Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

THE SHERLOCK HOLMES COLLECTION (MPI): HD enthusiasts with a passion for the Golden Age need to do themselves a favor next week by picking up MPI's Blu-Ray box-set of the "Sherlock Holmes Collection," which not only will encourage the release of more titles like it but also infuse your collection with terrific HD presentations of the 14 vintage Holmes mysteries starring Basil Rathbone as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective and Nigel Bruce as his faithful sidekick Dr. Watson. The five-disc BD set offers the duo's first two series entries - "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and the outstanding "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" - which were produced at Fox as Grade-A productions in 1939, as well as the following 12 pictures Rathbone and Bruce starred in for Universal Pictures beginning in 1942. Universal's entries differed from the Fox films in a number of ways: the studio produced the films on a lower (though not entirely bargain-basement) budget and, most notably, initially shifted the stories away from Victorian era England to the then-present day of the 1940s. This enabled the producers to offer more "contemporary" WWII-era stories (most evidently seen in "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror," "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon," and "Sherlock Holmes in Washington"), designed to appeal to populist sentiment of the time with anti-Nazi themes permeating the respective mysteries. Additional entries - "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death," "The Spider Woman," "The Scarlet Claw," "The Pearl of Death," "The House of Fear," "The Woman in Green," "Pursuit to Algiers," "Terror by Night" and "Dressed to Kill" - lessened the war-time rhetoric, with the latter entries also de-emphasizing the modern trappings of the era in favor of a tone more in keeping with the material's literary roots. Some of the pictures are more successful than others (and some are a far cry from Conan Doyle's stories), but with Rathbone and Bruce onboard, every one of them is at least entertaining and MPI's Blu-Ray set is just tremendous. Universal's 12 entries were painstakingly restored by the UCLA Archive over a span of nearly ten years; despite working often with less-than-stellar materials, the Archive's efforts were dazzling, particularly considering the shambles some of the films were in (several had entered into the public domain after Universal sold them all in the `50s, resulting in decades of showings that were generations removed from the original negatives). The 1080p AVC encoded transfers look like real film, with grain prevailing throughout, which is a necessity given the age and condition of the elements (and make no mistake - print damage and numerous other issues are occasionally evident throughout). When screened on larger sets, there's no question viewers will see an appreciable gain in detail over their prior HD editions. Informative extras are carried over from MPI's prior DVD releases of the pictures, including a half-dozen commentary tracks, an interview with UCLA preservationist Robert Gitt, a number of trailers, a photo gallery and several theatrical trailers. This is a marvelous release and one that comes highly recommended for all Sherlock Holmes fans and Golden Age enthusiasts, and hopefully the sign of more classics to come in HD.