‘Queen… of a crime cult!’
Dressed to Kill is a 1946 mystery thriller film about the theft of seemingly unassuming and inexpensive music boxes.
The movie was produced and directed by Roy William Neill (The Pearl of Death; The Scarlet Claw; The Spider Woman; Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man; et al) from a screenplay co-written by Leonard Lee and Frank Gruber, loosely based on stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Universal Pictures production stars Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Patricia Morison and Edmund Breon.
Plot [contains spoilers]:
John Davidson, a convicted thief in Dartmoor prison, embeds code revealing the hidden location of extremely valuable stolen Bank of England currency printing plates in the melody notes of three music boxes that he crafts to be sold at auction. Each box plays a subtly different version of an Australian tune, “The Swagman”. At the auction each is purchased by a different buyer.
Doctor Watson’s friend, Julian Emery, a music box collector, pays him and Sherlock Holmes a visit and tells them of an attempted burglary in his house the previous night of a plain cheap box (similar to the one he bought at auction) while leaving other much more valuable ones. Holmes asks to see, and he and Watson are shown Emery’s collection.
After they leave, Emery welcomes a female acquaintance, Hilda Courtney, who tries unsuccessfully to buy the auctioned box. When Emery declines, a male friend of Courtney’s who has sneaked in murders Emery.
At this murder Holmes becomes even more curious and learns to whom else the boxes were auctioned off. Holmes and Watson arrive at the house of the person who bought the second one, just as a strange maid (Courtney in disguise) is on her way “to go shopping”. Holmes later realizes it was not a maid: she locked a child in a closet in order to steal the box from the child.
Holmes is able to buy the third box, and upon examination discovers that its variant musical notes’ numbers correlate to letters of the alphabet. Scotland Yard fills him in on the stolen bank plates to which the music boxes connect, but all three are needed to decipher the message.
Back at home, their flat is found ransacked, and a cigarette with a distinct type of tobacco is the sole clue. Holmes tracks down the woman who bought the tobacco, Courtney.
While confronting her, Holmes is ambushed by her accomplices, handcuffed, taken to a warehouse, hung by a rafter, and left with poison gas filling the room. While Holmes is narrowly escaping death, Courtney visits the flat and steals the box from Watson.
Holmes manages to make it back in one piece and, while conversing with him, Watson offhandedly mentions a quote from Doctor Samuel Johnson. Thinking about this quote, Holmes makes a connection as to where the stolen plates may be hidden.
Having stolen all the boxes and deciphered their message, Courtney and gang join a tour group at Doctor Samuel Johnson’s house, now a museum, where they slip away and find the plates hidden within a bookshelf. Courtney is stealing the plates when Holmes ambushes the group. Scotland Yard officers arrest them, and the plates are returned to the bank.
“Dressed to Kill is far from an underrated picture, but its few agreeable qualities are usually glossed over by reviewers. The film is small–scale and ungimmicky; in fact, it is the most rudimentary of the last group of Sherlock Holmes thrillers […] In Dressed to Kill, Holmes rarely strays from his old, familiar environs, picking up obscure clues from musical boxes and half-forgotten dance hall ditties. The mystery is commonplace and unspectacular, but there is a certain appeal in the film’s simplicity…” Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931 – 1946
Choice dialogue:
Sherlock Holmes: “The truth is only arrived at by the painstaking process of eliminating the untrue.”
Doctor Watson: “Seems to me we’re up against a bunch of lunatics.”
Filming locations:
Universal Studios – 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California
Technical specs:
1 hour 12 minutes
Black and white (a colour version was also created)
Aspect ratio: 1.37: 1
Audio: Mono (Western Electric Recording)
Working title:
Prelude to Murder
Alternate title:
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code (British release title)
Trailer in 480p [blurry]:
Free online on YouTube in 4K UHD:
Free online on YouTube in 1080p Premium HD:
Free online on YouTube in 720p:
Related:
THE SCARLET CLAW Sherlock Holmes horror-tinged classic – free on Plex and YouTube (4K)
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