Sherlock Holmes and the photo enlarger bombsight

[Trask]

Kind of cute, and very understandable. Channel-surfing I came across “Sherlock Holmes and The Secret Weapon” — Basil Rathbone in a 1942 film about a new, improved bombsight that Moriarty wants to steal. Gotta take a look! So I tune in just as the bombsight inventor is taken aloft in a bomber to demonstrate how capable his new invention is. He sits in front of his device, which somehow allows him face forward but also look down vertically to his target. He then grasps a switch and releases the bombs.

But as I looked, and looked again, I thought that bombsight looked familiar. Then it all came clear — the director sat the actor in front of a photo enlarger, stare through the cantilevered uprights, and press the switch normally used to turn the enlarger on and off. They shone a light on his face to boost the impression of outside illumination. As the “device” is seen only briefly, the public viewers of 1942 wouldn’t know the difference, and in the midst of real war it’s easy to understand that using an enlarger was perhaps the best they could come up with at the time.

And later Holmes uses the same enlarger, as an enlarger, to read a cryptographic code on a sheet of paper, after soaking it in “fluorescent salts” and making a photography using ultra-violet light. Photography to the rescue!

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Makes one lose faith in Sherlock. Reminds me that the original King Kong movie was filmed using a model that was 12" tall.

 

[voceumana]

I've noticed this, too. This series of movies was done on a slim budget, and they got good mileage from that enlarger. If you ever see the movie, The Dam Busters, where the plane's altitude was critical for the bomb's effectiveness (and it was very low altitude), they used beams of light reflecting off the water's surface--when they were coincident, the plane was at the right height.

 

[Truzi]

Cool, I'd never noticed that. The Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce duo are my favorite, even though the movies aren't canon.

 

[voceumana]

The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Rathbone/Bruce set is quite good; Rathbone--perhaps truer to the original stories, though I haven't read them so I can't say for sure. I believe Rathbone doesn't even get top billing in the credits for the Hound....

 

[Kodachromeguy]

Is the bomb-sight inventor wearing his suit jacket, white shirt, and necktie on the plane while he tests the device? How elegant. I wore a suit on airplanes up through the mid '80s. Now anything flies and looks like it just rolled out of a dumpster or a Wal-Mart.

 

[Anon Ymous]

Heh, I remember having a thread about this "bombsight" years ago.

EDIT: Found it: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/enlarger-bomb-sight.128730/

 

[AgX]

In this context I like to hint at this long time going thread Old cameras (and such) in old Movies
where we list appearances as such.


That "bomb sight" showed already up there, but more such weird stuff is welcome there.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Now I know why it is hard to find a good enlarger these days, they have gone to bomb sights everywhere, when will they every learn?*





* Apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary

 

[Ian Grant]

Arthur Conan Doyle was a very keen photographer and wrote articles for photo magazines. He was involved in authenticating the Cottersley Fairies photographs which he said were genuine, in fact the two girls who made them worked as photo retouchers.

Ian

 

[AgX]

All that trivia we learn here at Apug... more of that.

 

[jvo]

yes, and that "bombsight" is appropriately an omega (d2?) - a real tank!

 

[Orftoden]

Too funny. Looks like something you would see on amazon prime!

 

[Zathras]

It's an Omega D-II, the older Push-Pull chassis. The D-2 is the newer version which uses a crank to raise and lower the head. I have the older version an it's great machine.
Mine is a wartime military version according to the late Harry Taylor, so maybe it served as a bomb sight?