The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

I’m very fond of Moriarty’s trap in this one (and, of course, Zucco’s Moriarty—still the best of the lot, in my opinion, though I really liked Henry Daniell and Eric Porter as well), though that may because I have the same kind of mind as Moriarty describes Holmes’s—well, not the genius, of course, but that childlike jumping-from-one-thing-to-another, for better or worse.

I don’t think Adventures is as good as Hound, but it’s still high up there in my ratings of the series. The plot’s clever, even though we know Moriarty’s plan from the get-go (à la Columbo, actually!), and there are some great Holmes-Watson moments and a better-than-most heroine in Ida Lupino. There are a lot of plot holes, though, and it isn’t exactly as well-paced as Hound (which itself may be considered under-paced compared to the lightning-quick Uni b-movies).

And I kind of wish Moriarty had a better send-off—though, of course, he’d pop up as Lionel Atwill in The Secret Weapon, just to fall to his doom again!

Also, while the following dialogue makes Watson look like a complete nincompoop, it never fails to crack me up. Watson is lying on the street to play a corpse so that Holmes can reconstruct a murder.