Note: As a young French boy, Robert Florey became obsessed with Hollywood movies in the silent era. He boarded a board and became the king of B-movies at Paramount, proud that he should bring craft for a junky studio system that churned out movies like sausage.
A
Study in Scarlet
1933 / 1:11
Tagline: “SHERLOCK HOLMES Playing his Part in the Drama
of Life-love and Dangerous Living!”
[internet archive]
The movie opens with a Robert Florey-type touch: we see a guy who’s been strangled through the broken glass of a railway carriage window. The death of Robert Murphy is ruled a suicide, though how exactly one strangles one’s self is left obscure. Sherlock Holmes is consulted by the widow Murphy, who is miffed at being left penniless by her husband’s executor.
Murphy was a member of a secret society. The Scarlet Ring is headed by lawyer Thaddeus Merrydew. The terms of membership in the society are that the assets of any of its deceased members will be divided among the remaining members (widows are left in the cold).
Who in their right mind, the movie-goer wonders again, would belong to such a society given that it is unsurprising when members start exiting this vale of tears before their time, helped along by gunshots? When Captain Pyke is shot, Sherlock Holmes focuses on his mysterious Chinese widow (Anna May Wong) as well as the nasty Merrydew. Other members are put in a dying way: Malcom Dearing first, then Mr. Baker. There is also an attempt on the life of young Eileen Forrester, who became a reluctant society member upon the death of her father. She engaged to a guy so dumb that she gets kidnapped when he is tricked.
Reginald Owen is a 20th century Sherlock Holmes. He has the manner of a successful business executive, which does not comport with my image of a believable Holmes. I mean, Holmes ought to have a slight whiff of eccentricity and instability whereas Owen always has his feet on the ground. Dr. Watson takes a minimal part and he's stuck in the Victorian era. The English actors have that offhand manner of being offensive that makes American rudeness seem merely out of ignorance. I mean, the English can act like cold bloody monsters with no effort at all (in movies; in real life, they’re always ever so nice).
Gleefully wicked, Anna May Wong is smiling that inimitable “I’m gonna chop you up into little pieces” smile. She’s well-dressed too, as usual. She could wear a poncho and look poised and elegant. She’s in the movie for 10 minutes, tops, and she’s her compelling self for every second.
The plot is nothing like the
original novel. In another Robert Florey touch, the subjective camera is
used when Marrydew is consulting a hit man. The secret passage is pretty cool
as is the fog here and there. But the utter lack of music – didn’t the silence
ring in 1935 like it rings in 2026? - makes the lack of visual interest a bit
more surprising and disappointing.
