I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part III-“The Postman Always Rings Twice”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Scarlett Claw” (1944)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part III-“The Postman Always Rings Twice”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Scarlett Claw” (1944)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Danny Moriarty

(Once again as I did in my initial offerings on the bogus Sherlock Holmes legend Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, hah!, and the so –called, again, hah The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes  in the interest of transparency which has become more of an issue these days when every medium is under scrutiny Danny Moriarty is not my real name. As I mentioned then and will be discussed again below in the review of this death blow to Holmes’ legend The Scarlett Claw there is a weirdly nefarious band of his devotees masking themselves as a thing called the Baker Street Irregulars. Why such an outlandish name for these thugees I can only guess. 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 wigs and robes, who I am told have very stylized rituals involving exotic illegal drugs and human blood, and are the bane of the London Bobbies although strangely corruption-infested Scotland Yard has not lifted a finger in the matter. Moreover these 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.

So this need for an alias, for cover, is no joke since that first review and the subsequent second one 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.” I am willing to show an impartial commission my accusations. 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.  There are a total of twelve films which 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 blood-splattered junkies. D.M.)

The Scarlett Claw, 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), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who did time at Dartmoor as well for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I assume they met up), 1944 

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, 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 Watson, aka Nigel Bruce, a fellow 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 or second review, 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.”             

This The Scarlett Claw should put paid to the Holmes legend as he let the bodies pile up like a cordwood before a grieving father actually stopped the rampage. Everybody knows 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. 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.

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. Here they are in Canada, in one of the colonies, no, that is not right, in one of the members of the British Commonwealth. No, I was right the first time one of the colonies attending some conference, at least that was the purpose they told the customs officers at the docks in Halifax. The real reason although it does not have anything to do with the story, with the further debunking of the Holmes legend, is that he and Watson were on the search for an exotic psychedelic drug which the Inuit, the indigenous people of Canada use in their ceremonials. So they are really trolling for drugs internationally.

Somehow, very conveniently too late, the wife of the convener of the conference, a conference on the occult, you know weird ghostlike stuff that seems paranormal, this Lord Penrose, winds up dead in a village where they live. Killed gruesomely by an instrument, a clawed garden tool used for weeding, which you can buy at any True Value hardware store. Body number one. The way that our dynamic duo get to go to that village is that this Lady Penrose has allegedly send Holmes a letter fearing her death by some unseen hand. Of course the letter arrived too late since Holmes had been on a junkie shoot-up up in Thunder Bay and hadn’t bothered to check his mail for a week.   

The whole scene at the village is filled with mystery, foggy moors and marshes with strange doing, and fear since these country bumpkins think a ghost or a monster did the deed. At least Holmes had enough sense not to fall into that trap. It turns out this Lady Penrose was some kind of actress who had fallen off the face of the earth when she married the good Lord. The reason Sherlock knew that hard fact was she had been involved in a case where a fellow actor had killed a suitor in a jealous rage over her affections. That should have set something in motion, some thought about w but Holmes let it pass in a landudum fog. Then a judge in a case involving that dead actress who passed away since he sent that lunatic actor to prison wound up dead by that same clawed garden tool right at the very same time Holmes stoned out of his mind was knocking on the good judge’s door thinking he was playing the drums is what he told Watson later. Hadn’t thought when he heard the judge’s anguished screams to batten down the door. Two down.

It gets worse since our so-called sleuthing pair have finally figure that the whole caper has something to do with that actor case, that actor who had escaped from prison and was seeking revenge on everybody associated with the case, including that actress under the principle, if there is such a thing in the case, that if he couldn’t have her nobody could.   Get this. They actually confront the bastard but he gets away since whatever his deductive skills Holmes is a horrible shot, a disgrace to a profession that relies, for better or worse, on gun play. Because of that deficiency an innocent girl, the daughter of a former prison guard at the prison where the actor had been held was killed. Killed by clawed garden tool-number three.

Of course an actor has to be a master (or mistress) of disguise and that is how the actor was able to do his thing. That was a book sealed with seven seals to this hapless pair.  That would prove the actors undoing since he had been running around as a postman after killing the real one who was supposed to take over the town’s route. If Holmes had just read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Ring Twice he could have solved the whole sordid mess in about ten minutes. Instead number four. Yeah, cordwood. Here’s the clincher though that actor is run to ground not by Holmes and Watson but by the irate father who in poetic justice killed the villain with that self-same clawed garden tool.        

Like I said the last two time, 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 gear now.