Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are one of the original dynamic duos, that's for sure!
If I counted right, "The Spider Woman" was the 8th movie of fifteen in the 30's and the 40's where Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes! I haven't seen every one I don't think, but I'd be willing to bet that every one of them is worth watching!
A bunch of guys have suddenly been committing suicide, and nobody can figure it out!
Sherlock Holmes isn't interested, and really doesn't care, because he's out enjoying himself fly fishing with Dr. Watson!
Then the unimaginable happens, Sherlock has a dizzy spell, and falls in the stream, not the river but the stream, and drowns! Watson is powerless to do anything!
Some days later, this courier shows up at Watson's door, and freaks out the good Doctor when he finds out it's Holmes in disguise! (He needed to disappear so he could get to the bottom of these suicides undetected!)
Gale Sondergaard as Adrea Spedding is a bitch in every sense of the word! Gale is very good at being bad, and should really enjoy a greater role in celluloid villainess history!
Sherlock Holmes is now in disguise as Rajni Singh. He's showing her how to take a selfie!
Now this is an awesome shot!
I love that stairwell, and the lighting and the placement of everything else is perfect!
So evil Adrea Spedding has got this scam going that involves spiders and suicides!
Sorry, it's hard to see in this shot, but that's the spider that just got skewered by Holmes pretending to be a sleeping Rajni Singh.
These movies are serious, but there are always comedic moments like Watson thinking this Entomology expert is just Sherlock in disguise again!
This weirdo kid is a cross between one of those Chinese hopping vampires and Renfield's son!
He hops around and catches flies!
Adrea Spedding leaves the boys a little gift, the dust of a plant called Radix pedis diaboli, or the devil's foot, that when burned is deadly! The devil's foot is a totally fictional plant, created by the mind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of all the Sherlock Holmes books.
Sherlock and Watson go out searching for more information!
The curator of this place is acting very strange, and cannot even pronounce the name of this spider, and just calls it a large spider instead!
What a phony! The spider woman needed a better stooge than that to fool Sherlock Holmes!
Fittingly so, "The Snake Woman" ends in an arcade complete with a sideshow!
The "Obongo From The Congo Prancing Pygmy" show is closed down for some strange reason!
Sherlock smells a rat!
(I don't think they plan on re-opening it in this century)
This arcade features a fun full size shooter game using real bullets of revolving dictators like Hitler and Mussolini for the kids to shoot at (Remember, this is 1946).
The spider woman's henchmen have Holmes tied to the back of the Hitler target, and the metal plate heart target has been removed
Wow! What could be worse than having your best pal, the crack shot Dr. Watson, fire the final shot!?
Sherlock Holmes is such a gentleman, that even after the spider woman has tried to kill him three of four times, he lets her walk off uncuffed so she can retain some dignity!
Bad move!
In the Weirdsville Departamento, Gale Sondergaard returns to the screen as the spider woman three years later in a supposed sequel without Sherlock Holmes, as a completely different person with an evil affinity for spiders in, "The Spider Woman Strikes Back!"
1 comment:
Whether it makes sense or not, I almost always like the idea of a crime story ending that does without handcuffs. That's one of the big attractions of COLUMBO endings.
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