Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

Roy William Neill's Sherlock Holmes and The Secret Weapon (1942) comes to Alpha Video's low-priced edition as one of the most cleanly mastered public domain DVD releases this reviewer has yet encountered, from a surprisingly crisp and sharp source print. The whole release is a match in quality for the authorized laserdisc editions of the Holmes films (of which there never was one on this title). The quality is about equal to a good film-to-video transfer of the late 1980's or very early 1990's, with no smearing of details and generally beautifully balanced contrast and density. The only drawback is that the materials have been slightly edited, to remove the Universal Studios logos at the start or finish of the production, which makes for a too quick and slightly awkward edition of the image and sound at the close of Basil Rathbone's speech at the end of the movie, directly into the cast list without showing the Universal logo or name. There is no way that Alpha Video's standard six chapters could adequately delineate a plot with as many twists and turns as this movie's, but that is all that one does get. The disc opens automatically to a simple two-choice menu.