The Spider Woman The Spider Woman The Spider Woman (alternatively titled Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman and Spider Woman) is a 1943 mystery film starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, the seventh of fourteen such films the pair were involved in. As with all of the Universal Studios films in the series, the film is set in then-present day as opposed to the Victorian setting of the original stories. This film incorporates elements from the novel "The Sign of the Four", as well as the short stories "The Final Problem", "The Adventure of the Empty House",
Sherlock Holmes novel "Psmith, Journalist" (neither spoken by Holmes). The exact phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" is used by protagonist Tom Beresford in Agatha Christie's 1922 novel "The Secret Adversary". It also appears at the end of the 1929 film "The Return of Sherlock Holmes", the first Holmes sound film. The phrase became familiar with the American public in part due to its use in The Rathbone-Bruce series of films from 1939 to 1946. Conan Doyle's 56 short stories and four novels are known as the "canon" by Holmes aficionados. Early canonical scholars included Ronald Knox in Britain and Christopher Morley in