Movie: 'The Spider Woman' aka 'Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman' (1944)

Short though it may be, this movie is one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories to ever be committed to film, and not just because it's one of the Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce series that ran superbly for fourteen films without flagging. It also boasts some of the strongest elements from the Conan Doyle canon and a valiantly evil performance from Gale Sondergaard as the eponymous Spider Woman. Now do not be deceived by this age of superhero movie making, for she was but a mastermind collecting on insurance policies by killing people via deadly spiders and not a mutant of some kind.

The strengths of the series, and specifically 'The Spider Woman' are in the superbly balanced tone (Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson may be a buffoon, but he's an extremely entertaining one), the accumulated cast that carried over from film to film, the bizarrely high production values afforded by a massive studio complex to a B-movie series, and some exceedingly bare and film noir story telling that adds to a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. In this case, the fifth of the Universal series and seventh overall, the production is in full swing, the early days of overt wartime propaganda have been put to bed, and the production team is playing all the strengths of an updated Sherlock Holmes for every benefit they can receive.

'The Spider Woman' is the film where Sherlock dies at the beginning claiming brain problems, before coming back to reveal an undercover investigation into the mysterious 'Pyjama Suicides', facing off against his villainous female counterpart on at least three occasions, and surviving death attempts by all of a giant poisonous spider released by a pygmy, poisoned smoke from burning toxic candy paper and being strapped to the back of a Hitler target at a sideshow shooting range. When you put all of that in a movie less than sixty minutes long, in addition to a touching sequence where Lestrade lovingly takes one of Holmes's pipes as a memento to the supposedly dead detective, you are surely making something dense and delicious if it works.

If you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes and not averse to liberties being taken with the source material, than this series represents the best of adaptations to the screen. The spirit of the character is held perfectly in focus (thank you, Basil Rathbone) even while the surroundings move on fifty years from his literary heyday. In this film, the three encounters between Holmes and Adrea Spelling, the Spider Woman, are all scintillating, and the chain of events never slows to a complete stop. It's a miniature marvel, and so 'The Spider Woman' is recommended. Is it, however, the best of the series? Only time will tell.

O.