THE SCARLET CLAW (1944) **1/2 Basil Rathbone has the impetuous conceit to be Sherlock Holmes, and that's a good start. Things get frustrating, halfway through, when it turns out that instead of working off the clues that we've been given, they're going to just keep going pathological off the sides (new characters, new evidence, whenever they have to reveal something). Then, as if to make up, or to surprise us worse, Edmund L. Hartmann starts weaving new mysteries (i.e., not whodunit) with the very few clues provided, and as a kicker Roy William Neill provides a visual clue that pretty much solves everything else we can think of. Of course, they can think of more, and so there is that sense of manipulated mastery down the stretch that you'd hope for from such a film. Neill has several precise and perfectly raucous cuts, once on a drunk guy talking, and the other one of which closes the spoken portion of the film.
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