Saturday, December 1, 1973 (Noon): Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death (1944) Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Synopsis: A nervous man on board a steamship bound for England is told a message has come for him via wireless. He leaves his stateroom, but as soon as he does so, young Naomi Drake (Evelyn Ankers) sneaks into his room and steals a large pearl that was hidden in the lining of his suitcase. Later, she asks an elderly man she’s befriended on the voyage to carry her camera through customs.

In Dover, the elderly man tells Drake he had no trouble; the customs agents did not even ask to look at the camera. He gives it back to her, and she goes to meet arch-criminal Giles Conover (Miles Mander). But at their meeting she discovers that the pearl is gone.

We learn that Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) has been disguised as the elderly traveler, and that he has out-conned the confidence trickster and taken the pearl. He tells his associate Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) that the “Borgia Pearl” has a long and bloody history; many people have been killed in the struggle to possess it. They take the pearl to the British Museum, but Holmes is dismayed when he learns that the pearl will be put on display inside a glass case in public view. He is distinctly unimpressed with the electric security system that will lower steel shutters over the windows and sound an alarm if the pearl is taken from its display case. The pearl will only be safe, he says, in “the deepest vault in the museum”.

Holmes shows Watson a weakness in the system, one that would make it easy for a thief to steal the pearl. As he does so he cuts power to the electric security system momentarily, but in that moment the Borgia Pearl is stolen.

The press has a field day blaming the pearl’s theft on Holmes’ incompetence. Conover is arrested and detained, but the pearl isn’t found on his person. Later, a series of strange crimes gets the attention of Scotland Yard: crimes in which people are murdered, their spines snapped and their bodies covered with dust from smashed plates and bric-a-brac. Holmes and Watson determine that all the murder victims were killed by the same telltale method. We learn that Giles Conover employs a spine-snapping brute called the Hoxton Creeper (Rondo Hatton) to do his dirty work.

Holmes discovers a common thread in all the killings: amidst the smashed crockery in each case are the shattered remains of a small plaster bust of Napoleon. Realizing that the plates and bric-a-brac were smashed to hide that fact, Holmes deduces that the Borgia Pearl must be inside one of the six Napoleon busts that were created at the same time, and that he must find the right one before Giles Conover does….

Comments: Loosely based on “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”, The Pearl of Death borrows the central gimmick of the Arthur Conan Doyle story but builds an entirely new plot around it. Part of this is dictated by screenplay structure — the original story is simply too short to be a feature film — but it’s also intended to create a worthy antagonist for Holmes with the character of Giles Conover.

In this, the movie succeeds. Conover is the perfect brains-heavy for Holmes to face: bold, ruthless and keenly intelligent. In fact, Conover is a far better antagonist than Professor Moriarity was, at least as portrayed by Lionel Atwill in the lackluster Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.

And Conover is aided by his hired muscle, the Hoxton Creeper, played by Rondo Hatton. Hatton is incredibly menacing in this movie because he is so enigmatic, wisely kept off the screen for much of the picture. Later attempts to add the Creeper to the Universal monster pantheon would be less than successful, largely because he is most effective in small doses, but he is quite scary and memorable here.

I would rate this entry as one of the better Sherlock Holmes movies of this cycle, though that’s not saying much. Universal’s Holmes stories rarely rose above average for the time. They followed a standard suspense-movie template and ladled in enough broad comedy relief to make them easily accessible to audiences who weren’t looking for anything very demanding.

As usual, Basil Rathbone plays Holmes as cool and razor-sharp, with Nigel Bruce supplying the warmth and humor that the lead character can’t provide. As dismal as I think Universal’s treatment of Watson was in these films (the depiction of Watson as a waffling buffoon persisted in the public mind for decades) audiences clearly had a lot of affection for him, and responded to the obvious chemistry between the leads.

Evelyn Ankers is on hand as well, though it’s not really clear what she’s doing there. Her character has little impact on the plot, but Ankers was their go-to female lead in Universal’s B-pictures of the time and she just seems to turn up, whether she’s needed or not.

We saw Miles Mander in Columbia’s Return of the Vampire. He’s quite good in that film and brilliant here, and I found myself wishing he’d been in more Universal horror films of the era.

Synopsis: Rock Dean (John Bromfield) is dispatched by a consortium of Brazilian tropical fruit tycoons to go into the Amazon and find out what is scaring off their workers and slowing production at their plantations. A number of people have been slashed to death by razor-sharp claws and rumors of a monster called “Curucu” are rampant.

Preparing for his trip, Dean gets a battery of vaccinations from attractive doctor Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland) who is interested in the practices of headhunters. She believes that the process of shrinking heads might contain a cure for cancer, and she asks to join Dean’s expedition upriver. But he refuses to take her. The next morning, he discovers that the crew that was going to take him upriver has been hired away by Romar, and he reluctantly agrees to join her.

Their guide Tupanico (Tom Payne) leads them upriver to meet Father Flaviano (Harvey Chalk), a missionary who is trying to civilize the pagans in the jungle. He has had mixed success with this, and has found the natives of the area to be extremely superstitious and in constant danger of backsliding into their pagan ways.

They see a shimmering form in the river, which Dean believes is a water snake but which the natives believe to be Curucu. Tupanico sticks close to Dean and Romar, even cleaning Dean’s rifle for him, which he is at first reluctant to assent to.

Soon another murder occurs: a body is found slashed with razor-sharp claws, and the hunt for Curucu is on….

Comments: My friends, I have long dreaded writing about Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, even though (until this week) I hadn’t seen it since I was around eight years old. I guess you could say that seeing it was important to my early film education, in that it was the first movie that I considered to be a brutal, out-and-out cheat.

The cheat is a pretty notorious one for monster kids like myself. It is revealed that the titular monster of this Curt Siodmak monster movie isn’t a monster at all — just a guy in a costume pretending to be a monster. I didn’t remember much about the movie from seeing it as a kid, but I do remember quite vividly the sting of disappointment in sitting through a monster movie, only to discover that there wasn’t actually a monster in it.

I’d call it a Scooby-Doo ending but the big reveal happens with another twenty minutes of running time left. At least Scooby-Doo had the good sense to place the twist ending at, you know, the end.

Having seen it again, this time as an adult, I can understand my own childhood disappointment even more. It isn’t just the cheat: Curucu has a lot of problems.

The first is that it’s a slog to get through. The characters are dull, the dialogue is soggy and despite the fact that it was shot on location in Brazil (a title card at the beginning makes sure we know this), it’s still loaded with stock wildlife footage and clumsy rear-screen projection, making it look far cheaper than it was.

Even for the time, the movie was astonishingly retrograde: ominous “native drums” pound away through the night, as though we’re watching a Tarzan movie (though it takes place in South America); headhunters threaten our heroes at every turn (despite the fact that the practice of headhunting had long since vanished from South America by the 20th century) and shopworn “native customs” abound (“You saved him,” Dean tells Romar solemnly, after she successfully treats a man who had been close to death. “Now his life belongs to you”).

The film is also deeply misogynistic, with the independent Romar repeatedly beseiged by the perils of the jungle before coming to realize that she needs Dean’s brawny arms to fall into.

Oh, we also get Tupanico’s Curucu costume, which is really just bird feathers and animal bones — a costume so ramshackle that Siodmak hides from us as much as possible — one of the few wise decisions he made as director.

John Bromfield is dishwater-dull as Dean, and horror-movie icon Beverly Garland (making her first Horror Incorporated appearance) can do nothing at all with the bad dialogue and paper-thin characterization of Dr. Romar.