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there are some series that bounce along nicely, offering familiar pleasures and few surprises, content to reshuffle trusted elements in a reassuring way. But, through some freak, a particular historical moment, maybe, or the fortuituous hitting on the right subject, a particular film can transcend its series, can become strange, rich, resonant, clever, even though the same old elements haven't changed. It happened the 'Carry On' films with 'Cleo' and the Bunuellian masterpiece 'Up the Khyber'. 'Pearl of Death' isn't quite up to that standard, but there is something about this film more compellingly pessimistic than the usual Rathbone/Bruce Holmes films.
The familiar pleasures are all here - Holmes with his disguises and snipings; Watson and his bumbling bemusement; Lestrade and his stubborn narrow-mindedness. There is a clever plot with some good twists, and a particularly charmless villain. Director Neill does what he can with a limited budget, creating atmosphere, menace and tension through camerawork rather than expensive period sets.
Normally, this is about all you'd get from the series. But 'Pearl' offers something more. Most Holmes plots are bizarre enough until explained away, but there is a Chestertonian absurdity to this one, of a priceless, murderous jewel secreted in one of six busts of Napoleon, that hints at a peculiarly English kind of nonsense, of dream, verging on nightmare. Once again Holmes' disguises are ritualised, the emphasis on acting, on playing a part, of shifting, unreliable identities.
We must remember that this film was made in 1944, the height of the Second World War. Conan Doyle's story was written in 1903, before any world war. Comparing film and story is instructive. In the story, a not hostile Lestrade comes to Holmes with an unusual case which, with a few interviews, some casual racism, inductive reasoning and supreme detachment, the great detective solves. Here, however, Holmes is the source of the crime, the mystery, the five murders. It is his unwitting, Watson-like dismantling of the security system that enables Giles Conover to steal the jewel. Conover is thus, in a sense, Holmes' double, committing his crimes, maybe a Freudian emanation of the Id. This is a world as yet unknown to Doyle, a world where moral certainties have so collapsed that even Holmes now facilitates thieves and murderers.
Conan Doyle's Holmes is the true Enlightenment man, hiding his decadent taste for cocaine and atonal violins by reason, by his assurance that the world can be explained, that knowledge can be transmitted, and the world made a safer, even better place. One person as responsible for this ideology as anyone was Dr. Johnson, whose great Dictionary is one of the major Enlightenment artefacts. Here, this very book conceals a weapon intended to kill Holmes (there is some lovely comedy and suspense here, as an unaffectedly curious Watson tries to open it).
Similarly, Watson as a doctor represents progress through science. And yet, the chief agent of evil in this film is a hideous, deformed convict, half-man, half-beast, the Creeper, a Yahoo-like monster that Enlightenment man would deny (Lestrade thinks him dead) and yet who keeps resurfacing (there's class stuff too - Conover and the Creeper go through the servants entrance on their way to the final bust; his accomplice holds a number of menial jobs).
The climax is more suited to a horror movie (that great genre of reason breaking down), with its allusions to Poe, its monster and Holmes as a mad scientist lying in wait, a powerful allegory of the struggle between bestiality, reason and murder taking place in Europe (perhaps why the 'Six Napoleons' story was chosen, alluding to another charismatic, continent-dominating lunatic). Holmes' final, generic summation may have been intended as propaganda, but its tone and content is pessimistic, even defeatist: not even Holmes is sure evil can be vanquished. Extraordinary stuff.
score 9/10
the red duchess 22 December 2000
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0031236/ |
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13-2-2020 18:05:14