It’s not exactly canon, as they say, but that’s hardly surprising when you lift Holmes out of Victorian times and place him in the midst of Britain’s World War II struggle. The story here is a bunch of humbug about trying to protect a scientist and the weapon he has developed—a storyline with particular contemporaneous interest, though one that does not entirely match the typical, unusual nature of the great man's preferred cases. The movie often fails to live up to the promise of an authentic Holmes experience; an early scene depicting a test of the doohickey shows a laughably obvious desert landscape supposedly substituting for England’s Salisbury plain, and there are other production stumbles. Nevertheless, the movie does move at a quick and entertaining pace, and there remains enough of the super sleuth's trademark traits in Basil Rathbone's version of the character—the deductive skill, the facility with disguises, the confidence bordering on arrogance—that fans can feel an affinity for the classic embodiment of one of fiction's greatest personas. The only real regret with this flick is a lack of essential Britishness; though everyone speaks with a British accent, the atmosphere of the story never really conveys that sense of Holmes’s home country, which is so very much a part of the appeal of Conan Doyle’s creation. Still, for a film that was made to be an almost throwaway, Saturday afternoon matinee feature—the best time to watch this one is either on a lazy weekend morning or late at night—it provides just enough entertainment value in its brief running time to work as a light and casual watch. It’s no mystery: if Sherlock Holmes is on the case, you’re going to have a pretty good time.
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