The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not based on any of Conan Doyle's original stories and, according to Holmes scholars, only nominally adapted from the credited stage play by William Gillette. The film pits Holmes against his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty (played with cool cunning and obsessive drive by frequent screen heavy George Zucco), who escapes a murder charge in the opening scene and proceeds to bait Holmes with a challenge. "I'm going to bring off right under your nose the most incredible crime of the century, and you'll never suspect it until it's too late," he taunts the detective. "It'll be the end of you, Sherlock Holmes." Thus he begins a master plan that involves enigmatic letters, a flustered young beauty, a murdered aristocrat, a South American stalker (complete with an eerie wooden flute that haunts the victims) and the priceless (and fictional) Star of Delhi jewel. Ida Lupino co-stars as the terrified young heiress worried that her brother has been marked for death, a case that Holmes takes up despite his promise to oversee the transfer of the jewel to the Tower of London. Needless to say, Moriarty's fingerprints are all over these seemingly disparate cases, but the mystery is just exactly how and why. Basil Rathbone's resemblance to the Sidney Paget illustrations in the original Strand publication is startling, but his incarnation is far more than visual. He brings to the screen the offhanded arrogance that Holmes so memorably displayed in the stories, and tempers it with his delight in conundrums and challenges. He's exacting, exasperating, charming, devoted to Watson and oblivious to all else while concentrating on an experiment. Through what can only be seen in retrospect as mishandling by Fox, this handsome studio production was relegated to second bill status upon release and considered a failure by the studio, which cancelled its planned series of Holmes adaptations. Yet Rathbone and Bruce proved popular enough to recreate the characters for a radio series and, in 1942, a revival of the screen series by Universal, which brought the characters up to the present to solve mysteries in World War II-era England. For all the villains played by Rathbone in films such as The Sea Hawk (1940) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), he is still best remembered for his heroic Holmes.