User Reviews

*** In this one at the beginning we're treated to Holmes and Watson holidaying in Scotland, Holmes drowning, Watson and LeStrade clearing out 221B and Mrs Hudson crying. Then Holmes, being the nice man he is comes back from the (pretense of being) dead to save his notebooks falling into the wrong hands - hang the whole nation's grief!***

That was the only part I didn't like about the Spider Woman, the rest has very little padding, and it has to move fast for you to swallow the storyline. He's up against a feline Moriarty plus gang who have been causing suicides throughout the capital. I thought Rathbone's disguises were rather good if not totally deceptive, again proving in this series what a master of character make up he was. Sondergaard makes the film stand out though, even earning it a sequel, her slinky sliminess oozing out at you from every frame.

The scenes at the fair were well played out, managing to get a bit of wartime propaganda in, along with the tension - I wonder if Hitchcock ever saw the climax of this film?

So says Sherlock Holmes in describing the obvious villianess responsible for a series of pajama suicides which he is sure are murders. That feline is none other than the beautiful but exotic looking Gale Sondergaard, the best bad lady in the business who obviously enjoys the crimes she commits here with the glee in her smile as she plots another scheme or attempts a murder.

There is no doubt from the start of the film in the audience's mind who the culprit is. What the mystery is comes down to how she will be caught. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are excellent as always, but the film belongs to Sondergaard, who would play many similar characters, but none as deliciously deadly as this one. Feline or 8-Legged, Sondergaard's outfits cast shadows that even resemble a spider. Try not to freak out as she makes one attempt on Holmes that is quite spooky. It's no wonder that classic film fans compare her Spider Woman so much to George Zucco's Moriarty. The final shot of Sondergaard at the very end is classic and will make viewers guess as what scheme she has up her sleeve.

I'm beginning to learn not to take these Sherlock Holmes film mysteries too seriously and this one is a prime example of why. While conversing with Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce ), Holmes (Basil Rathbone) states that he's through with crime and about to hang it up due to dizzy spells he's been having, and then proceeds to faint away into a river. Newspaper headlines report on the death of Holmes, but no one seems to question the lack of a corpse. Where would it have gone in that slow moving stream? Didn't Watson bother to look for him?

I guess movie viewers weren't supposed to ask those kinds of obvious questions back in the day. But on the flip side, this movie was made extremely entertaining with the whimsical elements thrown in to keep you guessing. Like the business with the 'lycosa carnivora' spider, found only in the upper reaches of the Obongo. Totally made up of course, and calling to mind a Johnny Weissmuller/Jungle Jim flick from 1951 called "Fury of the Congo"; that story had a creature called an 'Okongo'. Suddenly I'm starting to get a little dizzy myself from all these 'ongo' iterations.

Adding to the fun here is Rathbone donning a pair of disguises to the consternation of his partner, with a red herring impostor showing up calling himself Gilflower (Arthur Hohl) and turning out to be the real thing, making Watson look even more foolish. As the villain of the piece and Spider Woman of the title, Gale Sondergaard actually brings an element of class and sophistication to the role, proving a formidable adversary along with her retinue of henchmen and underlings.

The carnival atmosphere and shooting gallery location of the film's finale provides one of the more unusual backdrops to solving the mystery of the 'pyjama' murders (not a mis-spelling, I'm using the film's version), as Holmes thwarts the villains by escaping his bonds while the authorities descend to put away the Spider Woman once and for all. All handled with just the right amount of suspense, though I thought it might have been appropriate for the film makers to bring this story to a conclusion by getting the fat lady to sing.

When a wave of apparently inexplicable suicides strikes London, Sherlock Holmes sniffs a more sinister plot and uncovers a diabolical insurance scam masterminded by a femme fatale, Adrea Spedding, also known as The Spider Woman …

This one is my personal favourite of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes quickies of the forties, not least for the fabulous performance by the beautiful, charming, wildly talented Sondergaard as the arch-villainess. Her scenes with Rathbone sparkle with undercurrents of attraction, respect, ambiguity and tension, each character trying to trip the other up and both actors playing an amazing game of illusions. As with most of the other films, Bertram Millhauser's script is pretty much an original work with little coming from any of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, but is never less than exciting or amusing, or both. The finale, as Watson unwittingly shoots at a carny sideshow to which Holmes has been strapped, is one of the series most memorably gleeful sequences. Cult fans should note Rossitto as Obongo the pygmy - he was in a plethora of great oddball flicks, from Freaks to The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Followed by a curio, The Spider Woman Strikes Back, which is a horror quickie with no relation to the Holmes movie, but also features Sondergaard as the villain. Despite their make-'em-quick-and-cheap nature, many of these forties detective series films are full of invention, intrigue, great performances and thrills-a-plenty. This is one of the best.

Rather neatly done tale that draws nothing of importance from any of the Conan-Doyle stories. London is suffering a great rash of suicides by wealthy men. After faking his own death by stroke while on a fishing trip -- for no evident reason -- Holmes investigates and discovers that the victims had one thing in common, their love of gambling.

Disguised as an Indian aristocrat Holmes frequents a number of casinos, which I never knew England had in 1943, hoping to find a link. I realize, by the way, that the film was released in 1944 but I'm assuming it was set in 1943 because Benito Mussolini figures as a villain, and by 1944 he was out of it. Holmes locates the link between the victims at one of the casinos. When he loses money, he's approached by a sympathetic Gale Sondergaard. She offers to lend him money if he's willing to use his life insurance policy as collateral, and if he's willing to change the name of the beneficiary. Something like that. I'm not too good at this stuff. I don't know how much my OWN policy is worth.

Anyway, that's the scheme. Sondergaard hangs around casinos looking for rich guys who are temporarily broke. She has them sign over their policies in return for a loan. Then she has the victims bitten by a venomous spider while they sleep. The venom is so painful that it drives the victim mad and they destroy themselves while in their pajamas. Later, someone will come forward and claim the benefits of the insurance.

It doesn't take long for Holmes to sniff out the scam. And it doesn't take Sondergaard long to figure out who the mysterious Indian aristocrat was either. She lures Holmes to an arcade and has her thugs tie him up behind a rotating cut-out figure of Hitler. She removes the iron plate behind Hitler's heart, exposing Holmes' heart instead. In a tense scene, the unwitting Watson picks up a rifle at the counter and stops barely short of shooting Holmes through the heart. Holmes escapes and he and Lestrade capture Sondergaard and her henchmen.

Holmes gets to wear two of his disguises, one -- the postman -- fairly effective. He and Watson are almost gassed to death at 221b Baker Street. An African pygmy plays a role in the plot. It's a distracting and undemanding story. Sondergaard gives a hammy performance full of knowing smirks. And one of her goons is the goofy-looking detective who is enthralled by the abstract painting in Joan Fontaine's vestibule in Hitchcock's "Suspicion." But it occurred to me that, without Rathbone as Holmes, and without Watson to provide his pawky humor, this is a B murder mystery that Boston Blackie or Bulldog Drummond or The Falcon or Charlie Chan might have managed equally well.

I enjoyed it. It's the kind of story that, if I'd seen it as a child, would have creeped me out. "The Pearl of Death", as I recall, made my hair stand on end.

The Spider Woman is another fun and enjoyable outing for Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson. In this one, Holmes investigates a series of murders that the police have labeled suicides. He quickly determines the connection the men have with one another and surmises the murders are being committed by an unknown woman that he calls a Female Moriarty. But she's ready for Holmes and has a number of tricks up her sleeve. Can Holmes escape her multitude of traps and bring this feminine menace to justice?

It's always a joy to watch Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce do their thing. They seemed to work off of each other so effortlessly and do so in The Spider Woman. Gale Sondergaard is excellent as the film's title character. She proves to be quite the match for Holmes. The verbal sparring match the pair has in a couple of scenes as each line and look has a double and deep meaning is perfect. The dialogue in these scenes is as well written as any I've yet run across in a Sherlock Holmes film. Bruce gets a chance to shine as well in a couple of scenes in The Spider Woman. Watching Watson pull on the beard of a postman while calling him names because he thinks its Holmes in disguise is very funny and very well done. But the best may be the scene where Watson very nearly kills Holmes with a rifle at a carnival game. It's a moment that stands out to me as a highlight of the entire series.

Overall, The Spider Woman is a nice entry in the Sherlock Holmes' series. I'm glad I finally had the chance to check it out.

This film, along with Hound of the Baskervilles, Woman in Green, and Pearl of Death, is in a tie for the best Holmes film as far as I'm concerned. The film grabs the viewer's attention immediately with a man jumping to his death (which viewers later learn is the result of a spider bite causing pain and apparently insanity), and England once again needs Holmes. Holmes and Watson are away in Scotland, where the detective fakes his death after telling Watson he is not well enough to solve the case, falling over a waterfall supposedly from a cerebral hemorage. Lestrad has a rare moment where he admits respect for Holmes, and a scene where Holmes in disguise badmouths himself and gets slugged by Watson for it is priceless, especially when Watson faints when he learns Holmes is alive. Back to work, Holmes in disguise starts to unravel the case he and Watson had been discussing before his supposed death to throw the murderess of guard. The Spider Woman is his intellectual equal though, and sees through his disguise. Several scenes follow with witty banter between the two, an attempt at killing Holmes and Watson with poisonous gas, Watson embarrassing himself by mistaking a spider expert for Holmes in disguise, and the two friends nearly being killed by an impostor spider expert. For once Watson is actually a help to Holmes understanding how the crime is done by pointing him towards the pygmy idea. The end scene is too good to spoil,but take my word for it, it's as suspenseful and funny as the best of any Holmes scenes. Avid readers of the original series will recognize scenes from The Final Problem (the death scene), the Empty House (the return), The Speckled Band (where the spider goes after Holmes in the hotel) and Sign of the Four (one word: pygmy. LOL).

The police are baffled after a series of suicides in which a bunch of men, wearing their pyjamas, throw themselves out of high windows or blow their brains out. The city needs Sherlock Holmes on the case but he's too busy being on holiday in Scotland with Watson (cue the tune to Take the High Road as the film fades from London to the wilderness). But Holmes suffers a dizzy spell and plummets to his 'death' off the top of a waterfall.

Watson returns to London and grudgingly begins to pack up all of Holmes's stuff. But it was all just a decoy and Holmes promptly returns and begins to unravel the mystery of the Pyjama Suicides undisturbed. He works out a single common denominator; a psychotic seductress has been involved with each of the victims.

There's an old saying that a hero is only as good as the villain. Well, I happen to agree with that most of the time and it certainly proves to be true in this film. We've seen Holmes match wits with various enemies over time but this is the first one where he really seems to have met his equal. Adrea Spedding (played by Academy Award-winning Gale Sondergaard)comes across as more calculating and efficient than Moriarty or any of the Nazi villains.

The story also takes elements from a few of Conan Doyle's works, including The Speckled Band and The Sign of Four. It packs a hell of a lot into it's running time and is surely one of the most entertaining of the Rathbone/Bruce series. Still not too keen on the 'modern' setting though.