The Woman in Green
Director: Roy William
Neill
Year:
1945
Rating: 6.0
The Woman in Green
is a rather bland title for a film that has Jack the Ripper type murders
occurring, severed fingers, an elegant and deadly femme fatale, hypnosis,
an assassin and the Prince of Crime, Professor Moriarty. It makes for a solid
eleventh film in the series. Sherlock Holmes faces two worthy opponents but
has his Watson by his side. Random women are being murdered in London and
their finger cut off as a souvenir. In the original draft, they were children
being murdered but the censors said no way. That would have been fascinating.
An early Giallo. The police are of course at a loss, so they call in Holmes.
He instinctively feels that the murders are a smoke screen for the real motive..
He is of course correct. It is a diabolical
scheme by Moriarty and his seductive partner to blackmail men. Moriarty is
alive once again after having died in two previous films in the series, but
as we know Moriarty cannot be killed. Here he is played by the chilly Henry
Daniell who made a career playing devious villains without ever raising his
voice. He is like a cobra ready to strike. His cohort is the immoral Lydia,
a smooth talking blonde who sends men signals of sexual promises. Come have
a drink at my place. She is played by the lovely sophisticated Hillary Brooke
who was in her third film in the series.
After getting men to her swank apartment,
her maid lowers the lights and puts on soft music and any man would think
they were about to score from third base, but in fact she hypnotizes them
and the next thing the man knows is that he wakes up in a dingy room with
a fresh finger in his pocket. And ready for plucking by Moriarty. Watson
is as baffled as ever and the comic foil. In one scene he mocks a society
of hypnotists in that tut-tut manner of his and volunteers to be hypnotized.
Only the feeble-minded can be hypnotized, he says. You can guess how that
works out, but in the end he saves Holmes.
