That film is a sleazier reinterpretation of Roger Corman's horror comedy Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961 / trailer / full film).

Considering this D2V movie's TV-movie and family-audience vibe, it is easy to understand why some claims have been made that Silent Venom is an oblique remake of an obscure CBS movie of the week, the long-forgotten Fer-de-Lance (1974 / full movie), starring David Janssen ([27 Mar 1931 – 13 Feb 1980] of Cult of the Cobra [1955 / trailer], The Swiss Conspiracy [1976] and Moon of the Wolf [1972]). That said, while the somewhat dull and not too fun Fer-de-Lance and the somewhat dull but occasionally fun Silent Venom do share some basic plot similarities (specifically: snakes on a submarine), we see Silent Venom as influenced less by that slab of CBS flotsam than an older, better-known TV series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68). The underplayed-but-present concept of oversized "mutant snakes" fits well into that series general science-fiction orientation — monsters on the sub were not unheard of in that series — and one could easily imagine the manly main trio of the sub, Commander James O'Neill (Luke Perry [11 Oct 1966 – 4 Mar 2019] of American Strays [1996], below from his turn as a disgraced homophobic preacher in the TV series Oz [1997-2003]) & Lt Commander Houston Davies (John L. Curtis) & Eddie Boudreau (Anthony Tyler Quinn), along with some recognizable-name special guest star, having a new low-budget adventure every week. The only thing in Silent Venom that ultimately undermines that concept is that the movie ends with Luke Perry's character's retirement.

Silent Venom opens on a Pacific island that looks a lot like California scrublands, where we meet the movie's asshole-you-want-to-die, Jake Goldin (Louis Mandylor of The Prometheus Project [2010]), get to watch two non-characters die — one by snakebite, the other by being eaten by a huge, mutated snake in a scene as laughable as anything found in The Snake King (2005) — and meet Jake the Assistant's hot herpetologist boss, Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista "Can't Act MILF" Allen of Feast [2005 / trailer]), who wears tight string tops and is conducting nefarious military experiments and mutations on poisonous snakes. Then, on a generic military-office set, we meet Commander James O'Neill (Perry), whose moment of integrity has cost him his career, being given a chance to save his retirement by Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom "I Take Every Job I Do Seriously" Berenger) by delivering a decommissioned, and thus unarmed, submarine to somewhere in Asia.

And so it comes to pass that when Dr. Swanson and Jake have to evacuate the island due to incoming Chinese, O'Neill's sub is the only possible option. Being the capitalistic, egocentric scumbag that he is, Jake smuggles some two dozen deadly snakes (including two giant mutant ones) aboard. Of course, as soon as the sub starts playing cat and mouse with a Chinese war fleet, they promptly escape and start killing sailors.

Okay, Krista Allen is seriously miscast as the herpetologist, but her character is relatively unimportant to the movie; that they even cast such a hot actress in the role is only to add some sexual tension between the tightlipped and sleepwalking Luke Perry, something that only truly ignites during an oddly funny scene in which Commander O'Neill slowly unwraps deadly snakes off Dr. Swanson (only to toss them carelessly aside): director Fabulous Freddie Valentine films the scene as if it were an act of teasing foreplay — not that the tease ever pays off.

Jake Goldin, on the other hand, is truly well cast and successfully channels the irritating immaturity of his annoying younger-brother shtick of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002 / trailer) and its sequels, like the last, My Big Fat Greek Wedding III (2023 / trailer), whence the image below comes, to be the guy you're truly happy to see die; Goldin is so naturally unlikable (but for one inexplicable scene in which he takes umbrage at the sexism of young — and soon dead — sailor Rhodes [Haran Jackson]) that you could almost believe that he must be like that in real life. (But then, who knows, maybe he is.)

Berenger, in the stock part of the good man back at the base, is on screen more than one might expect for what was surely a one-day job, but as always he doesn't let on in any way that he knows he's in a crappy movie. (Rather unlike Perry, whose dry, tired characterization of Commander O'Neill often comes across as the result of a subliminal desire to be anywhere but in the movie.)

Silent Venom is more than slightly padded in more ways than one. Not only do most scenes drag out in TV-movie fashion and the two-part credit sequence way too long, there is an overdose of stock-footage submarine shots. And the whole cat-and-mouse subplot of the sub trying to avoid being detected by the evil Chinese seems less relevant than casual padding of a narrative that really had nowhere else to go once the snakes get released.

Likewise, considering how much easily damaged technical equipment is found on a sub, a lot of guns are shot rather pointlessly at snakes, most of which — all but the two big mutant ones — are not exactly a big target. Still, it's fun watch the snakes disappear and reappear: much like how all the bite victims (but for the galley cook) seem to get beamed into the sickbay, the timing of the snakes' appearances is immensely inconsistent — for example, the snake canister is barely opened and one is seen slithering on Jake's bag and under Dr. Swanson's towel — and they almost seem to appear and disappear at will, like when they basically are just suddenly there between Boudreau and Dr. Swanson when the two are running down the subway corridor.

In short, Silent Venom is as flawed as any other Fabulous Freddie Valentine movie but slightly more enjoyable than many, providing you can harness your inner-child and enjoy it for what it is in its core: a family-appropriate TV movie.

The really young ones and people suffering ophidiophobia might find the flick terrifying, especially since it obviously uses a lot of real snakes (all but the mutated ones), but everyone else will see the movie as harmless fluff that offers nothing new and no surprises. No way necessary viewing, Silent Venom passes the test of possible TV viewing when stuck with the kids or with nothing else is at hand. But don't bother searching this one out, because it sure ain't that good.