I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IV-“Bumbling Across The Pond”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes In Washington” (1943)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IV-“Bumbling Across The Pond”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes In Washington” (1943)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Danny Moriarty

(Frankly in this my fourth debunking of the so-called legend of punk amateur detective Sherlock Holmes and his paramour, yes, paramour more on that below the bumbler-in-chief Doctor “Doc” Watson Sherlock Holmes In Washington  I am tired, tired beyond endurance, of having to once again tell a candid world that Danny Moriarty is not my real name, is instead my moniker to protect me against some very real threats from a bunch of dope-addled Holmes aficionados, no, worse cultists known far and wide as the Baker Street Irregulars. Known to the police, to the see no evil hear no evil London peelers, the Bobby Peel guys so named after the guy who put together the first real police force in London but which has gone way downhill since then who have ignored my pleas for protection, have dismissed the threats against me as child’s play, kid’s stuff. What passes for the law, the coppers have gone back to their tea and crumpets as usual routine while half of the toddling town gets ransacked by these Baker Street hooligans who have sworn vengeance unto the seventh generation against me and my progeny for exposing their boyfriend hero for the fake snoop that he is, was.

I stand here again today despite my need to hide my identity, my whereabouts, my voice and features and having had to send my family into private hands hiding stating I will not wilt like some silly schoolgirl under the blare of their evil deeds. This motley of criminals, junkies, and cutthroats is being protected by high society personages. The peerage I think they call it in Mother England, you know the House of Lords holy goofs with the cheapjack woolen wigs sliding all over the place and made in Bangladesh sweated labor textile factory robes who spend endless hours talking about the good old days when everything was simpler, the mob knew its place or it better had under Charles I, monarchs like that. 

These Irregulars in case I don’t survive the onslaught to number twelve in this series of films, a series which has done more to create an “alternate facts” Holmes world than anything any dastardly British monarch could ever do to keep the masses at bay I am told have very stylized rituals involving exotic illegal drugs and human blood. Are the bane of the London Bobbies and maybe not so strangely corruption-infested Scotland Yard has not lifted a finger in the matter. Moreover these Irregular cretins have been connected with the disappearance of many people, high born and low, who have questioned the Sherlock myth, and not a few unsolved murders of people who have washed up on the Thames over the years. I know I am on borrowed time, I am a “dead man walking” but maybe someone will pick up the cudgels if I have to lay down my head for the cause.  

I don’t want to frighten the audience, the reader but this need for an alias, for cover, is no joke since that first review and the subsequent second and third ones I have been threatened, threatened with I won’t death, death threats, but some nasty actions edging up in that direction which necessitate my keeping very close tabs on my security apparatus as I attempt to deflate this miserable excuse for a detective, a parlor detective at that who even Agatha Christie dismissed out of hand as a rank amateur. From my sources, serious sources under the circumstances, of ex-Irregulars who have left the organization as its attacks have become more bizarre and its blood rituals more gruesome including allegations of human sacrifice I have been told I am on their “watch list.” 

I know and can prove that I have been the subject of cyber-bullying without end including a campaign to discredit me by calling me Raymond Chandler’s “poodle” and Dashiell Hammett’s “toadie” for mentioning the undisputable fact that these hard- knock, hard-working professionals like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe were as likely to grab some wayward young woman as kick ass on some bad guys and still have time for lunch. Sherlock was much to dainty for that kind of heading to the danger work. I am willing to show an impartial commission my accusations with documents and affidavits. Believe me it is getting worse and once I get a grip on who is who in that nefarious organization I will be taking names and numbers.  These twelve films have been nothing but propaganda vehicles for the Holmes legend so I have plenty more work cut out for me. Until done I will not be stopped by hoodlums, your lordships and ladyships, and blood-splattered junkies. D.M.)

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Sherlock Holmes Goes To Washington, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was right and that his real name is Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name is not Strachey but Lanny Lament, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed they had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1943 

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As I have mentioned previously and nothing recently has changed my view we live in an age of debunking. An age perhaps borne aloft by cynicism, hubris, sarcasm and above all “fake news,” not the fake news denying some reality that you hear so much about these days, but by the elaborate strategy of public relations cranks and flacks who will put out any swill as long as they are paid and not a minute longer. That phenomenon hardly started today but has a long pedigree, a pedigree which has included the target of today’s debunking one James Sherlock Holmes, aka Lytton Strachey, aka Lanny Lamont out of London, out of the Baker Street section of that town. From the cutesy “elementary my dear Watson” to that condescending attitude toward everybody he encounters, friend or foe, including the hapless Doctor “Doc” Watson, aka Nigel Bruce, an inmate at notorious Dartmoor Prison in the early 1930s this guy Holmes, or whatever his real name is nothing but a pure creation of the public relations industrial complex, the PRIC. As I have noted above I have paid the price for exposing this chameleon, this so-called master detective, this dead end junkie, with a barrage of hate mail and threats from his insidious devotees. I have been cyber-bullied up to my eyeballs but the truth will out.

Maybe I better refresh for those who may not have read the first three reviews, may be shocked to find their paragon of a private detective has feet of clay, and an addiction problem no twelve step program could curtail in a million years. Here are some excerpts of what I said in that first review which I stand by this day no matter the consequences:      

“Today is the day. Today is the day I have been waiting for since I was a kid. Today we tear off the veneer, tear off the mask of the reputation of one Sherlock Holmes as a master detective. Funny how things happen. Greg Green assigned me this film out of the blue, at random he said when I asked him. However this assignment after viewing this film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (of course he doesn’t face, hadn’t been anywhere near any danger that would put death in his way but that can wait until I finish out defanging the legend) set off many bells, many memories of my childhood when I first instinctively discovered this guy was a fraud, a con artist.

Back then my grandparents and parents hushed me up about the matter when I told them what I thought of the mighty Sherlock. They went nutty and told me never to speak of it again when I mentioned that a hard-boiled real private detective, a guy who did this kind of work for a living, a guy named Sam Spade who worked out in San Francisco and solved, really solved, the case of the missing black bird which people in the profession still talk about, which is still taught in those correspondence course private detection in ten easy lesson things you used to see advertised on matchbook covers when smoking cigarettes was okay, who could run circles around a parlor so-called detective like Mr. Holmes. 

[Even Sam Spade has come in for some debunking of late right here in this space as Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs have gone round and round about how little Spade deserved his “rep,” his classic rep for a guy who was picked by some bimbo out of the phone book and who couldn’t even keep his partner alive against that same femme he was skirt-addled over. Kept digging that low-shelf whiskey bottle in the bottom desk drawer out too much when the deal went down. The only guy who is safe is Phillip Marlowe since nobody can call him a “one solved murder wonder” after the string of cold as ice, maybe colder, cases he wrapped up with a bow over the years. They still talk about the Sherwood case out on the Coast even today where he rapped the knuckles of a big time gangster like Eddie Mars, and his goons, to help an old man going to the great beyond no believing that he had raised a couple of monster daughters without working up a serious sweat. Talked in hushed tones too. You notice nobody has tried to go after him, not even close. D.M.]            

That was then. Now after some serious research as a result of this film’s impact on my memory I have proof to back up my childhood smothered assertions. Sherlock Holmes (if that is his name which is doubtful since I went to the London telephone directories going back the first ones in the late 1800s and found no such name on Baker Street-ever) was nothing but a stone-cold junkie, cocaine, morphine, landudum and other exotic concoctions which is the reason that he had a doctor at his side at all times in case he needed “scripts” written up. A doctor who a guy like Sam Spade would have sat on his ass a long time before as so much dead weight.

That junkie business would not amount to much if it did not mean that high and mighty Sherlock didn’t have to run his own gang of pimps, hookers, con men, fellow junkies, drag queens, rough trade sailors and the flotsam and jetsam of London, high society and low, to keep him in dough for that nasty set of habits that kept him high as a kite. There are sworn statements (suppressed at the time) by the few felons whom the Bobbies were able to pick up that Sherlock was the guy behind half the burglaries, heists and kidnappings in London. And you wonder why the Baker Street Irregulars want to silence me, show me the silence of the grave….

Of course the Bobbies, looking to wrap up a few cold file cases which Sherlock handed them to keep them off the trail, looked the other way and/or took the graft so who really knows how extensive the whole operation was. In a great sleight of hand he gave them Doctor Moriarty who as it turned out dear Sherlock had framed when one wave of police heat was on and who only got out of prison after Holmes died and one of Holmes’ flunkies told the real story about how Holmes needed a “fall guy” and the wily Doctor took the fall.”             

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Apparently this Sherlock madness knows no borders, could not be contained with the four walls of the British Isles, hell, even the bloody cockeyed Empire since the film under review Lanny Lamont, no, Sherlock Holmes In Washington has him crossing the pond to the “colonies” like this was 1774 or something to solve a little espionage problem the British government has. Seems that one of their agents got waylaid by an ambiguous “international spy ring” (remember this is 1943 so I hope you can guess what nation that so-called spy ring might emanate from) when they were looking for a secret cache he was carrying. Enter Sherlock. Stop. This agent, this guy who got his clock rung and sent to the great beyond was an MI5 agent, you know a Bond, James Bond, and Le Carre’s George Smiley-type  operation. No way was any secret agency, much less M of MI5 was going to let an ex-felon, a rough trade mauler, a mommy’s boy, handle that kind of work. Kim Philby would have that secret cache out of the hands of that international cartel and to his handler in Moscow before nightfall if anybody let Sherlock anywhere near this action.      

But let’s allow the so-called master deductive reasoning detective have his minute just for kicks although I will never tire of letting everybody know that Sherlock made his name after he beat down some poor mistreated dog who should have been reported as abused to whatever they call the humane animal treatment society in merry old England. Also that he worked overtime to keep his name in the public prints through his friendship with the editor of the London Times despite the fact that he had no gainful employment, no source of income except whatever his thug cronies delivered to him from their various escapades and that he had the goods on that editor as they used to say since he was “light on his feet,’’ gay.

It is hard to believe that Holmes and his lapdog pill-pusher Watson would be let out of the country, let out of jail, unless they had protectors in high places but that is the case here.

Once on the ground in D.C. after the usual tourist run through the National Mall he is on the case (and never forget that net drag Watson who made the number one mistake of a trafficker-don’t taste the merchandise while providing Sherlock his high-end dope so was always looking for some fixer man on dark street corners once his hidden stash ran out after about a day in D.C.). Blows it from the beginning since this secret document is on microfilm hidden in a package of matches. In an unbelievable comedy of errors the matches wind up in the possession of a young Washington debutante and she is therefore the hunted partridge before getting into the hands of that nefarious German agent who did not know what he had right in front of him. The head of that international spy ring, Heinrich Hinkel not hard to figure who he is working for in 1943 Europe, has the young woman kidnapped. Holmes finds out where she was being held and got waylaid himself before the mumbling Watson showed up with ten thousand coppers, not peelers that is London, and after some gunplay Sherlock and the young dame are freed. The Hitlerite escaped with matchbook in hand but Sherlock caught up to him and forced him into a couple of unforced errors which let the police grab him. Sherlock grabbed the matchbook and that was that. Kim Philby came by and the whole secret document was in Uncle Joe Stalin’s hands before midnight. Nice work Kim.

[This is probably as good a place as any to discuss the elephant in the room. The whole sexual preference business that was always until the last couple of decades only inferred on film, in books, in society, if at all. I wouldn’t have though much about the matter, about the “sin that dare not speak its name,” you know, sodomy, about catamites if I hadn’t noticed in the film above that when Sherlock and the Partridge twist were being held by Hinkel he never even looked at her and she was a dish to look at. That started bells ringing my head that there was a reason, a real reason why Sherlock couldn’t shot straight, had no lady-friend like Spade and Marlowe who would eaten her up in a minute, and had stuck it out through thick and thin with giddy, bubbly Doc Watson. Yes, a Nancy, a mommy’s boy, a fag to use the old time neighborhood term from my growing days in, no I had better not say where which might give aid and comfort to the thugs at Baker Street explains a lot of things about the dope, the tell-tale scorn of women and why he and Doc were an item, in the closet.

Nowadays, recently, the whole sexual preference would not even be a subject for discussion except for what I have heard from an ex-Irregular who broke hard with the organization who told me that there was a big division in the club between those who wanted to “out” Sherlock and claim him from the mythical Homintern and those who wanted to not attract attention to their various nefarious activities and crimes by such a scheme. Back then though when Sherlock was roaming the world pissing off that candid world with his fake fortune-teller madness the example of poor Oscar Wilde and his catamite and as recently as the Durning case in the 1950s it was not safe, was criminal to “come out.”

Of course the English public schools, our private schools, were hotbeds of gay activity so it no wonder an odd-ball like Holmes got flighty and never looked back. Here is the problem everybody knows that no way a gay guy, a gay couple if you included Watson could then juggle dealing with hardened criminals the coppers couldn’t cope with and survive if it were known they were lovers, even platonic lovers. The pair would be in Reading Gaol themselves. Just remember what they did to Wilde and Durning. The next few films should put paid to that notion of mine that Sherlock was nothing more than a parlor plotter.]        

  

Like I said the last three times, a fake, fake all the way. Unless that Irregular crowd of thugs and blood-stained aficionados get to me, find my hideout, this is not the last you will hear about this campaign of mine to dethrone this pompous junked-up imposter. I am just getting into high gear now.