With 1944’s The Scarlet Claw, the series of Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone passes its halfway point, as it was the eighth of 14. In a small village called La Morte Rouge, the locals worry that something sinister and supernatural stalks them. Tales of mysterious glows and animals with ripped-out throats abound, and these take a turn for the worse when Lady Penrose ends up dead, also with severe damage to her neck.

News of this reaches Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanagh) in Quebec while he attends a convention to discuss the occult. Penrose believes in the topic, so he butts heads with a more fact-based attendee: Sherlock Holmes (Rathbone).

When he learns of his wife’s death, Penrose heads home – and Holmes follows, primarily because he gets a postmortem letter from Lady Penrose herself in which the now-deceased frets for her life. Holmes and his cohort Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) head to La Morte Rouge and the scene of the crime to find out who – or what – caused the Lady’s demise.

I’m cherry-picking the Holmes movies I see; I can’t make the time to watch all 14, so I chose to go with the titles that offer audio commentaries. That’s been a fairly good method to date, as it seems to allow me to skip some of the lesser entries, though a relative clunker like Voice of Terror does slip past on occasion.

Claw definitely deserves discussion among the series’ stronger flicks, as it plays like a better-made version of Hound of the Baskervilles. That one lost points due to too little Holmes and a tired romantic subplot. Claw doesn’t make either of those mistakes, as it provides a consistently stimulating affair.

If forced to pick a disappointment, I’d say that Claw discards the supernatural element too quickly. Sure, we know that there isn’t really a monster stalking the inhabitants of La Morte Rouge, but the film could’ve kept that thread alive longer and done more to cast doubts upon Holmes’ unswerving sense of rational thought.

Otherwise, plotting and development seem good. The story sets up a clear mystery and follows its paths in a concise way. Of course, this means the usual diet of missteps and red herrings, but all fit the tale well; we don’t get a lot of fat along the way.

That goes a long way toward making this a compelling story. As I mentioned when I reviewed Faces Death, the Holmes franchise flounders when it tries too hard to go away from its roots. Is Holmes a limited character? Yes – he’s not someone who gives us a true three-dimensional personality, and that’s fine, as we don’t really want that from him. When we go into Holmes movies, we want good mysteries that the lead solves via deduction, and that’s about it. If Sherlock has to fight Nazis or chase spies, he loses his identity.

Which the series’ producers clearly realized, as the franchise usually went with bread and butter. To stretch food metaphors, Scarlet Claw is indeed a meat and potatoes Holmes film: one that focuses on what the character does best. And it’s a good meat and potatoes tale that one could argue stands among the franchise’s best.

The Scarlet Claw appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.33:1 on this Blu-Ray Disc. I hoped that as the Holmes series progressed, the images would improve, but in this case, the opposite seemed to be true, as Claw might’ve been the most problematic transfer of the films I’ve seen.

As usual, print flaws were the main concern. From open to close, I noticed many examples of specks, blotches, marks, tears, nicks, scratches, lines and debris. Some segments looked better than others, but none escaped harm.

The rest of the image was stronger but not as good as its predecessors. In particular, softness took a bit of a hit. While most of the film showed fairly nice delineation, wide shots tended to seem softer than usual. No issues with jaggies or shimmering occurred, and blacks looked pretty good. Dark tones seemed reasonably solid, and low-light shots offered fairly positive clarity. Though this wasn’t an unwatchable presentation, the combination of nearly constant print flaws and some softness made it a “D+”.

Don’t expect improvements from the problematic monaural soundtrack. In particular, this one seemed rougher than its predecessors. Noise was a bigger concern, and speech tended to be edgy and sibilant. Music was usually somewhat harsh, and effects appeared distorted. All I want from a 1940s mono mix is to get acceptably clear audio, but that didn’t happen here; the track was a bit of a mess.

Because Claw came as part of a 14-film, five-disc set, I didn’t give it a grade for bonus materials. The package spreads these across all of those platters, and only a few are film-specific, so I didn’t think it was fair to issue individual marks for extras.

We do find an audio commentary for Claw. Author David Stuart Davies provides a running, screen-specific look at story issues and influences, cast, characters and performances, sets and locations, connected timelines and other production areas.

This is the third Davies commentary I’ve heard, and it’s a decent one but not terrific. At this point, Davies seems to be running out of series-related notes the share, so he feels a bit tapped out along the way. Nonetheless, he still manages to throw out a reasonable amount of info; the track simply drags more than I’d like.

Found on Disc One of this package, we get an Introduction by Robert Gitt. In this four-minute, 38-second piece, Gitt discusses the efforts that went into the restoration of the Universal Holmes flicks. Gitt gives us a good look at some of the challenges he and his team encountered.

Disc Five offers a few more bonus materials, and we find five Photo Galleries. Each one shows a running montage of stills accompanied by music; they run two minutes, 35 seconds apiece. We see posters and photos from the flicks. These are mildly interesting but not particularly memorable.

Next we discover a compilation of trailers. We locate promos for The Spider Woman, The Scarlet Claw, The Pearl of Death, House of Fear, Terror By Night and Dressed to Kill. They’re in awful shape, but they’re still fun to see.

Footage of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes from a newsreel that appeared at the time of his death. This one-minute, 16-second clip gives us a little of Doyle as he talks about his work on the series. He doesn’t tell us much, but it’s nice to have a look at the man behind the legend.

With a tight narrative and a clever narrative, The Scarlet Claw satisfies. It doesn’t attempt to reinvent any wheels, but it delivers the kind of fun mystery we want from Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, picture and audio come with many problems. A few supplements round out the set with some decent material, however. The Blu-ray has issues but the movie itself entertains