Lionel Atwill

The fourth of Universal's Sherlock Holmes films updates Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" to wartime. Holmes smuggles a Swiss scientist out of Zurich ahead of the Gestapo and brings him to London, where the man has developed a revolutionary bombsight he intends to give the Allies. When the scientist is kidnapped, Holmes and Watson discover that Professor Moriarty is behind it, working to deliver the weapon to Nazi Germany. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are in their familiar roles, with Lionel Atwill as a silkily malevolent Moriarty. The film grafts a spy thriller onto a Conan Doyle puzzle and was made on a small budget at a moment when the series leaned hard into the war effort. It was released in 1943 and is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

A wealthy insurance broker receives a death threat from a killer known as the Gorilla and hires three bumbling detectives, the Ritz Brothers, to protect him. On the appointed night, a real escaped gorilla appears at the mansion just as the lights go out, and the detectives scramble through secret panels and hidden catacombs trying to tell the murderer from the ape. Bela Lugosi plays the sinister butler, Peters, in a role originally written for Peter Lorre. Allan Dwan, a veteran director whose career began in the silent era, keeps the slapstick moving at a brisk pace. The film is based on the 1925 stage play by Ralph Spence that was a Broadway hit. It entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.

Comedy · Horror

A string of murders has witnesses giving identical descriptions of a man seen leaving each scene — Jerome Breen, a wealthy philanthropist who has been deaf and mute since birth and could not possibly have been overheard. Lionel Atwill plays Breen in a Monogram old-dark-house mystery directed by Phil Rosen, with Sheila Terry as the reporter convinced there is more to the suspect than his affliction suggests, and Paul Hurst as the detective working the case. The solution, when it comes, is a genuinely nasty piece of pre-Code plotting. Made the same year Atwill headlined Mystery of the Wax Museum, it shows why he was the era's go-to man for quiet menace. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

When corpses drained of blood begin appearing in a small European village, the townspeople suspect a vampire. The local police chief doubts it, but the village doctor insists the supernatural is real, and suspicion falls on a simple-minded young man who keeps bats as pets. The Vampire Bat is an early sound horror film made to cash in on the success of Dracula and Frankenstein, and it borrows freely from both. It stars Lionel Atwill as the doctor, Fay Wray as his assistant, Melvyn Douglas as the skeptical policeman, and Dwight Frye, fresh off Renfield in Dracula, as the accused simpleton. The film is in the public domain because it was published without a proper copyright notice.

Horror