Carry On, Holmes

 I suppose I've seen most of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes at one time or another. But I can't actually remember any of them. So I've queued up a few to watch from time to time. This time: Sherlock Holmes: The Scarlet Claw (1944).

It starts in a Canadian pub, when the church bell starts ringing. After a lot of sitting around and muttering, they finally go to see what's up. They find Lady Penrose holding onto the rope, dead, with her throat ripped out. She had slowly bled to death trying to ring for help. Yet nobody said anthing like. "Wish we'd come as soon as we heard the bell..."

Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanaugh) is attending a meeting of the Occult Society, expounding on the mysteries of existence, while Holmes and Watson reply skeptically. When he gets the news about his wife, the meeting adjourns. Holmes and Watson are packing up to leave Canada, when they check the mail, and find that Lady Penrose had written the previous day telling them that she feared for her life. This plea from a dead woman convinces them to stay and investigate.

This is not based on a Conan Doyle story, unless you count The Hound of the Baskervilles. There wasn't a lot of Holmesian deduction, but a lot of Holmes barging into houses and rifling corpses, etc. The best part, I'm afraid, was Nigel Bruce bumbling and mumbling through the Watson role. 

Anyway, to warm up for this, we watched a movie I downloaded from archive.org, Carry On Screaming (1966). The Carry On series were a bunch of low British parodies, full of bad puns and smut. This one is a parody of the Hammer Horror films, and pretty funny. It has Fenella Fielding as a sexy mad scientist - or member of a mad science team along with Jon Pertwee. Pertwee plays Dr. Watt, and even makes a Dr. Who joke, three years before he was cast as the third doctor. We get a number of the old Carry On crew, including Bernard Besslaw, Charles Hawtrey, and Joan Sims as the classic nagging wife. If this sort of thing sounds fun to you, give this one a try - it's supposed to be the best of the lot (there's ~30 and some are right stinkers). 

Anyway, it made a great intro to the Holmes and Watson.