Synopsis: On a fishing trip in Scotland, Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) is hoping for a peaceful vacation with no news of the outside world, but Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) has obtained a local newspaper filled with reports of a mysterious series of deaths. The so-called “Pajama Suicides” cause men in their nightclothes to lose their minds and throw themselves off balconies or through windows to their deaths in the dead of night.
Holmes has been complaining of of dizzy spells and after one such episode Watson finds he has vanished, with only his hat floating by on the river. Believing that Holmes has fallen into the river and drowned, a despondent Watson returns to London to act as executor of his estate.
But soon enough Holmes reappears to Watson (in the guise of a postman), and reveals that his supposed death was simply a ruse; Holmes has in fact been quietly working on the case of the Pajama Suicides, which he has deduced are murders performed by a singularly clever and deadly criminal. The perpetrators of these crimes, Holmes reasons, will no doubt lower their guard if they believe he is dead.
Holmes invents the persona of a wealthy Sikh named Rajnee Singh, making sure the man’s arrival in town gets coverage in the London society pages. At a private gambling club Singh loses badly after following the betting advice of the beautiful Adrea Spedding (Gale Sondegaard), and later goes out to the balcony. He pulls out a revolver and holds it to his temple, but Spedding stops him. She tells him that if he is desperate for money, she knows someone who can cash in his life insurance policy; all he need do is sign it over.
Holmes as Singh expresses delight at this possibility. But Spedding is already suspicious that he is in fact Sherlock Holmes; she “accidentally” spills tea on his hand and then wipes it away with a napkin, revealing the greasepaint he is wearing. She arranges for a venomous spider to crawl down the ventilation shaft and into his bedroom while he sleeps, but Holmes guesses her action in advance and kills the arachnid, which is revealed to be a creature whose toxin causes hysteria and death, in exactly the same way as the previous victims of the Pajama Suicides.
Spedding then visits Holmes as 221B Baker Street in the company of a young boy, who throws what appears to be a candy wrapper into the fire. After the guests leave, the apartment is filled with deadly smoke, and Holmes and Watson barely escape with their lives.
After an encounter with one of Spedding’s agents who has impersonating a noted entomologist, Holmes is captured and Spedding devises a fiendishly clever plot that will make Watson the unwitting assassin of his best friend….
Comments: The Spider Woman is one of the better Sherlock Holmes adventures of Universal’s 1940s cycle, for once providing a villain who operates at Holmes’ level. Gale Sondegaard’s Adrea Spedding makes a better showing than any of the Universal contract players trotted out over the years to play Professor Moriarty. In fact, so deliciously evil was her presence in this movie that three years later she was brought back for Spider Woman Strikes Back, a sorta-kinda sequel. In that opus, Sondegaard played a woman named Zenovia Dollard of Domingo, California. Instead of spiders she bred poisonous plants, but her sinister methods were much the same.
The Spider Woman is a well-paced little thriller, and actually makes an attempt to put together a compelling mystery story — never a guarantee with these films. As with all the previous entries in this series it borrows story elements from the Conan Doyle stories, more to fulfill a contractual requirement than anything else, and in fact plot points from both “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” and “The Final Problem” are used here.
As always, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce have great chemistry as Holmes and Watson, and Gale Sondegaard is absolutely splendid as Adrea Spedding, the resourceful and murderous career criminal. Spedding’s m.o. is never properly explained (her victims’ deaths are ruled as suicides, and insurance companies don’t pay out on suicides) but it is pushed past us so quickly many in the audience probably never stopped long enough to think about it.
This was the seventh of the 14 Holmes adventures at Universal, and while the ending is a bit contrived, with Spedding putting Holmes in a Batman ’66-style trap and then leaving him to escape, this is nevertheless one of the best of the series.
The Thing That Couldn’t Die
Synopsis: At a California dude ranch, owner Flavia McIntyre (Peggy Converse) and her ranch hands watch as niece Jessica (Carolyn Kearney) searches with a divining rod for water on the property. Three of the ranch guests, Gordon (William Reynolds), Linda (Andra Martin) and Hank (Jeffrey Stone) arrive on horseback and watch as Jessica walks around with the divining rod. Gordon expresses the opinion that water witching is just a lot of superstition, but Flavia vouches for Jessica’s ability; she can even find lost objects, having once found one of her own missing rings.
Jessica is briefly nettled by the appearance of the three skeptics but continues her search. Near a large tree she indicates that she has found water, but just as quickly declares that there is something evil below the tree and no one should dig there.
Ignoring her protests, Flavia’s hired hands Boyd and Mike begin to dig a well, but soon hit a strange object instead: a chest with words carved into it that indicate it dates from 1579. Believing it might be a significant archeological find — and perhaps might even have been left by Francis Drake’s expedition — Gordon goes into town to fetch Dr. Julian Ash (Forrest Lewis) who can help verify what they have found.
But Boyd, convinced the chest is filled with treasure, decides to open it. He convinces the strong but simple-minded Mike to break the lock. But when Mike opens it, he finds not treasure, but a human head that stares into his eyes and mouths words we can’t hear. This, we learn, is the head of Gideon Drew, a devil worshipper executed by the Francis Drake expedition. Now freed from the chest, the head uses its hypnotic power to force a reunion with Drew’s body, which is buried nearby….
Comments: The Thing that Couldn’t Die was paired in cinemas with Hammer’s The Horror of Dracula, and it didn’t have much of a reputation even before it got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment in the 1990s. MST3K fans enjoy kicking around movies featured on the show by giving them one-star ratings on IMDB (they seem to believe this makes the jokes funnier, for some reason), and this has a lot to do with why the movie currently scores a lowly 3.8.
The MST3K bludgeoning set aside, this isn’t a great movie; it’s slow and talky for the first couple of reels. But things liven up considerably when we get to the buried treasure chest containing the severed head of Gideon Drew, a 16th-century Satan worshipper. The scenes of Drew’s head staring balefully at its victims, mouthing silent instructions, is pretty creepy, as is a scene where a hypnotized Linda places the head in a hatbox and places it on a closet shelf for its next victim. The juxtaposition of gothic elements with ordinary midcentury vacation cabins is surprisingly effective. And there’s a surreal bit near the end where the body gets up out of its casket and walks around. The movie ends somewhat abruptly, unfortunately, and the monster disposed of all too easily; but it does have its moments.
William Reynolds was one of the demobilized soldiers terrorized by a mysterious snake woman in Cult of the Cobra; his performance in that 1955 thriller made me wonder why he didn’t have more of a career (Arbogast, in his review of that film, compared Reynolds to a young Johnny Depp, and I can kinda see it) so it’s nice to see him get a shot at a starting role. But any screen presence he had in Cult of the Cobra has drained away here, and he’s quite forgettable. In his defense none of the characters in the film are very well-drawn.
Overall, this one has second-feature written all over it, but it’s worth a watch if you happen upon it.
The Horror Incorporated Project 