Experiment #9 - "The Pearl of Death" (1944)

Bric-a-brac!

***

Nick: Welcome to Back on Baker Street, your semi-regular dose of Sherlockian goodness. It’s been a while, but we like to think that we have an especially good movie to review today.

Cat: It has been awhile (and we do apologize for the delay), but I have to agree with Nick: we’ve got a good one in store today. (And I have to add that it couldn’t have come sooner - Basil Rathbone withdrawal is a very, very real thing and it was striking me pretty hard.)

Nick: I agree. I had not been watching Sherlock Holmes movies on a regular basis lately (surprisingly I do have other interests), but when I decided to go back and watch some Sherlockian cinema, Roger Moore in Sherlock Holmes in New York just didn’t cut it like good ol’ Basil Rathbone could.

Cat: No one can fill the void that Basil Rathbone leaves, Nick. No one. (I may or may not have a very, very strong appreciation for Basil Rathbone as a result of our Experiments. Whether or not that’s a positive has yet to be seen.) So, now that we have had our ‘fix’, we’re ready to review yet another film. Nick, care to do the honors of introducing today’s subject?

Nick: Of course!

Vital Statistics:

The Pearl of Death (1944)

Major motion picture

Starring Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Nigel Bruce (Dr. Watson), Evelyn Ankers (Naomi Drake), Dennis Hoey (Inspector Lestrade), Miles Mander (Giles Conover), Rondo Hatton (The Creeper)

69 minutes, black-and-white

Thoughts:

Nick: I’ll say right off the bat that while many in the Sherlockian community consider The Scarlet Claw the pinnacle of the Rathbone/Bruce films, I think that The Pearl of Death may be the superior movie. It’s an intense thriller, though not without some fun and a great take on one of Doyle’s greatest stories. But, before we get ahead of ourselves let’s go through the action and the film and we’ll take it apart piece-by-piece. So, we begin on a ship in Dover with an attempt to steal the famed Borgia Pearl. Not only does this open the movie with some intrigue, but we get to see Holmes in disguise once more. Did you fall for that priest disguise, Catharine?

Catharine is learning to look past these disguises

Cat: NO, I’m learning! :D I was actually really proud of myself for guessing it was Holmes right off the bat. Basil Rathbone has a very definitive nose, it helps to pay particular attention to his nose. (It also doesn’t hurt that when I blurt out a guess like that in the middle of us enjoying a movie, Nick has an awful poker face when I’m on the right track.)

Nick: Yeah, I’m not really good at bluffing. It’s pretty upsetting. I’ve got to work on it so I can keep some things secret with these films. Well, the attempted theft is the work of criminal Giles Conover (for whom Holmes describes with some very Moriarty-like descriptors). With the pearl in the safe hands of the Royal Regent Museum (remembered that name from memory...I’m so good), the curator is certain that the pearl is safe. That is until Holmes deactivates the museum’s security system allowing Conover to steal the pearl. And that is, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of this film: Holmes is partially responsible for it all. His own cocksure attitude leads to the pearl’s actual theft.

Cat: And something that I find particularly interesting about that detail is that he never once apologizes for his hand in the crime either. (Unless I missed an apologetic line while scribbling a note down.) He was trying to make the point that this “flawless security system” had its shortcomings, which you can’t necessarily fault him for, as it did have a very vulnerable Achilles heel. This much is evidenced by how easily the theft was accomplished, which I can only imagine he felt a tiny bit superior over, as he technically was right. In my own (not so) humble opinion, I kinda have to side with Holmes. That was a really fallible security system in the end.

On Holmes' watch, the pearl is stolen!

Nick: You are correct, Holmes never did apologize for inadvertently letting the pearl get stolen. That is - I think - very in character for Holmes. He would never apologize (and be made a fool of by Lestrade), but he brood about it until the end of days. What this plot development does allow for though is yet another glimpse into the friendship between Holmes and Watson; especially when we learn that Watson has taken to punching newspaper reporters in the mouth in order to defend his friend’s honor. It’s a very touching, poignant moment in the film.

Cat: It was indeed. It’s hard to come up with anything to say on the subject other than the fact that the Baker Street Bros have an absolutely beautiful bromance, which is shown perfectly in this one scene. And, though I’ve come to love all that is Nigel Bruce, I have to say that, while we didn’t see the punch in question, it’s nice to hear about Watson having a solid (for lack of a better word) competent moment. Especially when it was in defence of Holmes. I’d deck a reporter for bad mouthing my best friend too (yes, that means you, Nick).

Nick: Aw, how very kind. (Though as something of an amateur journalist myself I feel sort of morally obligated to say something to the effect of “support student journalism” and “first amendment rights” etc.) But, the sentiment is appreciated all the same and I would go to great lengths to defend your honor as well Catharine.

Cat: Awwwwwww! You’re gonna make me blush, Nick, stop it. You’re such a good friend. :) (And you know I wouldn’t punch a student journalist...well...probably. Not unless they had it coming.)

Nick: Okay, let’s not get too sappy here (we’ll save that for some other time). Before we go too far, let’s focus for a moment on Evelyn Ankers as Naomi Drake. At this point in the movie we have seen her in two guises (once on the boat and once in disguise as a sassy dishwasher). Now, when you really take a moment to think about it, Naomi doesn’t do a whole lot in this movie, but she does play a vital role in the proceedings (especially at the end which we’ll get to in time). And, I can’t help but really like her. Knowing Evelyn Ankers’ career at Universal the way I do, it’s neat to see her in a role like this because it was unlike anything else she had done. (Ankers also played Kitty the prostitute in Voice of Terror where she was equally excellent.)

The Baz and Bruce are joined by Evelyn Ankers

Cat: Though she had limited screen time, I thought she was pretty good too. Though I  can’t help but wonder what exactly she was doing all the times we didn’t see her in the movie. By the end, the audience gets enough of a sense of what she’s been doing for a majority of the movie, but I was still a little curious how she specifically fit into the evil scheme at hand.

Nick: Well, every evil scheme needs a master of disguise. (I just had a great mental image: What if this whole movie was told from the other perspective in the style of Ocean’s Eleven or something with the gang all trying to outwit Sherlock Holmes in their quest to steal the pearl. Sorry...but I do love a good heist movie.)

Cat: That would actually be really, really cool, I must say. And she certainly worked as the necessary disguise master (mistress?). Not counting the opening scene (as we’re not entirely certain what her initial “cover” was), she wears 3 different disguises and puts forth different personas for each. She definitely makes for a valuable member of this imaginary Ocean’s Eleven team.

Nick: “Well, I couldn’t very well keep calling myself The Master, could I?” (I couldn’t resist…) Okay, let’s move forward, shall we? So, just as Holmes is getting all down in the doldrums about letting Conover steal the pearl (and then having to let him go because there was no evidence to suggest that Conover still had the pearl), Lestrade comes to Baker Street in the middle of a case. A man has been found in his home with his back broken surrounded by broken china. As soon as Holmes hears that the victim’s back was broken, his curiosity is piqued.

This could be a tangent

Cat: Beautiful little Doctor Who reference, Nick. Moving forward though, I was very interested by the switch of criminal focus, so it’s easy to see why Holmes was as well. Investigating the crime scene proved to make for a very amusing scene as Lestrade is being, well, delightfully thick is the only way I can think of describing him. He’s always most certain when he’s furthest from the truth it seems.

Nick: I just want to make the point abundantly clear how much joy Dennis Hoey’s Lestrade brings me in this series. He is so incompetent but lovable (in the same way as Nigel Bruce’s Watson), and this film makes great use of him. I also love how Rathbone’s Holmes is able to shut him down so quickly in the scene-of-the-crime scenes. We also get our first, tantalizing clues about The Creeper in this scene which is - well - creepy. But, I’ll follow the film’s example and keep The Creeper shrouded in shadow until the finale. In the interim, we have a comedic scene at Baker Street involving Watson and some glue and then a more suspenseful one as Giles Conover adopts a disguise himself in an attempt to (ingeniously) kill Sherlock Holmes.

Cat: Remind me another day to debate who’s more incompetent: Dennis Hoey’s Lestrade or Nigel Bruce’s Watson. I think we have the makings of an interesting debate there. Anyway, I greatly enjoyed this whole Baker Street sequence. Watson, while in the middle of trying to glue an article into his “sleuthing scrapbook”, accidentally brushes his arm against his freshly pasted article, sticking it to his sleeve. He then proceeds to wonder where on Earth the thing has gone. For everyone who has ever set down a pencil and misplaced it seconds later, the whole scene is a very relatable comedic moment. It gets even better when he legitimately says, “What would Holmes do?” and retraces his steps to solve his problem. For me at least, it was a very endearing moment with the good doctor. Nick can testify to this, I was giggling like an idiot for most of the scene.

Nick: It was pretty funny, I must admit. However, as I mentioned above, this scene really gets going when Conover turns up with an early edition of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (resisting the urge to make some kind of Blackadder the Third reference) which has actually been hollowed out to contain a spring mechanism which will thrust a knife into a person’s heart. It’s a pretty neat bit of suspense and I love how as soon as Holmes returns to 221b be knows something is wrong and will take no chances when opening the book.

Holmes ain't taking any chances

Cat: Or their EYES. When you see Conover prepping the device before entering Baker Street, my first thought was that it was a bomb of some sorts, but I have to say, this might be worse? Well, perhaps not worse, but at least equally as bad. I thought that the scene brought forth a couple of nervous laughs though, because before Holmes shows back up, Watson is entirely brought in by Conover’s disguise and is trying to “play detective” and guess who exactly he is, which is pretty funny, because Watson is really trying and feels decently proud of himself.  But the whole time, it’s like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, because you don’t know what exactly is going on with this book. You learn pretty quickly though when Holmes lifts the cover of the book with a cane and a knife quickly embeds itself in the ceiling. They both take the would-be-murder rather well though. (I, however, did not.)

Nick: This whole scene is one of the most memorable in the Universal series and is cleverly paid homage to in the pastiche, The Tangled Skein by David Stuart Davies. Part sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, part Dracula crossover, an early scene finds the escaped Jack Stapleton sending Holmes a hollowed-out copy of Great Expectations with a very similar knife-shooting device. It’s one of my absolute favorite pastiches and - when we get to it - I highly suggest that we listen to the wonderful Big Finish audio recording adaptation starring Nicholas Briggs (voice of the Daleks) as Holmes.  

Cat: Yikes. That’s not what you typically expect to hear when people say, “Great Expectations killed me.” And I think adding some radio-based (or audio books, or whatever else falls into the category of “audio recording adaptations”) to our to do list would be rather cool. Anyways, from there, Holmes and Watson get more reports of crime scenes similar to their first: bodies found with broken backs in their home surrounded by broken china. Or, as Basil Rathbone is so fond of saying, “bric-a-brac”. There was something really intriguing about the way Rathbone utters the term, because every time, he managed to spit it out with a certain level of authority that commanded respect. (We counted. He says it four times in one movie. That’s a lot of bric-a-brac.)

Nick: Watching this movie for the first time about the age of eight, nine, or ten, I had never heard the term “bric-a-brac” before and, ever since, I can only read the word (or hear it in my head) in Rathbone’s voice. You see, Rathbone had one of those voices and you could tell that he was a classically-trained Shakespearean actor because he can anything sound important. That bric-a-brac (we’ve said it just as many times as in the film) becomes an essential clue in solving the mystery. Having gathered up all of the broken china and taken it back to Baker Street, Holmes and Watson discover that each of the victims were in possession of a plaster bust of Napoleon. The shattered china was meant to cover up the breaking of the busts which leads Holmes to believe that Giles Conover managed to conceal the pearl in one of the plaster busts. This is, of course, more-or-less derived from the story “The Six Napoleons” which I am inclined to think is one of the best of the original stories. And now, things become a race-against-the-clock in order to prevent any more murders and find the pearl.

Cat: Basil Rathbone does indeed have one of those voices. (Insert dreamy sigh here.) But I have to boast a bit and inflate my ego: once this was figured out, I felt very proud of myself for picking up on the fact that the first victim had Napoleon things all about his house. This wasn’t that impressive of an observation, given that it’s directly brought to the attention of the audience by the investigators, but I still felt pretty proud of the fact. So, in this race-against-time, Holmes and Watson track down where the busts were made, and then sold, as to figure out who’s in danger and possibly in possession of the pearl. In yet another disguise, they even find Naomi Drake “working” in the store that sold the busts so that she could feed the information about the bust buyers to Conover. Holmes very cleverly thwarts her in her attempts to give the final go-ahead to Conover to go after the final bust and catches her before she can rejoin him, which proves that not only is Holmes quick on his feet, but corded landline phones have their shortcomings.  

Nick: Indeed they do. Interestingly, when Holmes imitates Conover’s voice on the phone that really was Rathbone doing it. (The last time Holmes imitated someone’s voice in the series was in Sherlock Holmes in Washington which used some pretty obvious dubbing effects.) Anyway, we really should get to the finale because...wow! Boy, do I love this finale. So, having tracked down the last bust owner, Conover and The Creeper go to seek him out and kill him. Holmes has already taken the man’s place and is prepared and turns the tables on the villains by means of some brilliant subterfuge. It had already been established that The Creeper had a strange attachment to Naomi so when Holmes says that she will hang for her complicity in the crimes (and it was all Conover’s fault), The Creeper turns on his former employer and snaps his spine as well. In a word: it’s intense.

Cat: Yeah, no kidding. The few minutes where The Creeper (who is a very intimidating character himself, because even at the end, we have no idea who he is or where he came from) is lumbering upstairs (towards where Holmes has instructed the owner of the bust to hide) so that he can kill him, as per Conover’s demands, and Holmes is casually describing Naomi’s fate while he has a gun pointed at him is totally tense. It’s a very “sitting on the edge of your seat” kind of a finale, because you don’t know if The Creeper’s going to turn around or if Holmes is going to get shot or what. But, like all Holmes’ plans, it all somehow manages to work out just right. But not before a few harrowing moments.

The Baz face-to-face with Rondo Hatton

Nick: The finale is great in that the whole movie has been teasing us with glimpses of The Creeper, and he finally gets a great introduction after all that build-up. The really interesting thing about The Creeper is that he was played by an actor named Rondo Hatton who, in real life, suffered from a glandular condition called acromegaly which causes a person’s hands, feet, and face to grow and swell. So, Hatton’s appearance as The Creeper was not aided by make-up in anyway. Universal would cast Hatton in a few subsequent horror films - and again as The Creeper (though not related to his character in this film) in a series of two films before his death in 1946. Hatton has gone on to have something of a cult status in horror cinema and today there is a series of horror-related awards called the Rondos (the award is a bust of Rondo Hatton) and in the 1991 film The Rocketeer, the actor playing the back-breaking Nazi henchman is made-up to look like Hatton. So, yeah...the more you know.

Cat: Ohhhh. You know, I was kinda wondering how much of his face was made up, but I didn’t want to be ask and be rude (to this person that I’ve never actually met). That is absolutely fascinating though. And I couldn’t give you a rough estimate here, but he looked as though he was extremely tall too. So he definitely pulled off the part quite convincingly. Though I’d still like to know where in the heck The Creeper’s character is supposed to come from, as we never get that story. But the finale is just great overall. It even shows Sherlock Holmes in one of his side professions: the world’s best suitcase surgeon! (The joke here is that while posing as the doctor who owns the final bust, he pretends to be performing some kind of a surgery on someone under a sheet. That someone is revealed to be just a suitcase. Ba-dum-tis.)

Nick: According to a quick IMDb message board search, Hatton wasn’t as tall as you’d think. He was about 5’9”! Goes to show what some fancy camera tricks and well-chosen angles can do, because I agree he looks gigantic in this movie. And yes, Sherlock Holmes has more talents than you could possibly know…

It’s time for Final Thoughts:

Nick: Well, as I said at the outset of this review, I have a soft spot for The Pearl of Death. It just checks off so many boxes for me when it comes to the Universal series. It puts a unique spin on an original ACD story; it features great performances from Rathbone and Bruce; the villain of the piece is great (in case we have three) and there’s a distinct touch of Gothic horror. While it may not be dripping with atmosphere (a definite point in the favor of some of the other Universal films like Scarlet Claw or Faces Death), there’s something distinctly modern and fast-paced about this movie which I really like (and in a way makes some of those Gothic elements even more potent as they mix with the modernity of it all). This has always been one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes movies. There’s very little that I can fault with in it. And you Catharine?

Cat: I have to agree with just about all that you said, Nick. Now, when we sat down to watch this, we also watched a few other films that we’ll release posts for later. Not to spoil absolutely anything about what we have coming for those, but I think that watching multiple movies helped me come to a consensus about one of the things that I really like about Pearl of Death. Nick, you can clarify this one for me; I don’t know if this is the the way that the original story is paced or just how it was translated to film, but I think that I have a preference for the cases, like the one(s? It was sort of two cases, but not quite) in Pearl of Death, that take their time, where you get to see Holmes and Watson work out the conclusion before the big finale. I feel like Pearl of Death shows that particularly well. But that’s just me. Like Nick said, this film has a stellar set of villains in it and some really great moments from both Rathbone and Bruce. Overall, I thought this was a particularly fun and enjoyable flick!

Nick: Good to hear that you liked this one. And, from what you describe, I don’t think it would be too off-the-mark to suggest that you are typically more fond of a thriller-like storyline. Pearl of Death doesn’t make a mystery of who is responsible, the mystery lies elsewhere. The film plays out more like a game of cat-and-mouse between Holmes and his antagonist (and that’s exemplified in films like Secret Weapon and Spider Woman both of which you’re fond of). So, it’s more of the howdunit that interests you, not the whodunit. Is that what you were trying to say?

Cat: Yes, that was exactly what I was going for with no real idea of how to say it. I want to designate you with all of my idea expression from now on. Thank you for turning my convoluted ramblings into a coherent idea!

Nick: Well, I have to serve some kind of purpose (I’m only joking). Anyway, there’s only one bit of business left for us now: an official deerstalker rating. I’ll let you do the honors first.

Cat: Well, as I just poorly articulated, this one definitely did the trick for me. It was really fun and I really enjoyed it. I think I might have to go with a 4.5 deerstalker rating here, Nick. How about you?

Nick: I am inclined to give this one the exact same rating. This is definitely in my top ten Sherlock Holmes movies of all time.

And so we’ve come to the end of another review. We hope that it won’t be so long before we get to the next one. Rest assured, there’s more to come from The Great Sherlock Holmes Experiment.

Nick's Rating

Catharine's Rating

Next Time: The first of the (many) orange pips