Wonderful character development!

Best movie of this year hands down!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This above-average entry in the Rathbone/Holmes canon sees the normal procedure of adapting a story for the screen abandoned in favour of some wartime propaganda. Here, Holmes is up against an international ring of spies whose job is to transmit top-secret information to the enemy. Cooperation between the British and American sides is emphasised in this film and the propaganda makes it quite interesting to watch as a measure of the times. On top of that, it's got a cracking story too involving some missing documents which have fallen into the wrong hands. The plot twists and turns repeatedly as clues and events come and go; they've really packed a lot into the seventy minute running time.Rathbone and Bruce are excellent together as always, with Rathbone on top commanding form as a fearless Holmes who always manages to stay two steps ahead of the enemy. Bruce milks his comic value for all its worth as the culture gap between countries is played for laughs; we witness Watson discovering chewing gum and mulling over the newspapers while in America. A black porter also provides some comic relief, although of the borderline racist variety. Thankfully the bad guys in this film are played by excellent, menacing actors. Henry Daniell, who would later go on to be Moriarty in THE WOMAN IN GREEN, is an evil henchman. One look at his face and you can realise why they cast him repeatedly in this series - cruel is too kind a word for it.Horror fans will also enjoy the rather brief presence of George Zucco, star of countless B-movies in the '40s. Zucco plays the chief Nazi war criminal and has some excellent banter with Rathbone - the pair really bring out the best of their acting abilities in each other. Suffice to say, he makes for one of the finest villains in the long-running series, even if he doesn't get much in the way of screen time. Then there's the beautiful woman in peril; the delight of Holmes pretending to be a clumsy antiques expert as he infiltrates the enemy base; lots of peril (Holmes nearly gets a block dropped on him and almost dies as a result of a spring-loaded trap); a gun fight and plenty more. Add to this Bruce's excellent support, an amusing travelogue interlude where all of the capital's landmarks are helpfully pointed out, truly nasty baddies and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of fun, and this turns out to be an entertaining highlight of the series.

Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Watson (Nigel Bruce) are sent to Washington to retrieve a top secret document hidden inside a book of matches before it falls into the hands of an international spy ring led by evil German Heinrich Hinckel (George Zucco).The third in Holmes's rather tedious wartime adventures, this film is one of the weakest in the entire Rathbone/Bruce series with very little intrigue and not nearly enough suspense to sustain interest, even over a scant 71 minutes run-time. It's a full twelve minutes before Rathbone even appears on screen, even longer before he gets to Washington, and once in the capital of the good-old US of A, he's given a guided tour of the city, taking in all of its landmarks (this bit's more like a travelogue than a thriller).Finally, the action begins proper, but it's far from exciting stuff, with a clue leading Holmes' to trawl Washington antique shops in search of the bad guys' lair. Meanwhile, the matchbook is passed from person to person, all of whom are unaware of the secrets it contains, eventually landing in the lap of Hinckel, who also remains oblivious to the microfilm within. When Holmes at last arrives on the scene, he must try and get the matchbook from the evil German without giving the game away. Yawn!Little more than a flag-waving exercise for the allies during WWII, Sherlock Holmes in Washington marks an all-time low for the series; thankfully, this would be the last film to pit Rathbone's Holmes against the threat of the Third Reich, the great detective getting back to solving domestic crimes in his next outing.4.5 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

Purist fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective Sherlock Holmes usually heap scorn and derision on Sherlock Holmes In Washington as it is not based in any way on one of Conan Doyle's stories. It is clearly an inferior product and I'm by no means a Holmes purist.But this was wartime and it would only be natural that world's most famous detective be called on to lend his services overseas when a British agent carrying a vital document disappears, but not before he passes it on to an unsuspecting Marjorie Lord on a train. Holmes and Watson go to America at the behest of British Intelligence to find out just what happened.Holmes and Watson dressed in their Victorian/Edwardian attire seem dreadfully out of place in wartime Washington, DC. Still with the keen intelligence that Holmes has and Basil Rathbone brings to the role, those enemies of democracy had no idea what they were dealing with.As a bow to current radio favorites, Thurston Hall plays a bloviating southern senator very much along the lines of Senator Claghorn from the Fred Allen radio show. Might have been even more interesting if Kenny Delmar who originated that character had been in Sherlock Holmes In Washington. Still Thurston Hall was quite good, possibly the best thing from this film.After some wartime propaganda films, the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies got back to some of Conan Doyle's stories as the material for the films. Good thing too.

First, I want to point out that the copy of this film (DVD) that you want is the re-worked UCLA film lab version that was digitized from a very pristine black-and-white 35 mm print. All other copies are inferior to this one. The aspect is full-screen.In the story, A British courier is dispatched to Washington as a decoy for the real carrier of a secret WW II document which is imperative to the Allied offensive. The real courier is one Alfred Pettibone, traveling under the alias of John Gregson (played by Gerald Hamer, astonishingly, uncredited in this film! We also saw Hamer play the postman in "Sherlock Holmes and The Scarlet Claw"; and other characters in "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death" ; in "Pursuit to Algiers," and in; "Terror by Night").Pettibone/Gregson manages to surreptitiously hand off the document, which he had reduced to microfilm and embedded in a matchbook, to the fiancé of an American Navy Lieutenant -- she doesn't know that she has it until she suddenly recalls that Pettibone/Gregson dropped the matchbook into her purse just after he lit her cigarette. Still, she plays dumb to Zucco's threatened tortures. Before the girl's actual abduction, Pettibone/Gregson is kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by these same Nazi agents, (one of whom is played by Daniell).Holmes and Pettibone had worked together before on important cases so Holmes is ready to take on the task and travel with Watson to Washington when the British authorities tell him that his associate has disappeared, along with the document. Subsequent to attempts on his own life and that of Watson's, the pair travel to America where the Washington D.C. police are at their beck and call.It's soon discovered by both Holmes and the Nazis that the young fiancé has the document, or at least a knowledge of its whereabouts, so the bad guys kidnap her just before Holmes can get to her. Then, Holmes has to dredge up some quick clues to locate the Nazi agents' (the boss of whom is played by the great and sinister George Zucco!) base of operations.Will Holmes be in time to save the girl and recover the document?!? What do YOU think *.* Still, it's a good suspenseful film with plenty of action. Definitely worth watching.