The Speckled Band *** (1931, Raymond Massey, Athole Stewart, Stanley Ault, Lyn Harding, Angela Baddeley) – Classic Movie Review 2626

A 1930s update – complete with typewriters and dictaphones – on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous snaky tale The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Putting his stamp on  the role, Raymond Massey is splendidly aloof and chilly as ace sleuth Sherlock Holmes, stooping to superior bantering with his admiring inferiors – that’s everybody, of course, but especially Dr John Watson.

W P Lipscomb adapts one of Conan Doyle’s best stories, in which Holmes helps socialite Helen Stonor (Angela Baddeley) who is scared that she will be next to die after her sister Violet (Joyce Moore) is found mysteriously dead by snakebite in her bedroom at the gloomy mansion of her brutish stepfather, Dr Grimesby Rylott.

Violet had become engaged to be married and was to have inherited a large annual allowance from her parents’ estate but, as the film starts, she is discovered collapsed in the hallway by Helen, and her dying words are ‘the band, speckled’. Now, Helen has become engaged too. Rylott orders her to sleep in her sister’s bedroom, where the bed bolted to the floor…

The plodding pace and old-style filming methods count against this dawn-of-sound British mystery thriller effort. But director Jack Raymond’s 1931 British thriller is still worthwhile for the compelling tale, the atmospheric filming with cinematography by Freddie Young, and the stalwart efforts of a near-ideal cast: Massey, Athole Stewart as Dr Watson, Marie Ault as the housekeeper Mrs Hudson and Lyn Harding as Dr Grimesby Rylott.

Holmes is very modern, working not from home exactly but in a two-room office at Baker Street. He is in an inner office and he has two secretaries in an outer office equipped with all the information available on all criminals. This is stored on cards, continually updated by Holmes, who can use a communications system to call his secretaries..

The failure of the copyright holder to renew the film’s copyright resulted in the movie falling into public domain, so happily it is available, but often in poor quality duped copies.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band is one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the eighth of the 12 stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The film blends the original short story with Conan Doyle’s later play adaptation The Stonor Case, which added characters like Mrs Staunton the housekeeper (Nancy Price), Rodgers the butler (Stanley Lathbury), and the Indian servant Ali who plays snake charming music.

It originally ran 90 minutes but a 50 minute ‘full film’ is available to watch free on You Tube. It’s not in a good way but it is still very watchable.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2626

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