A Study in Scarlet

Edwin L. Marin, World Wide, 1933. Reginald Owen is Sherlock Holmes in a London that has almost none of Conan Doyle’s first novel: a secret society, a shared-estate pact, deaths among members. Anna May Wong is Mrs. Pyke. The title is rented; the plot is an original by Robert Florey. Seventy-two minutes, Poverty Row after the Fox and Paramount Holmes pictures. Owen plays the detective as a talker, not a silhouette. Wong is again the woman the poster can use. Doyle’s Utah backstory is gone. What remains is a club that kills its own.