A man eceives a nursery rhyme and dies. Alan Dinehart assembles a group of people and discusses how the loot is to be split up following his death. A lady calls on Reginald Owen as Sherlock Holmes to complain about his death, and how she doesn't know how she will live. Soon, Alan Mowbray as Lestrade turns up in Baker Street because there is another murder with another nursery rhyme.
It doesn't sound like any Holmes adventure you've heard of, and that's because the producer bought only the right to the title from the Arthur Conan Doyle estate; the story would have been a lot more, so he hired Robert Florey to write a new screenplay, and let Owen write his own lines; Owen had played Watson in a couple of movies and figured that was a sort of apprenticeship. Surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for the actor, he is all right in the role, Holmes as a pure thinking machine, lacking any of the tics or nervous energy that other performers put into the role. With a decent mystery, good supporting actors, including Anna May Wong, June Clyde, and Billy Bevan, it's a decent little Poverty Row mystery, even if it didn't break an house records.
It doesn't sound like any Holmes adventure you've heard of, and that's because the producer bought only the right to the title from the Arthur Conan Doyle estate; the story would have been a lot more, so he hired Robert Florey to write a new screenplay, and let Owen write his own lines; Owen had played Watson in a couple of movies and figured that was a sort of apprenticeship. Surprisingly, given my lack of enthusiasm for the actor, he is all right in the role, Holmes as a pure thinking machine, lacking any of the tics or nervous energy that other performers put into the role. With a decent mystery, good supporting actors, including Anna May Wong, June Clyde, and Billy Bevan, it's a decent little Poverty Row mystery, even if it didn't break an house records.