The Sleeping Audience

You're right: it is entirely too much sitting about and speechifying. There are a few "noirish" scenes in which shadow and light are effectively utilized, but all in all far too static to be a successful film. Yet I enjoyed it, because its story (based on two actual Doyle tales) is vastly superior to most of the Rathbone film narratives after "The Hound of the Baskervilles". In most of those films (apart from the simple joy of watching Basil and Nigel with their distinctive voices and actions), Holmes is no more effective a detective than most of the usual film investigators of the time, who seemed to cogitate and fret as one after another person is killed, winding up the feeble mysteries with improbable analysis and some hackneyed "gathering of suspects" scene. That isn't even to mention the fighting of Nazis. I did enjoy the star's depiction of Holmes, despite his being a bit long in the tooth for the role, and while - yes - one longs for someone to open a window and get out of a room once in awhile, I felt the story held its own fascination, and the "modernizations" here seemed less obtrusive than those in the Rathbone features, which often lose all sense of Sherlock's milieu in a haze of modern women, telephones, cars, and airplanes. A very small and oddly inert film, but - for me - basically entertaining.

yeah I almost felt a sleep myself

very boring

When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...