Nigel Bruce

The last of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Three apparently ordinary music boxes, made by prisoners in Dartmoor and sold at auction, turn out to hide a coded message pointing to a fortune in stolen Bank of England plates. A collector who buys one of the boxes is murdered, and Holmes and Watson race a coolly ruthless woman, Hilda Courtney, to recover the other two before she cracks the code. Patricia Morison plays the villain, one of the series' most memorable, against Rathbone's weary, finally retiring Holmes. Roy William Neill produced and directed his final film before his death later that year. Released in 1946, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Crime

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

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson board the London-to-Edinburgh express to guard the Star of Rhodesia, a priceless diamond with a bloody history. When the jewel's owner is murdered and the stone vanishes, Holmes must unmask the killer among a carriage full of suspects — including the eminent Colonel Sebastian Moran — before the train reaches its destination. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce's thirteenth outing as Holmes and Watson, directed and produced by Roy William Neill for Universal, compresses the series' formula into a brisk, atmospheric hour. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

A string of murders of young women baffles Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes spots the pattern: respectable gentlemen are being hypnotized into believing they are the killers, then blackmailed. The trail leads through a society of mesmerists to a glamorous woman in green — and behind her, Professor Moriarty, reported hanged in Montevideo but very much alive. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce's eleventh Holmes film, with Hillary Brooke and Henry Daniell as a memorably icy Moriarty, directed by Roy William Neill for Universal. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller