SHERLOCK HOLMES (1932). Sepiatone.

SHERLOCK HOLMES (a.k.a. Conan Doyle's Master Detective Sherlock Holmes) is a 1932 American pre-Code film starring Clive Brook as the eponymous London detective. The movie is based on the successful stage play Sherlock Holmes by William Gillette, in turn based on the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and is directed by William K. Howard for the Fox Film Corporation. Brook had played Holmes previously in The Return of Sherlock Holmes and the "Murder Will Out" segment of Paramount on Parade.

Reginald Owen plays Dr. Watson, and Ernest Torrence is Holmes's arch-rival, Professor Moriarty. Reginald Owen played Sherlock Holmes the following year in A Study in Scarlet. Owen is one of a small number of actors to play both Holmes and Watson. Examples of other such actors include Jeremy Brett, who played Watson on stage in the United States and, most famously, Holmes on British television, Carleton Hobbs, who played both roles in British radio adaptations, and Patrick Macnee, who played both roles in US television movies.

PLOT:
The famous detective is pulled away from retirement and his fiancée when the condemned Moriarty escapes from prison and swears vengeance. Adapted from a stage play, rather than from one of Conan Doyle's books, this is a slightly odd portrayal of the great detective. Holmes finds himself about to be married to a society girl, a daughter of a wealthy banker. But marriage has to wait when the arch criminal Moriarty escapes the hangman's noose to unleash Chicago-style violence on the pubs of London. An "Americanised" story that will be unfamiliar to Holmes devotees (and, indeed, to students of London criminology) is, nevertheless, redeemed by some tight direction and excellent performances by Clive Brook as Holmes and Ernest Torrance, a villainous Moriarty. There's quite a memorable opening of Moriarty, in silhouette, being taken to and from the court for sentencing.

CAST:
Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes
Miriam Jordan as Alice Faulkner
Ernest Torrence as Moriarty
Herbert Mundin as George
Reginald Owen as Dr. Watson
Howard Leeds as Little Billy
Alan Mowbray as Colonel Gore-King
C. Montague Shaw as Judge
Frank Atkinson as Man in Bar
Ivan F. Simpson as Faulkner
Stanley Fields asTony Ardetti
Uncredited:

Ted Billings as Carnival Thug
Roy D'Arcy as Manuel Lopez
Edward Dillon as Al
John George as Bird Shop Thug
Robert Graves as Gaston Roux
Lew Hicks as Prison Guard
Brandon Hurst as Secretary to Erskine
Claude King as Sir Albert Hastings
Arnold Lucy as Chaplain
Lucien Prival as Hans Dreiaugen