Alright I admit it. There’s not been a Weekend or Friday Night Movie for a while on here and that’s because life is busy. I’ve mostly just not had the time to watch films to find the ones I want to share.
However I did manage to find myself a little time this week to do some film watching and I found a really good Sherlock Holmes movie from 1942 called ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror’. It’s clearly a wartime propaganda feel good film but it’s still a good movie.
The premise of the movie is very believable for the time as there was a big public panic on about German spies and saboteurs so it’s certainly a film that would have caught onto the public’s mood. The plot centres around attacks on strategic military and non-military British assets during World War II. Simultaneously to these attacks Nazi German radio is broadcasting an exact description of the attack as it is going on. Live or as near about live as dammit reporting by an enemy of an attack is not really anything that we would consider unusual these days. We’ve seen from coverage from today’s wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East how quickly video, images and text can go from the battlefields to understand that.
But during WWII, to have live or almost live descriptions on the radio of an attack as it is taking place would have been difficult if not impossible. Whilst it might have been just about technically possible for an operator using HF radio to be linked live with a German MW station for rebroadcasting as propaganda, equipment bulk, the need for large external antennas and earths and the every present danger of the operating being ‘DF’d’ or ‘direction found’ and killed would have in reality have played heavily on the minds of anyone thinking of trying this tactic. Both sides in WWII had excellent radio monitoring systems for examining propaganda broadcasts and picking up any clandestine radio traffic. This would be a suicide job for the radio operator.
In the movie the UK intelligence council call in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to try to find out what is happening and where the information is coming from after series of adventures and a search for clues, finds out the reason for the broadcasts and their ultimate source. This is a cracking little yarn that would probably have been a ‘B’ movie at the time, a bit of extra entertainment before the main picture. But for me that probably history doesn’t detract, it increases my amazement that these B movie producers and serial producers at the time, did so much with so few resources.
Here’s the movie. Click on the link and enjoy.
