Despite being a wartime product, with this
film, the fifth in the series of Rathbone/Bruce Holmes & Watson Universal programmers
(and seventh if you count the two 20th Century Fox films) the propagandistic elements
so heavily present in the first three of the [then] contemporary-set Universal
entries — i.e., Sherlock
Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock
Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943
/ trailer)
— are, as in the preceding entry, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943 / trailer),
pretty much absent. (The movie was released 10 December 1943 or 21 January 1944, depending on the source you choose to use; WWII officially continued until 2 September 1945, which is when Japan officially surrendered soon after the US obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima.)
Trailer to
The Spider Woman:
Indeed, about the only overtly allusion to
the current political situation of the world found in The Spider Woman is
visual: during the scenes at the fairgrounds, the cartoons figures Dr Watson (Nigel
Bruce) and Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey) are taking shots at in the shooting
gallery are of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. As in Sherlock Holmes Faces
Death, the villain(s) in this movie are not Nazis or working for Nazis, they
are simply greedy and after the money of easy targets. Unluckily for them, the
easy targets are of that certain social class that gets someone like Sherlock
Holmes interested... and if the apparently lowly amounts of the diverse life
insurance policies mentioned in the movies strike you as too paltry to instigate murder, keep in
mind that the purchasing power of £5,000 in 1944 is roughly equivalent to
£210,000 (or $270,000) in 2024.
Though The Spider Woman does incorporate
elements of actual published works by Sir Arthur
Conan, the narrative as written for the screen by Bertram
Millhauser* (24 Mar 1892 – 1 Dec 1958) is pretty much an original one,
though Millhauser does incorporate elements from, and make verbal allusions to,
diverse Doyle stories, including The Sign of the Four, The Final Problem, The Adventure of the Dying Detective and The
Speckled Band. But although Millhauser does give both Rathbone and Sondegaard
some great dialogue, rather unlike most other scripts he wrote for the series —
he worked on five in total — he leaves some king-size holes in the story. The
Spider Woman is one of the more well-known films of the series, possibly due to
its title and the actor playing the titular villain, the legendary Gale
Sondergaard (15 Feb 1899 – 14 Aug 1985), and is both truly entertaining and
well made. That said, it is truly dated in some annoying ways that seriously
hamper one's ability to take Holmes seriously, which substantially damages the
movie and thus keeps it from being truly great. Likewise, the film pales somewhat
in comparison to the more horrific and atmospheric entries that were to follow,
such as The Pearl of Death (1944 / trailer),
The Scarlet Claw (1944 / trailer),
The Woman in Green (1945 / trailer)
or The House of Fear (1945 / trailer).
* Here at a wasted life, we remember Millhauser
primarily because he co-wrote one of the lesser Universal horror movies, The
Invisible Man's Revenge (1944 / main
title). Roughly a decade prior to The Spider Woman, he also wrote the
script to the pre-code movie Sherlock Holmes (1932 / full
movie), poster above, the first sound version of Sir Doyle and William Gillette's play of
the same name, which first hit Broadway in 1899. The relatively forgotten film
version stars Clive
Brook (1 Jun 1887 – 17 Nov 1974) as the titular detective, and includes a
dearth of Dr Watson, an engaged Holmes preparing to get married, a
car-destroying ray gun, Holmes in drag (as an old woman), and a oddly
unnecessary child element in the form of Billy, who appears to be Sherlock's
ward.
Still, Sondegaard is wonderful as the
titular "Spider Woman", the beautiful and intelligent but ruthlessly evil Andrea
Spedding. A female variant of Dr. Moriarty, she is more than a match for
Sherlock Holmes and twice almost succeeds at killing him. That she never again
reappeared in the series — though she did subsequently appear in the non-sequel
The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946 / trailer further below) with the likewise legendary
Rondo Hatton
(22 Apr 1894 – 2 Feb 1946), the killer from The Pearl of Death — is
un-understandable.*
* Equally un-understandable is the premature
end of her career in 1949 due to her being blacklisted along with her husband
director Herbert
J. Biberman (4 Mar 1900 – 29 May 1971) during Joseph McCarthy's
witch hunts. A talented thespian who had even won an Oscar for supporting
actress for her first film Anthony Adverse (1936 / trailer)
and has the classic B-film The Black Cat (1941 / trailer)
to her credit, Sondegaard remained absent from films for a good 19 years after
being (unjustly) labelled a communist. She returned to the screen in a
miniscule part in the trashy proto-blaxploitation flick Slaves (1969 / trailer),
thereafter remaining somewhat active as a guest star on TV shows. Rare later-day
movie appearances include her (and Ruth Roman's
and Mercedes
McCambridge's) final film, Echoes (1982 / full
movie), and the rare grindhouse slab of flotsam that is Donald Wolfe's Savage
Intruder a.k.a Hollywood Horror House (1970 / opening
credits): a trashy version of the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950 / trailer)
that proved to be Marion Hopkins'
final feature film and with a blink-and-you-miss-her appearance of Fatty Arbuckle's
ex-wife Minta
Durfee (1 Oct 1889 – 9 Sept 1975).
The plot plays out in wartime Britain, where
well-to-do gamblers are killing themselves in great numbers. What all suicides
have in common is that they happen at night after the men have put on their pajamas, gone to bed and have locked themselves alone in their rooms — thus the
sobriquet, "the pajama suicides". (It would appear that back then men
still wore pajamas when they went to sleep; today, one would be hard placed to
find a male after puberty that still sleeps in jammies.) Holmes, on a fishing
trip with Dr. Watson, fakes his death for no logical reason and then reappears
to solve the case. The murders are so crafty and devious that it is obvious to
him that only a woman could be responsible. Disguising himself as Rahjhi Singh,
an Indian gambler, Holmes quickly discovers the murderess (Sondegaard), but she
just as quickly figures out who he actually is. Her first attempt to kill
Holmes using the same method as her other victims fails, as he is expecting it
and manages to kill the big nasty spider her henchmen lets loose in his room.
The spider is a rare, highly poisonous, and with a virtually indistinguishable
bite, and its poison induces painful hallucinations. (Some versions of the film
have cut the aspect of her pygmy helper, which results in some clues being
introduced but never being followed up on or actually making any sense.)
A
second attempt on Holmes' life almost succeeds, but at the last moment the
great detective is able to save both himself and Watson from the deadly smoke.
The clues he follows eventually lead him to a circus where the bad guys trap
him and tie him up behind the moving targets of a shooting gallery. Watson,
waiting with Lestrad, decides to do a little shooting to pass the time. Is he
going to be the one to kill his true friend? Well, the fact that another half
dozen films followed this one answers that question, now doesn't it?
There are many nice touches in Sherlock
Holmes & the Spider Woman, not the least of which is the interesting,
almost sexual tension between Holmes and the Babe of Evil. Both Watson and
Lestrad are in good form, neither being as overpoweringly dense as they often
are in other episodes. The emotion they show when Holmes is believed dead is
touching and, on Lestrade's part at least, somewhat unexpected.
But age of the
film aside, Holmes' badly dated justification for suspecting a woman is simply
idiotic, not to mention misogynistic. (And face it, Holmes in brown face as
"Rajni Singh" doesn't exactly sit well nowadays either. Worse, the brown face simply looks like brown face, not skin tint, so his disguise simply does not fly.) Likewise,
his "death" is unneeded plot padding, as are various short scenes of
unnamed English families commenting on such subjects as the suicides or his
death. Also, at one point Holmes states that one reason he cannot arrest the
Spider Woman is that he has no proof that she is guilty; at the end of the
film, when she finally is arrested, he still doesn't really have any proof. At
most, he would be able to send up a couple of her henchmen, but unless they
were to turn state's evidence there would be no provable evidence to her guilt.
And why does he say Lestrade doesn't need to put her in handcuffs? In what way
or form did she give him or us reason to believe that she wouldn't escape if
given the chance? As evil and cold-blooded as she is, all logic would say that
she would probably have some trick up her sleeve to kill Lestrade and
orchestrate her escape...
Overlook these obvious but minor flaws, and the obviously
dated film is rather entertaining minor classic of arguably quality, the last
especially when compared to some of the later films in the series. Regardless
of whatever flaws, however, Sherlock Holmes & the Spider Woman is well worth
watching.
Trailer to the non-sequel,
The Spider Woman
Strikes Back (1946)*:
* Initially intended by Universal as the
first of a cycle of Spider Woman horror movies, the somewhat slow and confused
movie was so poorly received that the concept of a new horror franchise was
tossed. Rondo Hatton's interpretation of the Hoxton Creeper in the later
Sherlock Holmes entry The Pearl of Death (1944) fared better: he returned as
the Creeper in two subsequent films, House of Horrors (1946 / trailer)
and the surprisingly exploitive The Brute Man (1946 / trailer).