Best Line: “The needle to the last, eh, Holmes?”

Score:

The notion of transplanting Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Dr. Watson from the gaslight era to the present – or from our point of view, the 1940s – is still an odd conceit, but that it worked as well as it did for so long is a tribute to the two men who came to embody these literary icons for so many years. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were born to play the razor-witted detective and his bumbling, blustery biographer, and despite the B-movie trappings of the standard-issue WWII espionage plot in SECRET WEAPON, they manage to preserve the dignity of their characters and the source material…which is at least partly represented through elements chosen from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” (the stick figure cipher we see Holmes and Watson puzzling over comes straight from that tale). Unfortunately, apart from a couple scenes here and there, the film never rises above the level of a pedestrian pot-boiler.

Opening with a fun gambit that introduces Holmes through his expertise in disguise, SECRET WEAPON pits Holmes against no less a threat than the Nazis as he battles to prevent a scientist’s crucial invention – a new bomb sight – from falling into enemy hands. As if that isn’t enough, a plot to exploit this technology has been hatched by Professor Moriarty himself. When it rains…

At first, Universal monster movie mainstay Lionel Atwill seems strangely miscast as Holmes’ arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, but he redeems himself with a macabre turn late in the film. Attempting to buy time for Watson and Inspector Lestrade to find him, Holmes maneuvers Moriarty into wanting to dispose of his hawk-nosed nemesis through the slow process of exsanguination. Moriarty takes Holmes into the convenient fully-stocked operating room he keeps in his dockside hideaway and inserts a tube in the detective’s arm, letting his blood drain away drop by drop. As Moriarty taunts Holmes with the fact that he is slowly dying with every passing second, one can’t help but suppress a chill. If Atwill could maintain this almost Lugosian level of perverse villainy, he might have been a much more formidable Moriarty, but this is about as good as he gets.

Despite its relatively brief running time, the movie will probably make you glance at your watch more than once before you reach the climactic confrontation between Holmes and Moriarty. The villain is then dispatched by Holmes with a clever bit of misdirection and the judicious use of the dastardly professor’s own failsafe death trap against him, but come on – we all know Moriarty has more lives than a cat. The film then concludes with a trite but understandable bit of patriotic soliloquizing from Holmes, who paraphrases Shakespeare in order to stir up some war bond-buying excitement in the moviegoers.

Not a classic outing for the sleuth by any means, but with a few intriguing touches it makes for a decent way to pass the time. But somebody hand Rathbone a comb – for some reason, his hair is always atypically disheveled in this one.

ATB