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.)
*********
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
***********
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.”
********
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.
