Sherlock Holmes (1939 film series)

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

A series of fourteen films based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories was released between 1939 and 1946; British actors Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce portrayed Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, respectively. The first two films in the series were produced by 20th Century-Fox and released in 1939. After these two films, Universal Pictures acquired the rights from the Doyle estate and produced a further twelve films.

The films from Fox had large budgets, high production values and were set in the Victorian era. Universal updated the films settings to the then-present time of World War II with Holmes fighting the Nazis and produced them as B pictures with lower budgets.[1] Both Rathbone and Bruce continued their roles when the series changed studios, as did Mary Gordon, who played the recurring character Mrs Hudson.

During the 1970s, four of the Universal films fell into the public domain when the studio failed to renew their copyrights.[2][3] These four films were restored and colourised. Some of the films in the series had become degraded over time, with some of the original negatives lost and others suffering from nitrate deterioration because of the unstable cellulose nitrate film. The UCLA Film and Television Archive restored the series, putting the films onto modern polyester film, in a process that was jointly paid for by UCLA, Warner Bros. and Hugh Hefner.

  1. ^ Smith, Christopher (January 2018). "Sherlock Holmes and the Nazis: Fifth Columnists and the People's War in Anglo-American Cinema, 1942-1943". Journal of British Cinema and Television. 15 (3): 1–27.
  2. ^ "Sherlock Holmes: 1940s Films Remastered". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  3. ^ "Sherlock Holmes | Public Domain Movies". publicdomainmovie.net. Retrieved 2023-11-27.