Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Robert J. Maxwell It's based on "The Valley of Fear," Conan-Doyle's last and least novella. Poor Conan-Doyle. He'd grown to dislike Sherlock Holmes. The character was a cash cow but had become Frankenstein's monster. And there is nothing more disgusting than a cow that is a monster except a mixed metaphor.Conan-Doyle had a much larger vision -- writing epic adventure stories. He did write some and a few were popular successes -- "The Lost World" -- but they didn't compare with Holmes. As time went by, Conan-Doyle put less effort into the Holmes stories. They lost their savour. In "The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes" with Arthur Wontner, we can see the result. This is a colorless Holmes -- no dope, no quirks, and some of the deductions are literally incredible.Wontner himself isn't that bad except when compared to Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett. Wontner simply isn't a commanding presence. It's too bad because more than any other Holmes he resembles the Sidney Paget illustrations that accompanied the original magazine stories.I suppose one of the ways that Conan-Doyle was able to satisfy his need to write exotic adventures was to insert flashbacks that took us to lands far away from 221b Baker Street. In "A Study in Scarlet" it was Mormons; here it's what seems to be the Wobblies in the Pennsylvania coal country. The back stories are frankly dull.The productions are adequate, no more than that. The set dressings don't look cheesy; they only look stagy. The performances fit into the same category. The most memorable figure is McGinty, the head honcho of the Scowrers, a giant of a man with a voice to match.

tedg This is the second of the early Holmes film experiments that I have seen. In The Sign of Four, they messed up the detective form by showing us the entire history before Holmes appears. Here, they do something similar. While Holmes interviews a woman about her recently dead husband, we have the major part of the film time occupied in a flashback illustrating her story. That story is a small film by itself. The outer story is a combat between Moriarty and a *retired* Holmes that ends with a chase up a medieval tower with what might have been exciting camera-work in its day. This story does respect Holmes as a detective, and the task he tackles is not something we already understand. I can see that as they made extra films, they tried different mixes of explicit storytelling and deduced and explained stories.

dj455k "The Triumoph of Sherlock Holmes" recently came out on DVD. First off the copy is quite awful, although from what I have read there aren't very good video sources to take from. Secondly, Arthur Wontner's Holmes is excellent. He looks like Holmes and he acts like Holmes as portrayed by Conan Doyle.The movie is based on one of the longer length stories, "The Valley of Fear". The story includes a long flashback to Pennsylvania coal country in the US and is included in the movie. It is very well done. As near as I can tell the scenes in America were done with American actors, including the well known character actor Ben Welden, except for Boss McGinty played by Roy Emerton who does a great job.The movie contains a good many Holmesian aphorisms taken from other stories. While it's always a pleasure to hear them I can imagine if you saw movie after movie and heard the same lines multiple times it could become a little annoying.I particularly liked the Watson of Ian Fleming as every time Holmes introduces himself and neglects Watson, Watson nudges him with his arm. A small bit but nicely done.

Jim Land The movie opened in 1935 and appears to be set in the 1930s. The original Arthur Conan Doyle serial, from which the screenplay was written, was published in 1914-15, and was set in the 1880s.The movie's flashback to the U.S.A. introduces the Scowlers, a secret society of thugs. The fictional Scowlers appears to be based on the Molly Maguires, an actual secret society of immigrant Irish coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania, USA, in the 1860s and 1870s. They were set up as a secret network of local committees, and they did not brand their members, since they wished to remain anonymous.Conditions in the mines were abominable, as this was long before child labor laws, a minimum wage, suitable standards on working conditions, or any organized form of labor union. The Mollies fought back with threats, beatings, riots, and murder against abusive mine owners, supervisors, police, and anyone who spoke out against them.The powerful owner of many coal mines hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the society, and one of their detectives managed to join the Mollies and stay under cover for nearly five years. When his investigation was finished, trials in were held, twenty convicted society members were hanged, and the Mollie Maguires were history.So the film's use of a local committee of thugs, and the triumph of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, are quite realistic, based on Pennsylvania history.