THE DYING DETECTIVE (1921)
Silent short
Article 4003 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-13-2012
Directed by Maurice Elvey
Featuring Ellie Norwood, Hubert Willis, Cecil Humphreys
Country: UK
What it is: Episode of movie series “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”

Sherlock Holmes must contend with a clever specialist in Asiatic diseases who may be guilty of a murder. Can he outwit the man?

In Walt Lee’s “Reference Guide to Fantastic Films”, he includes the Ellie Norwood Sherlock Holmes series as a single entity, and, since certain episodes of that series do have fantastic content, that’s acceptable. However, IMDB lists all fifteen episodes as distinct movies, so those that haven’t already done so will now be making their way to my hunt list. But that doesn’t mean that every episode will have fantastic content, and, unless the Asiatic disease in question here is in the realm of science fiction, there’s no real fantastic content to this one. Still, the story is entertaining enough, though I do think that the plot actually relying on the villain to tell all of his secrets to someone he thinks is going to die is a bit of a stretch. I haven’t quite settled on whether I care for Norwood as Holmes yet, but this may have more to do with the fact that I prefer to hear the voice of the actors playing the character, and this being a silent movie, I don’t have that opportunity. I’ve already covered one of the movies in the series, and there are a few others on my hunt list already that I’ve not been able to find, but I’ll probably be covering the rest of them that I do have in the near future.