Roy William Neill directed The Woman in Green, the 11th of the 14 Sherlock Holmes films based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle.
The film stars Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, with Hillary Brooke as the titular woman and Henry Daniell as Professor Moriarty.
The film follows an original premise with material taken from “The Final Problem” (1893) and “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903).
This was Hillary Brooke’s third of three different roles in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, after Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) and Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943).
Series regular Dennis Hoey’s Inspector Lestrade was replaced with Matthew Boulton as Inspector Gregson.
When several women are murdered with their forefingers severed, Holmes is baffled by the crimes. Widower Sir George Fenwick (Paul Cavanagh), after a romantic night at the apartment of Lydia Marlowe (Hillary Brooke), is hypnotized into believing he is responsible for the crimes; he awakes from a stupor to find a woman’s forefinger in his pocket.
In the end, Holmes reveals that he was never hypnotized, but secretly ingested a drug to make him appear so. Moriarty escapes from the police and jumps from the top of Lydia’s house, hanging onto a pipe, which becomes loose causing his fall to death.
