This movie has the redoubtable Basil Rathbone consummately playing the legendary character he immortalised on the silver screen- Sherlock Holmes. Experience the excitement of viewing the famous duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the last of the Sherlock Holmes series.
THE PLOT: A well handled script, backed by awe inspiring performance provides a fantastic showcase to see exactly how this crafty mastermind works his way through puzzling conspiracies. Here is a complete review of the film included in this incredible DVD! In the last of the series, set in Dartmoor and London's antique auction rooms, giving viewers a glimpse of London in the 1940's, Holmes is pitted against a female adversary, played by Patricia Morison. A criminal, John Davidson, has stolen and hidden the plates for £5 notes from the Bank of England. Their hiding place is contained in a cipher located in three identical music boxes made at Dartmoor Prison and auctioned in London. In the meanwhile, Stinky, or Gilbert Emery, visits Watson to tell him of a strange theft. Stinky collects music boxes and someone has stolen a cheap one, leaving the expensive boxes behind. When the innocent purchasers of the boxes are murdered, including Watson's old friend, Holmes and Watson investigate. Holmes is captured by the thieves and left in a vacant garage, hanging from a beam, his hands bound, while a poisonous gas fills the room. He emerges triumphant for his (Rathbone's) last bow on the screen.
Basil Rathbone was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1892, but 3 years later, his family was forced to flee South Africa because his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy at a time when Dutch-British conflicts were leading to the Boer War. The Rathbones escaped to England, where Basil and his two younger siblings, Beatrice and John, were raised by their mother Anna Barbara, a violinist, and their father Edgar Philip, a mining engineer. From 1906 to 1910, Rathbone attended Repton School, where he was more interested in sports than studies, but discovered his interest in the theater. After graduation, he wished to pursue acting as a profession, but his father disapproved and suggested that his son try working in business for a year, hoping his son would forget about acting. Rathbone accepted his father's suggestion and worked as a clerk for an insurance company--for exactly one year. Then he contacted his cousin Frank Benson, an actor managing a Shakespearean troupe in Stratford-on-Avon.
Rathbone was hired as an actor on the condition that he work his way through the ranks, which he did quite rapidly. Starting in bit parts in 1911, he was playing juvenile leads within two years. In 1915 his career was interrupted by the First World War. During his military service, Rathbone became a second lieutenant in the Liverpool Scottish, 2nd Battalion, working in intelligence, and received the Military Cross for bravery. In 1919, released from military service, he returned to Stratford-on-Avon and continued with Shakespeare but after a year moved onto the London stage. The year after that he made his first appearance on Broadway and his film debut in the silent film Innocent (1921).
For the remainder of the decade, Rathbone alternated between the London and New York stage and occasional appearances in films. In 1929 he co-wrote and starred as the title character in a short-running Broadway play called "Judas". Soon afterwards, Rathbone abandoned his first love, the theater, for a film career. During the 1920s, his roles had evolved from the romantic lead to the suave lady-killer to the sinister villain (usually wielding a sword), and Hollywood put him to good use during the 1930s in numerous costume romps, including Captain Blood (1935), The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), and The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Tower of London (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), and others. Rathbone earned two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and as King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938).
However, it was in 1939 that Rathbone played his best-known and most popular character, Sherlock Holmes, with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and then in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), which were followed by 12 more films and numerous radio broadcasts over the next seven years.
Feeling that his identification with the character was killing his film career, Rathbone went back to New York and the stage in 1946. The next year he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Dr. Sloper in the Broadway play "The Heiress," but afterwards found little rewarding stage work. Nevertheless, during the last two decades of his life, Rathbone was a very busy actor, appearing on numerous television shows, primarily drama, variety, and game shows; in occasional films, such as Casanova's Big Night (1954), The Court Jester (1955), Tales of Terror (1962), and The Comedy of Terrors (1964); and in his own one-man show, "An Evening with Basil Rathbone", with which he toured the U.S. IMDb Mini Biography By: Lyn Hammond
