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.
