SHERLOCK HOLMES FACES DEATH (1943, d. Roy William Neill)
I have long resisted the idea that the Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s belong in Universal's horror movie canon. The origins of this refusal can probably be tracked back to my days as a bitterly-disappointed child who impatiently waited all week for the Friday late-night horror-movie show only to be given SHERLOCK HOLMES IN WASHINGTON instead of THE DEVIL BAT or THE HAUNTED STRANGLER or some such thing.
Also, more generally, I guess I always have disliked Uni's fast-forward rebooting of Holmes & Watson as British homeland security agents hunting down Nazi spies. It's not because I was ever an A.C. Doyle fundamentalist like some others here on the CHFB, but it is simply that I was never interested in seeing Holmes removed from his Edwardian context. I mean, I understand why Uni had him battling Axis, but for me, as a viewer thirty years after the film's release, it just seemed silly and crassly propagandistic. (And you know that at some point some jackhole studio hack tried to convince Warner Brothers that Guy Ritchie's Holmes movie needed to be set in contemporary London --- Robert Downey, Jr. would be Holmes, and Watson would be played by a beautiful young Black actress from the British West Indies, and together they would infiltrate the immigrant neighborhoods of the East End in search of Usama bin Moriarity). When Holmes breaks into John of Gaunt's stirring patriotic paean from Richard II at the end of SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON ("This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this ENGLAND"), the last thing that came to my mind was "Wow, this is a great horror movie."
But lately I have been working to re-learn and re-consider the Universal horror movies,
and I've subsequently softened a little bit on my stand against these pictures. Messrs. Brunas, Brunas, and Weaver list all twelve of Uni's Holmes
& Watson films from 1942-46 as canonical; I respectfully disagree and will only concede that THE SCARLET CLAW, THE PEARL OF DEATH, and THE HOUSE OF FEAR should be regarded as "horror movies." But I am sorely tempted to
include SHERLOCK HOLMES FACES DEATH on that list of exceptions.

[a new drinking game: take a shot of tequila every time you see Nigel Bruce grip his lapels in SHERLOCK
HOLMES FACES DEATH]
Dr Watson (Nigel Bruce, once again in full-on Fuzzy St. John mode) is helping Dr Bob Sexton (a bland Arthur Margetson, from 1935's PHANTOM SHIP with Béla Lugosi and 1936's JUGGERNAUT with Boris Karloff) treat four Allied officers suffering from post-traumatic stress at the Musgrave family's 425 year-old private country estate on the English-Scottish border. When Sexton is attacked by a mysterious assailant, Watson summons his pal Holmes (Basil Rathbone, of course) to investigate; as usual, Scotland Yard's Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey) is already there on the case, and all converge on the house just in time to see the Musgrave family killed off one by one. Holmes takes a special interest in the traditional family oath sworn by the Musgrave heirs and discovers that it is a clue to a long-forgotten Musgrave treasure that is hidden in the house and which dates back to the sixteenth-century. The murderer is also after the lost family fortune, so Holmes does his best to bring both to light, which leads him to "face death" in the last reel of this unfortunately-named motion picture.
My synopsis of this uninspired and unfaithful take-off on Doyle's 1893 short-story "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" (if you are at all interested in the source material, be sure to see the cracking good 1986 adaptation done by Granada Television with Jeremy Brett) doesn't sound very "horror-ific," but the gothicisms are heavy here: there's a raven with a taste for human blood that lives in the pub in the village (played by Universal's "Vasaria" set) near the estate; the village clock tower rings thirteen bells just before the death of a Musgrave (this goes unexplained); there's an ancient family curse; there's a drunken butler who knows too much about the Musgrave's sordid family history; the house is haunted (Holmes describes the place as "positively ghoulish") and, as Lestrade learns himself, it is honeycombed with secret passages and hidden crypts (played by a recognizable DRACULA set); there's a sinister dilapidated greenhouse; there are shattering thunderstorms most of the time, one of which includes an impressive Strickfadden lightning strike; and the psychiatrically-wounded soldiers on the estate are vaguely unnerving (except for the US flyer played by Milburn Stone, who is just annoying). There's even one of those weird human chess games that Holmes organizes. And I think that I even caught a few samples from the FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN soundtrack here and there.
Inexplicably, though, these elements never come close to blending together to make a good gothic gumbo. The Brunases & Weaver call this a near-miss --- it's a slow 68 minutes, there's lots of poking around without much suspense, the killer isn't very memorable, and Holmes's deductions aren't all that interesting. Nonetheless, I think that the argument could be made that SHERLOCK HOLMES FACES DEATH is as much a "Universal Horrors" movie as HORROR ISLAND and THE CAT CREEPS.

…oh, and as a side note, there is no stirring wartime propaganda message preached by Holmes in the final scene, but he does make an allusion that foreshadows the main ideas undergirding the Keynesian scheme for postwar European reconstruction that turned up at the Bretton Woods treaty conferences in the summer of 1944!
