The Spider Woman (1943)

The Spider Woman (1943) is a Roy William Neill Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce 1940s era mid-war Sherlock Holmes serial movie series entry horror (?) film production and extremely rough adaptation serial killer and sleuthing light entertainment crime and detection film with various noirish aspects, and also starring as it does Gale Sondergaard and Dennis Hoey, may be one of the better items on the Holmes 1940s registry.

The Spider Woman (1943) occupies a curiously authoritative position within the Universal Studios Sherlock Holmes cycle, a position it did not reluctantly inherit but rather seized with a vigour that demands attention. So Holmes, so far. Curios and authoritative, we are fans and though this not be noir, it is still noir informed and noir informing, so give it credence.

This film, seventh in the formidable chain of fourteen entries starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, brazenly relocates Holmes from the proper fog of Victorian London to the electric anxieties of the contemporary 1940s. The relocation is not a mere aesthetic whim but a deliberate reconfiguration that insists upon relevance, as if the film audaciously proclaimed that the essential Holmesian intellect must stride directly into the viewer’s present in order to chastise modernity for its weaknesses.

The filmmakers plunder Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon with a scholarly aggression that borders on possessive reverence, embedding shards from The Sign of the Four, “The Final Problem”, “The Adventure of the Empty House”, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, and even “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”. They do not gently gesture to these stories but rather wrench their structural sinews into the new narrative, creating a hybrid text that simultaneously venerates and dominates its source material. As I once declared with thinly veiled hauteur, « Je refuse de traiter l’adaptation comme une simple copie » and the film behaves as if it agrees wholeheartedly with me.

The plot begins with a proclamation that is nothing short of tyrannical in its intellectual audacity. Holmes, interpreting the recent London suicides as criminal performances wearing the mask of despair, decides to vanish through a theatrically staged death in Scotland. The man does not merely escape notice but weaponizes his absence, treating his own mortality as a tool of investigation in a manner that insists on the inferiority of those who could ever doubt his strategic supremacy.

Having orchestrated this spectacle of false demise, Holmes returns secretly to Dr. Watson, who remains loyally bewildered as ever. Their renewed collaboration quickly centers on the unnerving pattern among the victims, all affluent gamblers whose fortunes, and consequently their identities, have been drained into instability. Holmes infiltrates London’s gaming clubs disguised as Rajni Singh, a distinguished Indian officer, an act of transformative cunning that asserts his will to manipulate cultural expectations with unforgiving precision.

Presumptive intrigue and subterfuge in Scotian interlude with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in The Spider Woman (1943)

It is here that Holmes confronts the chilling genius of Adrea Spedding, portrayed with a deliberate serpentine elegance by Gale Sondergaard. Spedding embodies a criminal intellect that refuses to bow to masculine narratives of villainy, and Holmes’s repeated references to her as a “female Moriarty” are not compliments but warnings delivered with scholarly severity. Her scheme is engineered with ruthless clarity as she identifies financially strained men, persuades them to pawn their life insurance policies, and then exterminates them through a method both grotesque and exacting.

Spedding’s instrument of murder, the spider Lycosa carnivora, operates as an extension of her own disciplined brutality. The venom, which inflicts excruciating pain so intense that the victims capitulate into suicide, renders each death an agonizing testament to her calculated cruelty. When Holmes discovers the faint footprint of a child near one of the scenes, the film’s atmosphere momentarily quivers with a chilling ambiguity that refuses immediate interpretation.

Different newspapers and same news in The Spider Woman (1943)

Holmes and Watson then journey to the home of arachnologist Matthew Ordway, whose scholarly niche provides the promised scientific anchor for the venomous spider. What they encounter instead is a grotesque imposture, for the man claiming to be Ordway is a counterfeit whose hurried escape exposes both his guilt and his cowardice. 

The discovery of the real Ordway’s corpse transforms the space into a mausoleum of violated knowledge, where the scientist’s journals reveal cryptic references to a Central African figure immune to the venom.

Initially baffled, Holmes deciphers the journal’s secret through an anatomical clue found in the model skeleton within the study. He mistakenly identifies it as a child until Watson, in one rare moment of analytical competence, reveals the proportions indicate not youth but small stature. 

Holmes extrapolates that the being described in the journal is a pygmy, a deduction he treats not as revelation but as confirmation of his intellectual dominion over both science and anthropology.

Their next investigative thrust brings them to a fairground where the veil of civilization has been theatrically lifted and replaced with a carnival of disorder. Holmes, in a calculated act of investigative self sacrifice, falls directly into Spedding’s clutches, allowing her to choreograph his capture with the confidence of a predator who believes she has cornered her rival. 

Bound and gagged, he is tied behind a moving target in a shooting gallery, transforming the space into a perverse parody of wartime patriotism.

Inspector Lestrade and Watson, oblivious to the trap, take aim at the target with a .22 rifle. Their shots function simultaneously as rescue attempts and existential threats, underscoring the humiliating fragility of Holmes’s body even while his intellect remains unassailable. Yet Holmes escapes with characteristic authority, shattering the illusion of Spedding’s superiority and opening the path for her inevitable arrest.

Spedding’s capture is staged not as triumph but as ritualized acknowledgment of her formidable intellect. Holmes instructs Lestrade to spare her the indignity of handcuffs because, as he asserts with devastating certainty, she will “go quietly”. 

Her appreciative smile is not an admission of defeat but a scholarly recognition of her adversary’s intellectual parity, a moment so charged with tension that it threatens to invert traditional Holmesian dynamics.

The cast that encircles this spectacle includes Basil Rathbone as the unyieldingly precise Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as the perpetually confounded Dr. John Watson. Gale Sondergaard infuses Adrea Spedding with an aristocratic venom that elevates her beyond mere villainy and into the realm of criminal philosophy. Other performers such as Vernon Downing, Dennis Hoey, and Mary Gordon populate the narrative with a constellation of figures who provide the structural density required for the film’s intellectual architecture.

The film’s allusions to Conan Doyle’s canon operate not as ornamentation but as aggressive acts of reclamation. Holmes’s staged death echoes the Möbius shape of “The Final Problem”, where disappearance and resurrection entwine into a cycle of mythic continuity. His reappearance before the mourning Watson in deliberate echo of “The Empty House” reasserts control over the emotional trajectory of his companion, transforming grief into a temporary pedagogical detour.

The pygmy accomplice, derived from The Sign of the Four, is repurposed here not for sensationalism but for symbolic emphasis on the extremities of human manipulation. The venomous creature delivered through a ventilation system recalls “The Speckled Band”, although the snake has been replaced with a spider whose role in the film is even more aggressively articulated. 

The film thereby operates as a crucible in which canonical motifs are subjected to transformative heat until their forms become sharper, colder, more domineering.

One character, a mute child obsessed with catching flies, echoes a figure from “The Copper Beeches”, although in this film the role has been distorted into something more sinister. A direct reference to “The Devil’s Foot” further embeds the film within a tradition of chemically induced suffering. 

Holmes’s remark that Spedding constitutes a “female Moriarty” is an unapologetically forceful classification, although the film delicately hints at parallels with Irene Adler in terms of cunning and autonomy.

Holmes’s request that Watson whisper “pygmy” should he grow overconfident alludes to “The Yellow Face”, where the word “Norbury” served as self imposed moral restraint. The substitution is not gentle but purposeful, punching through the narrative with a reminder of Holmes’s rare moments of humility. Yet even here, his humility serves as a calculated strategy rather than genuine vulnerability.

The film’s influence extends far beyond its original release. The television series Sherlock paid homage in “The Empty Hearse”, where Watson mistakes a genuine client for Holmes in disguise, echoing the earlier film’s gleeful obsession with misdirection. 

The intertextuality is not accidental but symptomatic of the film’s durable gravitational pull within the Holmesian cinematic tradition.

Gale Sondergaard later reprised a thematically similar role in The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946), a film whose misleading title attempts to evoke continuity where none canonically exists. Nevertheless, the echo demonstrates the lingering cultural appetite for Spedding’s venomous charisma. The sequel asserts itself like an impostor scholarship, attempting to claim lineage it does not possess.

Because The Spider Woman (1943) was filmed during World War II, its shooting gallery includes caricatured images of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. These targets reveal how the film grafts its narrative of intellectual conflict onto the global machinery of wartime propaganda. Earlier films such as Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) featured the Nazis directly as antagonists, but the later entries diminished this propagandistic thrust, opting for subtler interpolations rather than explicit ideological confrontation.

At this point one must appreciate, with aggression and academic hauteur, the film’s insistence on merging entertainment with philosophical inquiry. It stages its narrative not merely as a contest between detective and villain but as a collision between competing epistemologies of power. 

As I once wrote with merciless certainty, « La connaissance impose sa propre tyrannie » and the film manifests this principle with each deductive flourish and each venomous death.

Holmes’s mastery resides in his refusal to allow the world to remain opaque. Spedding’s mastery resides in her refusal to allow the world to remain alive. The two intelligences meet in intellectual combat that does not merely advance the plot but interrogates the nature of manipulation, identity, and the lethal potential of knowledge wielded without conscience.

The film’s use of spiders is not a simple indulgence in horror but a metaphor that crawls insistently across its narrative spine. The spider, silent and absolute, embodies a form of execution that reflects Spedding’s clinical distance from her crimes. 

Holmes’s response is not fear but analytical conquest, turning biological terror into an object of study, thereby asserting the superiority of rational scrutiny over unexamined dread.

Even the pygmy figure functions as more than narrative novelty. His presence exposes the unsettling colonial gaze threaded through the film’s anthropology, a gaze that transforms difference into threat. Holmes’s intellectual triumph does not erase this discomfort but rather illuminates it, as if the film demands that the viewer confront the limits of its own cultural assumptions.

The film’s fairground sequence serves as a theatrical pivot in which order and chaos exchange masks. Holmes’s captivity, staged amid carnival frivolity, reveals the grotesque potential of public spectacle to camouflage violence. 

The shooting gallery, with its rotating caricatures of wartime tyrants, transforms the detective’s peril into a darkly satirical performance of misplaced patriotism.

In its closing moments, the film refuses sentimentality. Spedding’s dignified acceptance of her fate crystallizes her as more than a villain. She becomes the rare antagonist who meets Holmes not with inferiority but with recognition, a recognition that both flatters and indicts the detective’s obsession with intellectual dominance.

Thus The Spider Woman (1943) stands not merely as a mystery film but as an aggressively articulated intellectual performance. It strips its sources to their narrative bones and reconstructs them with scholarly violence. It wields adaptation as an instrument of domination and insists upon its authority as both homage and critique.

Grim mystery to hold you breathless!

Here is crawling death sent to Sherlock Holmes by the most fiendish killer of all...

YOU'll GASP AND SHUDDER! (print ad - Lubbock Morning Avalanche - Palace Theatre - Lubbock, Texas - August 16, 1944 - all caps)

HIS BEST MYSTERY OF THEM ALL! (Print Ad-Waycross Journal Herald, ((Waycross, Ga.)) 27 April 1944)

HUMAN or BEAST? (print ad - Casper Star Tribune - Rialto Theatre - Casper, Wyoming - April 2, 1944)

BIF DOUBLE FEATURE: See Gene Autry in "The Big Show" and Basil Rathbone in "Sherlock Holmes and The Spider Woman! (print ad - Casper Star Tribune - Rialto Theatre - Casper, Wyoming - April 2, 1944)

Mistress of Murder!

Elements of The Spider Woman were given homage in the Sherlock episode "The Empty Hearse", including Watson mistaking a genuine client for a false-bearded Holmes in disguise.

Gale Sondergaard starred in a similar role in the misleadingly-titled The Spider Woman Strikes Back also produced by Universal, with which there is no canonical relation.

Filmed during World War II, the moving targets in the shooting gallery are Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito cartoons. Previous films Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon featured Nazis as antagonists, but all succeeding sequels downplayed their propaganda purposes.

Among the most diverting episodes in the enduring series of Basil Rathbone’s Universal-era portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, The Spider Woman (1943) stands out not for narrative sophistication nor fidelity to Conan Doyle, but rather for its baroque stylization, curious tempo, and the chilly elegance of its antagonist. 

The film, directed with increasing assurance by Roy William Neill, is a palimpsest of canonical fragments: borrowed freely from no fewer than five Holmes tales, yet more memorable for the fever dream of tropes it assembles—lethal arachnids, pygmies in air ducts, masquerade, gas chambers, and carnival sharpshooting. In the space of a mere hour, one finds delirium instead of deduction, spectacle instead of structure. And yet, it works—beautifully.

Released in the year of Italy’s capitulation in the Second World War, The Spider Woman (1943) appears almost defiantly disengaged from wartime rhetoric, a contrast to several earlier Holmes outings that enlisted the detective in direct service to the Allied cause. 

The faint echoes of contemporary conflict remain—Holmes’s heart is briefly poised behind a rotating effigy of Hitler in a fairground shooting gallery—but the war, as such, no longer governs the architecture of the narrative. Instead, the film retreats into the fog-shrouded precincts of Gothic noir, reaffirming the supremacy of the intellect against the forces of feminine mischief and irrational cruelty.

The casting of Gale Sondergaard as Adrea Spedding, the eponymous “Spider Woman,” lends the film a touch of supernatural malice absent from earlier entries in the series. Sondergaard—who had already made a name for herself with roles in The Letter (1940) and Anthony Adverse (1936)—manages a performance of extraordinary duplicity. With her reptilian grace and feline eyes, she is presented as Holmes’s psychological twin, equal in cunning, more ruthless in method. 

Her technique is exquisite in its absurdity: she lures indebted gamblers to pledge life insurance as collateral, then unleashes a venomous spider to induce death so agonizing it resembles madness, compelling the victims to hurl themselves from their windows. The press christens these events the “pyjama suicides,” a term both quaint and sinister.

This narrative conceit owes much to The Speckled Band, but the film’s treatment of these tropes carries it beyond pastiche into the territory of surrealist theatre. The mechanics of Spedding’s scheme—the pygmy, the spider, the air ducts—are implausible, but their logic is dreamlike rather than rational. 

One is reminded less of Conan Doyle than of Tod Browning or early Cocteau: death is aestheticized, moral consequence dissolved. Neill, by now deeply familiar with the cadence of the series, directs these elements with a mixture of restraint and relish, allowing the artificiality to flourish within the strictures of Universal’s economy-driven production schedule.

Indeed, it is the discipline of Rathbone’s performance that grounds the delirium. This Holmes, world-weary and almost clinical in his superiority, is presented at the outset as convalescing from a neurological affliction. In one of the film’s more delightfully contrived devices, Holmes fakes his own death by collapsing into a Scottish river, leaving behind only his floating hat. 

The absurdity of this gesture is almost beside the point; what matters is that the great detective is reborn, disguised, and ready to enter the underworld. Posing first as a surly postman and then as an Indian gambler named Rajni Singh, Holmes practices deception to expose it, reinforcing his identity through its suspension.

The disguises themselves are ludicrous—Rathbone’s brownface portrayal of Singh is offensive by contemporary standards and unconvincing by any standard—but within the cultural logic of 1940s Hollywood, such masquerade was taken as demonstration of Holmes’s protean intellect. Here, disguise is not only theatrical; it is epistemological. He reveals truth by cloaking it.

Nigel Bruce, as ever, plays Dr. Watson with a buffoonish charm that bears scant resemblance to the character in Doyle’s original stories. His interactions with a real entomologist—whom he suspects to be Holmes in costume—provide one of the film’s comic high points. Bruce’s Watson is more Punch than Plutarch, a figure of foolishness who nevertheless serves as Holmes’s conscience. 

The scene in which he nearly shoots Holmes through the heart during a rigged carnival game is emblematic: the bullet, aimed at a caricature of Hitler, would strike the detective, tied behind the target. That Watson hesitates and Holmes survives is testament to the film’s occasional flirtation with thematic profundity: the deadly consequences of misrecognition, the fragility of identity, the falsehood of appearances.

Alongside Rathbone, Bruce, and Sondergaard, the film features Dennis Hoey reprising his role as Inspector Lestrade, whose hapless energy is less grating here than in earlier films. 

Hoey, a regular of the Universal stock company, lends the proceedings a certain procedural charm, balancing the exoticism of the plot with stodgy Britishness. Mary Gordon, appearing once more as Mrs. Hudson, offers little more than continuity, though her presence is oddly reassuring. Arthur Hohl, as the entomologist Gilflower, provides a momentary ambiguity, his sinister presence masking more benign intentions. 

And then there is Angelo Rossitto, the diminutive actor tasked with embodying the film’s most troubling element: the pygmy, transported from the Congo, who releases the fatal spiders. This role, though brief, is laden with racialized grotesquerie—a reminder of the period’s fondness for anthropological horror.

The Spider Woman (1943) is suffused with elements that now read as theatrical excess, yet within the historical context of its production, such touches were essential to the Holmes mythos as reconstituted by Universal. The use of light and shadow—though less baroque than in later noir entries—is unmistakably aligned with the emerging visual language of film noir. 

The chiaroscuro interiors, the urban nightscapes, the fog-laden exteriors—all testify to the stylistic drift from drawing-room logic to psychological unease. In this, the film inherits not only the moral ambiguity of noir but also its gender politics.

Sherlock Holmes: [on the pajama suicides] Indubidably, these murders are the work of a well-organized gang and directing them is one of the most fiendishly clever minds in all Europe today.

Inspector Lestrade: Any notion who?

Sherlock Holmes: I suspect a woman. Do you have tobacco around this place, Watson?

Dr. John H. Watson: Yes, I've packed it. A woman? You amaze me, Holmes. Why a woman?

Sherlock Holmes: Because the method, whatever it is, is particularly subtle and cruel. Feline, not canine.

Inspector Lestrade: Poppy-cock. Canine, feline, quinine, when a bloke does himself in, that's suicide.

Sherlock Holmes: Unless the bloke is driven to suicide and then in that case it's murder.

Dr. John H. Watson: Driven? That *sounds* like a woman, doesn't it?

Sherlock Holmes: Definitely, a female Moriarty. Clever, ruthless... and above all, cautious.

Spedding, as a figure, is neither grotesque nor vengeful; she is composed, rational, and economically motivated. She mirrors Holmes in every way except purpose. If he pursues justice for its own sake, she seeks gain through mastery of social camouflage and technical ingenuity. The film’s anxiety stems not from her methods, but from her competence. She is, in this sense, more threatening than Moriarty—not because she is more dangerous, but because she is a woman. 

The production offers a portrait of female intelligence as predatory, calculating, and serpentine. There is, of course, an erotic charge in this construction: Spedding flirts, smiles, taunts. She is framed less as a monster than a temptation. Her defeat is, therefore, not merely narrative necessity but ideological correction.

This brings us to a consideration of the film’s gendered politics, which are at once progressive and regressive. On the one hand, Spedding is granted an autonomy rarely afforded to women in mid-century cinema: she is brilliant, unrepentant, commanding. On the other, her intelligence is framed as unnatural, her ambition as parasitic. She must be contained, not because she is evil, but because she has violated the sexual and intellectual order. 

The film permits her power but denies her legitimacy. This is made clear in the final scene, when Holmes triumphs not by outwitting her, but by surviving her snares. She is defeated not through logic, but through accident.

In terms of its place within American cultural history, The Spider Woman (1943) occupies a transitional space. Released as wartime propaganda was ebbing, it reflects a society in flux—eager for stability, nostalgic for prewar elegance, yet increasingly fascinated by disorder. The film gestures toward global anxieties (the colonial references, the racialized pygmy, the veiled satire of fascist iconography) while keeping its plot safely domestic. 

It is a story of insurance fraud and bedroom deaths, not battlefields or espionage. This inward turn marks a pivot toward the noir preoccupation with interiority and mistrust. The home becomes the scene of crime, the familiar turned deadly.

The actors themselves reflect a cross-section of Hollywood’s middle-tier wartime talent. Rathbone, of course, had been cast in prestige roles before being typecast as Holmes. Prior to the series, he had appeared in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and David Copperfield (1935). After The Spider Woman, he continued in Holmesian roles until 1946, after which his career shifted toward stage and radio.

Artie - Shooting Gallery Attendant: Hey gov', sir, try your luck on Mussolini, Hiro Hito, or Hitler. Hit 'em where their hearts ought to be and listen to the 'ollow sound.

Shooting gallery denouement with Basil Rathbone in The Spider Woman (1943)

Nigel Bruce, whose Watson had by now congealed into caricature, had previously appeared in Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), the latter a Hitchcockian thriller with clear noir affiliations. Gale Sondergaard, who dominated the screen in this film, had previously worked in The Cat and the Canary (1939) and would be blacklisted in the early 1950s, a casualty of Hollywood’s ideological purges. Dennis Hoey, a reliable if unremarkable presence, had bit parts in noir-inflected films such as The Brighton Strangler (1945).

The film’s noir credentials, though less overt than in the shadow-drenched thrillers of the late 1940s, are nevertheless unmistakable. The hallmarks are all present: urban menace, moral ambiguity, deceptive appearances, and the fatal pull of the femme fatale. 

That Spedding is dispatched not with a gun but through social exposure only intensifies the noir effect: her fall is not physical but symbolic. Holmes, like the classic noir protagonist, is isolated, intellectually arrogant, and emotionally dislocated. His victory is not triumphant but weary. The world has been righted, but not restored.

To call The Spider Woman (1943) the most entertaining of the Rathbone-Holmes films is perhaps not inaccurate, though it may be damning with faint praise. What elevates the film above its kin is not its mystery, which is incoherent, nor its pacing, which is too rapid for genuine suspense, but rather its commitment to the performative possibilities of genre. The film is a meditation on masks, on the eroticism of intelligence, on the theatricality of danger. It is not Doyle’s Holmes, but something stranger, darker, and more delightful.

In the end, this is not a detective story but a spectacle—a cabinet of curiosities animated by wit, performance, and absurd precision. It reminds us that cinema need not explain itself, only enchant.

Finally, The Spider Woman (1943) is most essentially tagged as Femme Fatale, because this is a phrase that is mentioned in the film!

The AI does say aye, the following little guff on the topic, it seems the phrase was nearly 70 years old at the time of shooting, although to find it in a potential film noir is not bad at all, not bad at all. here:

The term femme fatale (French for "deadly woman") appeared in the 1870s, with the Oxford English Dictionary citing its earliest use in an 1879 publication, but the archetype of the dangerous seductress is ancient, found in figures like Helen of Troy and Circe, gaining prominence in 19th-century French literature and exploding in 1930s-40s film noir. 

Origins & Evolution

Ancient Roots: The concept predates the term, seen in myths (Sirens, Clytemnestra) and legends (Daji in China).

19th Century: French writers and critics coined the term in the mid-1800s, reflecting anxieties about modern women in a changing society, contrasting them with the "natural woman" ideal.

Literary Rise: The trope flourished in decadent literature, with characters like Carmen (1845 novella) becoming iconic examples.

Early 20th Century: The term was used in journalism and theatre reviews around 1912, with American slang calling them "vamps" (vampires) in silent films.

Film Noir: The archetype cemented its fame in 1930s hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir (e.g., The Maltese Falcon), featuring mysterious women leading men to ruin. 

Key Takeaway: While the term emerged in the 1870s French-influenced literary scene, the character type is timeless, evolving from ancient temptresses to modern cinematic figures. 

The Spider Woman (1943)

Directed by Roy William Neill

Genres - Crime, Holmes, Horror, Mystery-Suspense, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Detective Film, Serial Killer  |   Release Date - Dec 24, 1943  |   Run Time - 63 min.  |