When a British secret agent carrying confidential documents is abducted from a train traveling between New York City and Washington, DC, His Majesty’s government calls on Sherlock Holmes to travel across the Atlantic to locate the missing agent and retrieve the documents. Bringing along Dr. Watson, Holmes quickly unravels the mystery behind this disappearance while exposing a Fifth Column spy operation in the nation’s capital.
The third entry in Universal Pictures’ series that brought the Victorian-era detective into then-contemporary times, “Sherlock Holmes in Washington” is a fast, stylish, and perhaps somewhat illogical mystery thriller that is notable as the first film in this series based on original material rather than the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Holmes’ brainy ability to deduct clues and motive is faster than usual here, no doubt thanks to the follicle power created by the wild upswept hairdo that Basil Rathbone sports in his Holmes outing.
Nigel Bruce is a bit sillier than usual as Watson in this film as he falls in love with American pop culture – he laughs at the Flash Gordon comics, enjoys chewing gum and malteds, expresses incredulity over the Brooklyn Dodgers, and tries to talk slang. However, his serious side shows up when called to provide a medical diagnosis to an injured American Navy lieutenant and when he shoots to kill in the climatic shoot-out with the baddies.
A former on-screen Dr. Moriarity, George Zucco, is perfectly cast as the enemy mastermind Henrik Hinkel (although the film stops short of openly calling him a Nazi), while a future Dr. Moriarity, Henry Daniell, is one of Zucco’s henchmen. Marjorie Lord and John Archer, a real-life couple off-screen, are the obligatory second-lead love interest, and an uncredited Clarence Muse steals the show as a railroad porter with an extraordinarily photographic memory regarding the incident that led to the British agent’s abduction.
Roy William Neill, as usual, brings a crisp and polished direction to this series entry, and the denouement with Holmes offering a dramatic recitation of a Churchill speech on Anglo-American partnership in the face of evil must have been a great cue to the movie audiences of the day to purchase their War Stamps and War Bonds in the theaters showing this nifty film.