The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) is a racing good time of frolicsome detective work in the new vein of Sherlock Holmes as presented on the big and silver screen, pre-war and pre-nuclear, and an honest film presentation of some post-vaudevillian ideas as they are newly filtered into the service of a good time, adapting and adopting notions of what this new canon might be and might look like, in a rather nonsensical but truly Hollywood gothic-comic matter.

The year 1939 is remembered as quite an apogeeic moment of classical Hollywood cinema. It was the season of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and many others that are routinely catalogued as monuments of an industrial art form at its height. Within that gallery, one also finds The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released by 20th Century Fox as a continuation of the enormously successful The Hound of the Baskervilles. The two films form a diptych. 

They are both Victorian in setting, lavish in production, and distinguished by the central presence of Basil Rathbone, whose interpretation of Conan Doyle’s detective has become definitive. Though based not on Doyle but on William Gillette’s stage play, this film has nevertheless acquired the aura of authenticity. It occupies a privileged place in the long Rathbone–Bruce series, and for many viewers it is the summit of the cycle.

The narrative framework is immediately compelling. The film begins with Moriarty’s acquittal in a London courtroom. Justice has failed. The villain walks free, not because he is innocent, but because the machinery of the law is inadequate to contain him. Holmes and Watson arrive too late, bearing evidence that would have secured a conviction. 

The judge, furious but powerless, declares the case closed. This opening is crucial, for it sets up the essential duel: the intellect of Holmes against the intellect of Moriarty. In fact, the confrontation is staged almost immediately, when Holmes and Moriarty share a cab. There they exchange veiled threats. Moriarty announces his intention to commit the crime of the century under Holmes’s nose, thereby destroying his rival’s reputation. The stage is set for a contest of minds that is more important than the jewels at stake.

George Zucco as Professor James Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) 

The central story divides into two threads. On the one hand, there is the plot concerning Ann Brandon, played by the young Ida Lupino. Her father has been murdered years earlier. Her brother soon follows. Both deaths are heralded by sinister drawings that predict the time and manner of their demise. Now she too has received such a warning. 

She turns to Holmes for protection. The parallel thread concerns the Star of Delhi, a precious emerald destined for inclusion in the Crown Jewels and to be guarded at the Tower of London. 

Holmes is enlisted to safeguard the jewel’s transfer. What Holmes does not know is that the case of Ann Brandon has been carefully planted by Moriarty as a distraction. While Holmes devotes his energies to solving a seemingly complex murder mystery, Moriarty pursues the theft of the jewels.

The duplicity is ingenious. The Brandon murders are not meaningless, yet they are secondary. They function as the smokescreen. The detective is thereby stretched between competing responsibilities, forced into what looks like failure. The film cleverly maintains suspense by alternating between the Brandon affair and the Crown Jewels, giving the impression that Holmes himself is uncertain where the true danger lies.

Rathbone’s performance here is finely wrought. His Holmes is urbane, meticulous, and at moments even playful. The disguise sequence, in which he appears as a South American entertainer singing to a crowd, is striking. 

The audience within the film, as well as the audience watching, cannot easily recognize him. Rathbone makes the transformation complete. This moment testifies to the theatrical background of the actor and his capacity for adopting mannerism, accent, and gesture. It also underlines the thematic link between detective work and performance: to unmask others, Holmes must himself assume masks.

Nigel Bruce as Watson provides comic relief, though it is fair to say his interpretation has always divided audiences. Conan Doyle’s Watson is intelligent and dependable. Bruce’s version is bumbling, absent-minded, and often the butt of jokes. Yet his bluster and affable incompetence provide a contrast that sharpens Holmes’s brilliance. 

The dynamic between the two men is thus not symmetrical but complementary. Many later critics have lamented Bruce’s caricature, but there is no denying the warmth he injects into the proceedings. His presence allows for levity in a narrative otherwise dominated by sinister plots and nocturnal murders.

George Zucco’s Moriarty is perhaps the strongest element in the film. Where Rathbone is clipped and aristocratic, Zucco is smooth and insinuating. He cultivates plants with the same meticulous attention that he devotes to crime. The greenhouse scenes, in which he chastises his butler for neglecting his botanical treasures, are quietly sinister. 

Here is the criminal mastermind who values orchids more than human life. Zucco infuses the role with menace but also sophistication, never descending into camp. He makes Moriarty credible as an equal to Holmes, perhaps even as his superior. Their conversations crackle with restrained hostility, an intellectual duel played out in words.

The film’s atmosphere must also be considered. This is one of the last Holmes films to be produced with substantial resources. Fox devoted real attention to sets, costumes, and cinematography. The fog-shrouded London streets, the hansom cabs, the Victorian interiors—all convey the late nineteenth century with conviction. 

Leon Shamroy’s photography is rich in shadows, filled with layers of mist, punctuated by gaslight. This visual language has affinities with the developing style of film noir, though The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes predates the full flowering of noir in American cinema. The thick fog, the chiaroscuro interiors, and the sense of dread connect the film to the same aesthetic impulses that would, a few years later, shape The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.

One must also note the historical context of 1939. Britain, where the story is set, had just declared war on Germany in September of that year. The United States had not yet entered the war, but the mood was already dark. 

The idea of Moriarty plotting the theft of the Crown Jewels resonates with anxieties about national security, the fragility of institutions, and the vulnerability of even the most established symbols of continuity. To stage a battle at the Tower of London in 1939 is to evoke the defense of tradition against modern threats. Although the film is ostensibly Victorian, it is received by audiences on the eve of global conflict, and the menace of Moriarty becomes metaphor for forces that threaten the civilized order.

Ida Lupino in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Ida Lupino’s presence deserves extended reflection. She was at the start of a major career. Within a year she would appear in They Drive by Night and later in High Sierra, establishing herself as one of the most important actresses of the 1940s and eventually one of the rare women directors of the period. In this film, she plays the endangered heroine, pleading for Holmes’s aid, caught between family tragedy and looming murder. 

Basil Rathbone’s career in Hollywood between the 1930s and 1940s presents one of the most fascinating case studies of non-hegemonic masculinity in classical cinema. Trained in the British theatrical tradition, Rathbone was always at ease in costume, makeup, and disguise, his body becoming a mutable surface upon which Hollywood inscribed villainy, queerness, and racial Otherness. 

Unlike contemporaries whose star images rested on stability and recognizable persona, Rathbone was a chameleon, moving across costume melodrama, swashbuckler, horror, and literary adaptation with an ease that unsettled normative ideals of male identity. His screen presence must be read not only through the conventional villain roles for which he was most famous, but also through the feminizing textures of satin and velvet, the coded signification of the robe, and the homosocial intensities of swordplay.

Between 1938 and 1940, the years of his greatest commercial visibility, Rathbone made twelve films, eight of which were costume dramas, and in six he played the villain. The costume film allowed the male body to be transformed into spectacle: hair powdered, bodies encased in tights, adorned with lace, cloaked in velvet. Here, villain and hero mirrored one another, the sartorial exaggeration placing masculinity itself into quotation marks. 

The dressing gown, a sartorial marker of the urbane playboy, extended this feminized masculinity beyond the confines of the historical film. It was a garment of ambiguity, one that blurred boundaries between masculine and feminine self-presentation without ever declaring transgression outright. Rathbone’s frequent donning of such garments—whether as aristocrat, seducer, or criminal—marks him as an emblem of unstable gendering in a Hollywood system otherwise wedded to fixity.

The robe’s semiotics were not new. Noël Coward, whose languid figure in silk dressing gowns epitomized Jazz Age decadence, provided a cultural template for theatricalized masculinity in the interwar years. Coward’s affectation of silk robes, cigarette holders, and witty detachment became synonymous with queerness, camp, and cosmopolitan modernity. 

As Coward himself wryly recalled, a publicity photograph of him in a Chinese robe provoked outrage from a retired Brigadier General, cementing his association with decadence in the public imagination. Rathbone’s appearance in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929) channels precisely this Cowardesque glamour: his luminescent silk robe, more radiant than Norma Shearer’s gown, stages a feminized male spectacle, situating Rathbone within a homosocial triangle of desire and rivalry. Such imagery aligned him with a queer genealogy of performance in which men in robes were simultaneously dandified and suspect.

The robe’s semiotic excess persisted into the 1930s, though its meanings shifted according to context. On Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938), it signalled comic emasculation; on Clark Gable in Night Nurse (1931), it suggested decadent villainy; on Clifton Webb in the 1940s, it marked outright effeminacy. 

For Rathbone, who appeared in a robe or its equivalent in over seventy percent of his Hollywood films, the garment consistently encoded duality: a masculinity compromised by feminization, a villainy defined by sartorial excess. The dressing gown thus functioned as an index of queerness, rendering visible the instability of gender codes otherwise rigorously policed by the Production Code.

If the robe marked Rathbone as queer, his roles as racial Other placed him within another system of cinematic deviance. His performance as deLevis, the Jewish outsider in Basil Dean’s Loyalties (1933), remains one of his most nuanced. 

The film adapts John Galsworthy’s play about antisemitism in British high society. Here Rathbone does not play the monster but the victim: excluded from the elite, mocked for his dressing gown, and persecuted for demanding justice. Doubling with his aristocratic rival Dancy, deLevis embodies both similarity and difference: sartorially akin yet socially ostracized. The film’s insistence on prejudice as the true villain—underscored by Rathbone’s restrained dignity—marked a rare British cinematic engagement with antisemitism, a subject Hollywood conspicuously avoided.

In contrast, Rathbone’s turn as Ahmed in The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) exemplifies Hollywood Orientalism at its most grotesque. Draped in turbans and silks, surrounded by male attendants, Ahmed is coded as both exotic and queer. He delights in cruelty, keeps lions and vultures for torture, and is introduced being massaged by male servants. 

His villainy is defined by excess: elaborate costumes, sadistic ritual, and an eroticized relationship with his henchmen. Even the notorious kiss between his lieutenants, a startling breach of the Production Code’s prohibition on “sex perversion,” occurs in his quarters, enveloped in the aura of queerness that surrounds him. Here the robe does not merely feminize but Orientalizes, aligning queerness with racial difference and rendering the villain doubly Other.

Yet it is in the swashbuckler that Rathbone’s queer villainy finds its most iconic expression. His swordfights with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and with Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro (1940), remain among the most celebrated duels in cinema history. These scenes enact what George Haggerty has described as the Gothic’s obsession with male-male relations so intense they verge on union. The duel is a ritualized intimacy: bodies circling, blades crossing, sweat glistening, faces inches apart. Swordplay becomes a displaced eroticism, sublimating desire into combat.

In Captain Blood, Rathbone’s Levasseur courts Flynn’s Blood as potential partner, only to be betrayed in a duel staged over a woman who functions as little more than a pretext. Their blades clash in rhythms that recall the cadences of flirtation; their final embrace of combat culminates in Levasseur’s death, a consummation by sword. In Robin Hood, the erotic charge is heightened by Technicolor spectacle: Rathbone’s Gisborne and Flynn’s Robin duel through castle halls as Erich Korngold’s score crescendos, the phallic sword delivering orgasmic penetration at the fatal blow. 

Accounts of the filming emphasize exhaustion, sweat, and near telepathic synchronization—descriptions that echo sexual intimacy. These swordfights encode queer desire within the strictures of Code cinema: desire that must end in the villain’s death, yet which is unmistakably the narrative’s true climax.

Thus Rathbone’s villains, whether aristocratic fops, Oriental despots, or swashbuckling swordsmen, were always excessive, adorned, and feminized. Their Otherness was gendered, sexual, and racial, each dimension reinforcing the perception of deviance.

If Sherlock Holmes represented the singular exception—a role of rational masculinity—Rathbone’s broader career staged a repeated interrogation of what masculinity could mean on screen. Through robes, wigs, tights, and swords, he embodied the instability of gender codes, becoming a locus where queerness and villainy converged.

Pam Cook has argued that costume cinema suggests that identity itself is fluid and unstable, a hybrid form that resists containment. Rathbone’s career epitomizes this hybridity. His villains are not merely evil but glamorous, not merely deviant but seductive. They are villains because they are queer, and queer because they are villains. In their silk robes and dazzling swordfights, they expose the fissures in Hollywood masculinity, where desire, spectacle, and power entangle in ways the Code could repress but never erase.

Her vulnerability is central to the plot, since her case diverts Holmes from the true target. Yet even within the stereotype of the damsel in peril, Lupino brings strength. Her features convey both terror and determination. There are moments when her composure suggests she is more resilient than the men around her assume.

This is where a feminist analysis intrudes. The film, like so many of its time, assigns the woman the role of victim. She exists to be protected, to be threatened, to generate anxiety in the male hero. Her voice is heard, but only insofar as it serves the detective’s narrative. Lupino herself was capable of portraying women of agency and complexity, as her later noir roles demonstrate. Here, however, she is the object around which men manoeuvre. The contrast between her helplessness and the male contest of intellect underlines the gender dynamics of the genre.

Yet one might also argue that the figure of Ann Brandon exposes the failure of patriarchal institutions: the law cannot protect her, her fiancé cannot shield her, her family has already been destroyed. It is only the eccentric detective, existing outside official authority, who can intervene. Thus, the film dramatizes both the vulnerability and the indispensability of the female figure.

The climax atop the Tower of London is both theatrical and symbolic. Moriarty believes himself triumphant. He gloats over his success, delaying his escape, thereby giving Holmes the chance to arrive. The confrontation is physical as well as intellectual, culminating in Moriarty’s fall. 

The visual spectacle of two figures battling above the ancient fortress carries mythic weight. The jewel is saved, the crime prevented, but only just. One cannot help feeling that Moriarty might well have succeeded if not for his own vanity.

Placed within the history of the United States, this film occupies an intriguing position. American audiences in 1939 were fascinated by British settings and characters. Hollywood was eager to exploit the atmosphere of Victorian London, with its gas lamps, hansom cabs, and mysterious alleys. 

This transatlantic fantasy allowed Americans to imagine themselves as inheritors of a cultural tradition stretching back to Conan Doyle, Dickens, and the fog-bound metropolis. At the same time, the film’s emphasis on individual ingenuity, embodied in Holmes, reflects an American ideal: the self-reliant problem-solver who resists bureaucracy and triumphs by intellect. Thus, even while the story is British, its appeal in the United States reveals much about American self-conceptions at the brink of war.

The noir connection must be elaborated further. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not a film noir in the strict sense, but it anticipates the style. Its fog-drenched streets and shadowed interiors evoke the atmosphere later perfected by the noir cycle.

The double plot, with its red herrings and distractions, resembles the convoluted narratives of classic noir. Moreover, the figure of Moriarty as a cultivated villain with a philosophical bent resembles later noir antagonists who embody the dark side of reason.

Ida Lupino’s presence also links the film to the noir tradition, since she would later become a major star of the genre. Her early appearance here establishes a continuity. When one watches The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, one senses that the stylistic and thematic materials that would define film noir are already germinating.

It is also worth contrasting this film with the later Universal series, in which Holmes was transplanted to the 1940s and mobilized as a wartime symbol. 

Those films are enjoyable in their own right, but they lack the luxuriant Victorian atmosphere of the Fox productions. They also lean heavily on propaganda, enlisting Holmes against Nazi agents. By contrast, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes maintains a period setting and therefore achieves a kind of timelessness. It is less topical, more mythic.

Rathbone’s embodiment of Holmes deserves final attention. Many actors have attempted the role: Peter Cushing, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch, among others. Yet Rathbone remains the touchstone. His profile, aquiline and severe, seems to have stepped directly from the illustrations of Sidney Paget. He conveys both arrogance and charm, both precision and theatricality. 

He is not Conan Doyle’s Holmes exactly, but he is Hollywood’s Holmes, a figure larger than life. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, one sees Rathbone at his most confident, balancing gravitas with wit, severity with play.

The film is not without flaws. The plot contains gaps. Gaps! Like we are bothered, the latter day noireux is not bothered. Certain coincidences strain plausibility. The finale, while exciting, feels hurried. Some critics have complained that Holmes appears slow to grasp Moriarty’s plan, distracted by the obvious red herring. But such weaknesses are minor compared to the overall achievement. The film delivers atmosphere, character, and suspense in abundance.

When seen today, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes retains its charm. It is a polished artefact of studio-era craft, a bridge between Victorian melodrama and modern crime cinema, a work that honours the detective genre while anticipating noir. For many admirers, it is indeed the finest of the Rathbone–Bruce series, a perfect balance of performance, atmosphere, and narrative intrigue.

As good as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche can get, this beauty of pre-War pre-nuclear fun fest of frolicsome purity came tagged as follows for the happy and lucky peoples of the lightweight mid-century moment of arrival of this new canon:

SENTENCED TO DEATH..by the King of Criminals! 

THE SUPER-CRIME OF THE CENTURY! 

The Struggle of Super-Minds in the Crime of the Century!

The 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Alfred L. Werker and produced by 20th Century-Fox, represents both a triumph of mood and a paradox of narrative failure.

As the second entry in the Rathbone-Bruce cycle, and the last of the Fox productions before Universal shifted the detective into wartime allegory, the film occupies a curious position: it is at once one of the most evocative Holmes films ever made, yet also one of the most exasperating in its logical incoherencies. It offers lush sets, brooding fog, and a villain of rare cunning, yet constantly undermines itself through clumsy exposition and gaps in deduction. 

The result is a work that seduces with its gothic atmosphere, while simultaneously inviting the charge that its plot is “risible,” to borrow the phrasing of disenchanted critics. To grapple with this film, one must move beyond a mere cataloguing of plot holes and embrace it as a cultural object—an artifact of 1939, a year when Europe collapsed into war, when Hollywood was gilding the last moments of its classical era, and when America still luxuriated in the Victorian trappings of inherited Englishness.

The film begins with remarkable promise. Professor Moriarty, played by George Zucco with an urbane venom, escapes conviction for a murder that the entire courtroom—and indeed the audience—knows he committed. Holmes arrives too late with exculpatory evidence, and the stage is thus set for a duel not of morality but of intellect. 

This opening suggests that the narrative will unfold as a battle of wits, a dance of equal minds. Moriarty, with chilling nonchalance, offers Holmes a carriage ride after the acquittal. Their conversation—eerie in its civility—anticipates later cinematic rivalries, the Bond–Scaramanga dinner in The Man with the Golden Gun, or Hannibal Lecter’s dialogues with Clarice Starling. Here are two minds who recognize in each other a worthy adversary.

Yet from the outset the film squanders the dramatic balance. While Moriarty boasts of committing “the crime of the century,” he foolishly confides elements of his plan to his subordinate. This act of theatrical exposition places the audience a full step ahead of Holmes. 

Rather than watching Holmes weave implausible clues into a tapestry of logic—as Conan Doyle intended—we are reduced to waiting for Holmes to catch up. The detective is not the engine of revelation, but the lagging participant in a game we already understand.

Rathbone’s Holmes: Authority, Arrogance, and the Mask of Reason

Basil Rathbone’s performance remains the film’s anchor. With his aquiline features and clipped diction, he embodies the image of Holmes so fully that subsequent actors struggled to escape his shadow. Yet Rathbone’s Holmes here is compromised by the script. 

He shows authority and even flashes of eccentric wit, yet his decision-making often verges on negligence. He allows a client, so marked for death, so yep to walk alone through fog-bound London streets, thereby ensuring murder.

He leaves a terrified young woman unguarded while he indulges in experiments at the Natural History Museum. These lapses are not demonstrations of overconfidence but of narrative contrivance, designed to allow Moriarty’s diversions to succeed. Holmes becomes less the master of deduction than the pawn of screenwriters seeking artificial suspense.

This cavalier disregard for human vulnerability sits uneasily with Rathbone’s innate gravitas. The actor conveys intensity with every gesture, yet the logic of the plot reduces him to a figure repeatedly deceived by Moriarty’s false trails. What was meant to be a titanic contest of intellects collapses into a structure in which the audience—fed exposition in advance—knows more than Holmes himself. The detective, in effect, plays catch-up in his own film.

If Rathbone lends authority, Nigel Bruce supplies levity. His Dr. Watson has long divided audiences. Purists lament his buffoonery, contrasting it with Doyle’s capable veteran of war. Admirers defend him as comic foil, essential to the chemistry of the series. 

In this film, Bruce is marginally less oafish than in later Universal entries, but he still bungles investigations and provides unintentional humor. At moments he earns genuine laughter—his street-side performance as a corpse feigning death to bemused passersby remains charming—but he simultaneously reduces the partnership to parody. 

Where Doyle envisioned Holmes and Watson as complementary minds, the film recasts them as master and clown. This decision catered to audience tastes of the late 1930s, when light relief was deemed necessary even in mystery films, but it strips the narrative of the dignity and tension that Doyle cultivated.

Ida Lupino, as Ann Brandon, damsel and symbol, supplies the requisite damsel in distress. She seeks Holmes’s aid after her brother receives ominous death threats, recalling the unsolved murder of their father years earlier. Lupino, in her early twenties, had already displayed formidable screen presence in crime melodramas and would soon direct hard-edged noirs of her own. 

Here, however, she is confined to hysteria and vulnerability. The role requires her to tremble, faint, and be pursued by a sinister assassin with a flute and bolas. The atmosphere surrounding her is potent—creeping fog, mournful music, shadows across drawing rooms—but the character herself is deprived of agency.

Seen through a feminist lens, Lupino’s Ann epitomizes the limited roles available to women in such films. She exists primarily as bait: her peril distracts Holmes from Moriarty’s true scheme. Her intelligence is dismissed, her warnings are met with skepticism, and her function is decorative. 

In later years Lupino would rebel against such passivity, directing films that explored female autonomy and social outcasts. But here she illustrates the gendered pattern of 1930s cinema: women as diversions, men as duelists. Holmes protects her body, Moriarty threatens it, but she never directs the narrative herself.

If Lupino is sidelined, George Zucco relishes his opportunity. His Moriarty, with shaved pate and sinister beard, embodies academic evil. He taunts his valet while being shaved, daring the man to slit his throat, then threatening posthumous revenge on the servant’s family should he dare. 

This small vignette crystallizes Moriarty’s dominance: even in apparent vulnerability, he holds absolute control. Zucco’s Moriarty is less flamboyant than later incarnations, but he radiates cruelty through restraint. He cultivates orchids like a parody of refinement, echoing cinematic villains who stroke cats or polish exotic weapons. The effect is chilling in its casualness.

Yet despite Zucco’s efforts, the film mishandles Moriarty’s scheme. The plot to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, masked by a series of diversionary murders, demands suspension of disbelief. It requires coincidences spanning a decade, and assumes that Moriarty has orchestrated not merely crimes but historical contingencies. 

Critics rightly dismissed the convolutions as absurd. Still, the very audacity of the plan—the notion of a master criminal outwitting the British state by manipulating symbols of monarchy—lends the film a grandeur absent from routine mysteries.

The film’s greatest strength lies not in logic but in mood. Cinematographer Leon Shamroy bathes London in impenetrable fog, gaslight, and rain-slick cobblestones. The mise-en-scène approaches horror, echoing the Universal monster cycle. The mysterious assassin, club-footed and flute-playing, stalks through shadows like a spectral figure from gothic lore. 

The mournful melody, repeated whenever doom approaches, invests the film with an uncanny aura. Even Rathbone’s disguise as a cockney entertainer at a garden party—singing “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside”—adds to the surreal texture, blurring high intellect with vulgar theatre.

It is this atmosphere, rather than narrative coherence, that situates the film within the proto-noir tradition. Long before the codification of American noir in the 1940s, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes demonstrates the stylistic ingredients: chiaroscuro lighting, urban labyrinths, fatalism, and psychological menace. 

The fog of Victorian London anticipates the shadows of Los Angeles alleys; Moriarty’s manipulations foreshadow the femme fatales and gangsters who entrap heroes in deceptive plots. The film is not noir in subject but noir in spirit, embodying the suspicion that rational deduction cannot fully dispel the darkness of human malice.

To understand the resonance of this film, one must recall its release date: September 1, 1939. On that very day, German forces invaded Poland, igniting the Second World War. The phrase “crime of the century,” bandied by Moriarty, gained macabre resonance: the true crime of the century was unfolding in Europe, where tyranny sought to enslave nations. 

Holmes’s struggle to defend the Crown Jewels from violation mirrored, unintentionally, Britain’s struggle to defend its heritage and sovereignty from Nazi aggression. Audiences watching in late 1939 could not miss the irony: while Holmes pursued a theatrical villain through foggy streets, the real Moriarty of the modern world had already unleashed mechanized horror.

This historical coincidence lends the film unexpected poignancy. It stands as the last Holmes film in which the detective inhabits the comfort of Victorian England. Within a few years Universal would uproot him into the 1940s, pitting him against Nazi spies and saboteurs, transforming Doyle’s creation into a propaganda tool. The film thus represents a threshold: the end of an era of nostalgic escapism, the dawn of cinema’s mobilization for war.

Though set in London, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes belongs equally to American cultural history. Produced in Hollywood, it reflects America’s fascination with Victorian England as a surrogate past. In 1939, the United States was still negotiating its relationship with Britain, torn between isolationism and sympathy. Films like this, luxuriating in fog and carriages, allowed Americans to claim a share in British heritage. They offered a safe distance from contemporary anxieties, while simultaneously preparing audiences to view Britain’s struggle as their own.

More broadly, the film reveals America’s appetite for logic and order. Holmes embodies the promise that intellect can master chaos, that even the most convoluted crime yields to rational inquiry. In Depression-era and prewar America, such faith in reason was both comforting and illusory. 

The very absurdities of the plot—its reliance on coincidence and diversion—betray the fragility of this faith. Holmes may prevail, but the world outside the cinema was plunging into irrational violence. Thus the film participates in the larger American story: the oscillation between confidence in reason and confrontation with catastrophe.

Revisiting the film through gender reveals a more troubling dimension. Lupino’s Ann Brandon epitomizes the Victorian damsel archetype, her body the site of male conflict. Her brother’s death and her own vulnerability are narrative devices to occupy Holmes while Moriarty executes his true scheme. She is denied agency; her fears are dismissed as melodramatic; her ultimate fate depends entirely on male intervention.

Yet the very limitations of the role illuminate the gender politics of 1930s cinema. Women were often positioned as catalysts rather than agents, as pretexts for male heroism. Lupino herself would later rebel against such confinement, becoming one of the few female directors in Hollywood’s studio era, crafting films about unwed mothers, bigamy, and sexual violence. 

Her later work, steeped in noir fatalism, can be read as a corrective to the passivity forced upon her here. In retrospect, Ann Brandon is less a character than a symbol of how women were used within patriarchal narratives: decorative, endangered, and silent.

The climax atop the Tower of London promises grandeur but delivers confusion. Holmes and Moriarty engage in physical combat, echoing their literary struggle at the Reichenbach Falls. Yet the logic of how Moriarty infiltrates the Tower, disguised as a guard, strains credulity. 

The film attempts spectacle, but the sense of inevitability is missing. Unlike Doyle’s stories, where Holmes explains deductions that retroactively appear brilliant, here the resolution seems forced, dependent on coincidence rather than intellect. The crime of the century dissolves into a contrivance of convenience.

Still, the imagery of Holmes chasing Moriarty through the medieval fortress carries symbolic weight. It is reason confronting evil within the very heart of monarchy, intellect grappling with chaos at the seat of tradition. If the logic falters, the myth remains potent. Holmes does not merely save jewels; he safeguards the continuity of civilization.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is both celebrated and derided. Admirers praise its atmosphere, its definitive Rathbone portrayal, and its chilling Zucco performance. Detractors dismiss its implausibilities and infantilizing of Watson. Both are correct. The film succeeds as mood piece and fails as detective story. It enchants with fog and shadow but frustrates with illogic.

Yet its cultural importance cannot be denied. It introduced Moriarty to the Rathbone series, established Holmes as master of disguise, and crystallized many of the tropes that subsequent films would recycle. It demonstrated Hollywood’s capacity to appropriate Victorian England as a playground of gothic thrills. And it coincided with the outbreak of world war, embedding itself in history as a final fantasy before reality intruded.

To situate the film within noir is not merely an exercise in style. Noir, as it emerged in the 1940s, thrived on fatalism, urban menace, and the erosion of rationality. This 1939 film, though costumed in Victorian garb, anticipates those themes. Holmes, ostensibly the apostle of reason, spends much of the film deceived, manipulated, and belated. 

The atmosphere of fog and flute evokes a world where clarity is impossible, where malevolent forces orchestrate diversions to entrap even the keenest mind. The narrative asserts Holmes’s victory, but the mood whispers that reason is fragile, always threatened by chaos. 

In this sense, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes belongs less to the detective genre than to the noir tradition, a precursor of the shadows soon to envelop American cinema.

You could, you know, you could if you were the sort, argue that this film is a paradox. It is atmospheric, entertaining, and rich in performances, yet logically absurd and narratively unsatisfying. It delights the senses while insulting the intellect. But perhaps this very paradox explains its endurance. 

It reveals the limits of logic, the fragility of deduction, the ease with which even Holmes can be deceived. Released on the day the world plunged into war, it captures the twilight of an era: the end of Victorian nostalgia, the dawn of global catastrophe.

For American audiences, it provided a glimpse of England’s mythic past and prepared them, unwittingly, to sympathize with Britain’s struggle. For modern viewers, it offers both charm and frustration, a reminder that cinema need not be coherent to be haunting. It is less a mystery than a mood, less a story than a cultural artefact. 

And in its fog-drenched streets, its mournful flute, its sinister Moriarty, one perceives the stirrings of noir: the suspicion that reason is never enough, that darkness always encroaches, and that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes are, in truth, adventures into the shadowed heart of modernity.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Directed by Alfred L. Werker

Genres - Crime, Mystery-Suspense, Thriller, Holmes  |   Sub-Genres - Detective Film, Serial Movies  |   Release Date - Sep 1, 1939  |   Run Time - 85 min.  |