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8:23 a.m. - 2012-06-06
DRESSED TO KILL
"Dressed to Kill," alternatively titled "Prelude to Murder," is the last movie in the Sherlock Holmes series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. As is often the case with this series, the plot is not based on any of the Conan Doyle stories; however, the screenplay either directly mentions or alludes to several stories in The Canon.

Two stories are mentioned directly, either by Holmes or Watson, and we see Watson in an early scene reading a copy of "The Strand," the magazine in which the Holmes adventures were first published. In this scene the story mentioned is "A Scandal in Bohemia," and, as I'll discuss later, there are several scenes and one memorable villain that invite comparison with that adventure. Late in the movie, fuddydud Watson mistakenly compares a pending case to "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist," then corrects himself, though I think this choice had to be deliberate on the part of the screenwriter.

The plot of "Dressed to Kill" involves a criminal's search for three music boxes that contain clues to another crime. In this sense it echoes another Doyle story, "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons." And the music boxes contain a cleverly hidden code involving a one-to-one substitution for the letters of the alphabet: recalling "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." One of the conspirators is locked up in Dartmoor Prison, which was a plot element in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and the henchman in the movie is a hot-blooded "foreigner" who kills an innocent person over the objections of his boss, reminding us of the pygmy in "The Sign of the Four."

But the movie owes its strongest debt to the first story I mentioned, i.e. "A Scandal in Bohemia." Holmes's antagonist in that story was Irene Adler, who actually got the better of the great detective, and who, as Holmes reminds Watson in DTK, must always be referred to as "The Woman."

One character in DTK invites comparison to Adler in several ways. Mrs Hilda Courtney, well played by the elegant and beautiful Patricia Morison, is an adventuress with the wit and resources to give Holmes a run for his money. She is, he remarks at the end of the movie, "a worthy adversary," which coming from Holmes is remarkable praise indeed. Mrs Courtney is not only capable of using her beauty and charm to get what she wants, but she is also, like Adler, a master of disguise. Her charwoman fools Holmes in a lengthy face to face encounter. She also reads about her opponent and prepares in advance, stealing the fake fire idea from ASIB to trick Watson, and using Holmes interest in tobacco ash as a forensic tool (She read his monograph on the subject) to set a trap for him. Mrs Courtney also displays a dry wit, remarkable self control, and a dislike of unnecessary violence. She is, however, a more or less remorseless criminal (unlike Adler), and her arrest and imprisonment are wholly justified, though it would have been nice to see her in another contest with Holmes. She was much more charming than Professor Moriarty.

A better tribute to Adler, too than the recent versions seen in the media. Mrs Courtney was much more intriguing than the version of Adler in the BBC series "Sherlock," which depicted a modern day version as a dominatrix who was later rescued from beheading by Holmes, returning him to a superior relation as well as a chivalrous one. And though Rachel McAdams is very charming, her pickpocket version of Adler in the Robert Downey steam punk revision wasn't all that satisfying either.

Watson's seemingly befuddled mention of "The Solitary Cyclist" also belongs in this movie, because Violet Grey, the young woman who seeks Holmes's help in that story, is perhaps the only female character in whom Holmes shows what might me more than a purely intellectual interest: remarking on the spirituality of her face, her apparent fitness, and holding her hand long enough to satisfy himself that her fingers are those of a musician and not a typist. Great singles bar lines, but probably pure coincidence, since Holmes never mentions her once the case has been brought to a successful conclusion.

Patricia Morison was sadly under-used by Hollywood, finding herself cast as the villain, the Other Woman, or in a small subsidiary role. Her performance in DTK shows what a mistake this was on the part of the big studios. Ironically, not altogether unlike Irene Adler, she had a career as a singer, a very successful one, on Broadway and other venues. Too bad for fans like me, who would like to have seen her in more movies. Like Gail Russell and Ann Savage, her work is too rare and difficult to find.

 

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