Product: Terror by Night (1946)
Rating: 5.0
A classic from a long time ago
One of these rare stories in which Sherlock Holmes and Scotland Yard's Inspector Lestrade do cooperate to arrest a great criminal and solve a diamond robbery, the star of Rodesia. The story itself is not quite creative though the criminal has some imagination. The brain of the robbery makes friend with Dr Watson to come on the crime scene under no suspicion. The accomplice who is going to commit the main killings is brought onto the train in an underneath compartment of a coffin with a real body on top. The killing is performed with some kind of exotic poison carried by a gelatin dart that dissolves in the blood and leaves no traces. The false Scottish inspector and policemen who come to arrest the brain of the story before arriving in Edinburgh. But we practically know the criminal from the very start: that strange friend accompanying Dr Watson, the extra and useless helper. The film has enough humor for us to find it at times funny, for example when the poor Dr Watson is severely humiliated by the suspects he is trying to interrogate, or the fact that a crime is confessed, the stealing of a tea pot in a hotel. The rest is Sherlock Holmesian routine. Just a good old black and white oldie for those who like those films we were making some sixty years ago.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines