Has any fictional character seen more cinematic service than Sherlock Holmes? Created by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, the master sleuth of 221B Baker Street found his way to the screen as early as 1903, and became the subject of a series as early as 1908. He’s been featured in respectfully faithful adaptations and thrust into fanciful adventures Conan Doyle never dreamed of. He’s stalked the alleys, lanes, and moors of his Victorian-Edwardian provenance, and been unceremoniously drafted to fight Nazi spies in the 1940s. Most movies have allowed him to remain his old misogynistic self; some have involved him in all manner of romantic liaisons ranging from the insipid to the sublime.
Peter Cushing nailed it in the late-Fifties Hammer production of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’Conan Doyle purists (the Baker Street Regulars, they call themselves) reflexively denounce any deviation from the letter of the lore. For others, the Holmesian film legacy is more problematical to sort through. And the best Holmesiana is not always to be found in the best films. Indeed, though pleasures abound, only one Holmes film of our acquaintance can be said to be absolutely first-rate. (We reveal which in good time.)
The great man’s profile is about to be raised this Christmastime with the release of a new adventure entitled, rather presumptuously, Sherlock Holmes; this Guy Ritchie extravaganza proffers Robert Downey Jr. as a chopsocky version of the detective, with Jude Law as a sardonic Watson and Rachel McAdams as “the woman,” Irene Adler. Better yet, there’s a gratifyingly comprehensive three-day slate of Holmes pictures scheduled for Turner Classic Movies on Dec. 25-27, including all fourteen of the movies that made Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce the preeminent Holmes and Dr. Watson, respectively, to generations of viewers. They’ve also got the 1922 John Barrymore portrayal of Holmes we’ve never had a chance to see. Stout fellows, TCM.
For now, here are ten (more or less) notable additions to Sherlock’s silver-screen dossier. Yes, we know many of you revere Jeremy Brett for his several seasons as Holmes on public television, but we’ve limited the field to feature films. There’s also an eleventh entry, a ringer that we submit as the most appalling misappropriation ever of the Conan Doyle mystique. Oh, yes: the game’s afoot!
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Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce—the most beloved, though not necessarily the definitive, interpreters of Holmes and Watson—first played the roles in a 1939 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It doesn’t take a Sherlock to deduce that 20th Century–Fox wasn’t thinking franchise; Rathbone didn’t even get top billing, which went to studio contract player Richard Greene as the endangered Henry Baskerville. The direction was undistinguished, but the Fox crafts departments were great at doing period and the movie has atmosphere in spades. Rathbone was never out of work in the Thirties, more often than not as a villain (A Tale of Two Cities, Murdstone in David Copperfield, rapier bait for Errol Flynn in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood). His crisp Brit delivery and aquiline features (a grande dame of the theater once referred to him as “that young man with two profiles pasted together for a face”) were ideally suited to portraying Conan Doyle’s fiercely focused sleuth. As for Watson, Nigel Bruce’s bumbling, mumbling, fuddy-duddy stylings irked Baker Street aficionados but made an effective contrast to Rathbone and endeared him to audiences. Fox recognized it had enough of a good thing to re-team the pair in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (also ’39)—even more atmospheric, with Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) to boot. Still, a franchise had to wait till Universal picked up Rathbone and Bruce three years later. Meanwhile, prospective viewers of Hound should be warned that the film ends rather abruptly, giving short shrift to the Grimpen Mire climax. And for decades it ended more abruptly yet, because the reissue cut censored Holmes’s curtain line: “Quick, Watson—the needle!”
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Rathbone and Bruce resumed Conan Doyle duties in 1942, but at the cost of moving down the prestige scale to Universal, a studio where even the most elaborate of productions carried a tinge of B-movie. Something else had shifted: the 19th-century setting faithfully retained in the Fox pictures gave way without explanation or apology to the present day, and Holmes and Watson’s crime-solving missions would often bring them up against the Nazis. There would be twelve entries before the series ended in 1946, all but the first directed by the English-born Roy William Neill. These are the pictures that made Rathbone-Bruce a fixture in pop culture, to their generation and also the next; for these movies were sold early to TV, and in the pre-cable era hardly a week went by without one of them popping up somewhere on the dial. Some were tokenly based on one of Conan Doyle’s tales, but the best by far, the sixth in the series, was a complete original. In The Scarlet Claw (1944), the Holmesian mystique is merged with the gothic strain for which Universal, “the House of Horror,” was best known. Holmes is attending a conference of the Royal Canadian Occult Society when he’s called to a remote village where several horrible murders have occurred—the work, locals insist, of a legendary monster. The aura of dread is as palpable as the apparently omnipresent fog, and although there’s no explicit gore, the nature of the crimes and the pathological resourcefulness of the killer are communicated vividly enough to have had late-show viewers of the Fifties double-checking the locks before going to bed.
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Among the screen Sherlocks who preceded Basil Rathbone’s, the least-known today is the player Holmes purists deem the truest to Conan Doyle. Arthur Wontner was a British actor, in theater from 1897 and films from 1916 (Lord Darlington in an early version of Lady Windermere’s Fan). By the time he first played Holmes, in 1931, he was in his 50s. He would appear in only four subsequent Holmes pictures (Silver Blaze came last, in 1937), all cinematically unmemorable and made on the cheap. Wontner—balding, a bit sepulchral in voice and appearance, yet serene in the keenness of his intelligence—wasn’t a figure for action cinema. In fact, the Wontner Holmes picture most often shown on American TV, The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), leaves him offscreen much of the time as the story (The Valley of Fear, essentially) largely plays out in flashback. Yet his Holmes was a compelling presence, especially when set against the “Curses, foiled again!” theatrics of Lyn Harding’s Professor Moriarty. And for James Bond–era viewers, the Wontner pictures have acquired a measure of inadvertent drollery in having Watson played by an actor named Ian Fleming.
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Don’t worry, we aren’t going to name every screen version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (it’s the most often filmed of the Holmes tales, and the character of Henry Baskerville was even shoehorned into the 1937 Silver Blaze). But there’s no question of leaving out the 1959 Hammer Films production, because from his very first snappish move—working out a chess problem while supposedly giving full attention to a client’s dilemma—Peter Cushing offers a triumphantly wired interpretation of Holmes as superneurotic. Thrilled to be temporarily relieved of Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein duties, and with his Hammer soulmate Christopher Lee cast as Sir Henry B., Cushing threw himself into the mission of re-creating Sherlock in all his addictive, tobacco- and drug-abusing glory, including personally designing the proper Holmes costume. As for the film itself, it marked Holmes’ first appearance in color, the same effulgent Technicolor palette—keyed to the red of fresh-spilled blood—director Terence Fisher had already devised for his 1957 Dracula. The opening, a ten-minute orgy of decadence accounting for why there should be a curse on the Baskerville clan, plays out like a certification to audiences that, yes indeed, you’re getting an authentic Hammer picture here. And if you think you know the solution to the murderous mystery, rest assured that Fisher has a characteristic Hammer twist in store.
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Why did it take nearly eighty years for someone to set the 19th century’s greatest detective on the trail of its most florid villain—Jack the Ripper? A Study in Terror, a British film from 1965, marked a distinct step up for schlock producer Herman Cohen, partly because of brothers Donald and Derek Ford’s central script idea, but even more because of a remarkably classy cast. John Neville’s almost over-refined features and actorly elegance were just right for Holmes, and Donald Houston, though a bit too broadly comical to do full honor to Dr. Watson, performs with appealing relish. Anthony Quayle manages a nice ambivalence as another doctor who may or may not be at the heart of the mystery, and the great Robert Morley is a sheer delight as Mycroft Holmes; his and Neville’s fraternal one-upmanship is the high point of the movie. And we’ve also got Barbara Windsor as one of Spring-Heel Jack’s victims, Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade, then–musical stage luminary Georgia Brown, Adrienne Corri (future Kubrick victim in A Clockwork Orange), Cecil Parker, Barry Jones … and that cute blonde in Dr. Quayle’s dispensary is none other than the young Judi Dench. Directed by James Hill, A Study in Terror departs from the usual Holmes pattern in that it plants suspects and hints at motivations before the sleuth has even entered the picture.
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The best thing about 1976’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution may be its foreword: “In 1891 Sherlock Holmes was missing and presumed dead for three years. This is the true story of that disappearance. Only the facts have been made up.” Adapted for the screen by Nicholas Meyer from his own best-selling novel, the film proposes that with the concerned intervention of stout-hearted Dr. Watson (a Robert Duvall you’ve never seen) and the reluctant connivance of the quite unmenacing Prof. Moriarty (Laurence Olivier), Sherlock Holmes (an ultra-fidgety Nicol Williamson) was spirited off to Vienna to be cured of his raging neuroses—and the title-indexed addiction to cocaine—by Dr. Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). Despite an appealing cast—which also includes Vanessa Redgrave, Joel Grey, Jeremy Kemp, and Charles Gray as Mycroft Holmes—this was more fun to read than it is to see on screen, especially since director Herbert Ross’s attempts to be taken for a visual stylist are leaden. It also must be said that Meyer and Ross’s way of accounting for Holmes’s misogyny and his choice of career and his casting of Moriarty as “the Napoleon of crime” are reductive in the extreme. However, production designer Ken Adam was fresh from an Oscar-winning turn on Barry Lyndon, Oswald Morris and Alex Thomson handled the cinematography, and Austria gave good location. They even managed to get the Lippizaner white stallions into it.
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Murder by Decree, a surprisingly ambitious endeavor for the Canadian film industry in 1979, again sets Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper. As the title hints, screenwriter Jack Hopkins and director Bob Clark go quite a bit farther than A Study in Terror in positing a connection between the Ripper murders and persons in high places concerned with preserving “the very existence of the social order in this country.” It only follows that the production lays on the grime and squalor of Whitechapel with a trowel, to stress the sociopolitical inequity and also infuse the film with pungent atmosphere. Christopher Plummer’s Sherlock may be the most together dude in Holmes-movie history, though he rises to a fine passion in his closing summation. He has the most delicious of Watsons in James Mason, whose investment in eating the last pea on his plate intact is one of the high-water marks of Western Civilization. From A Study in Terror, Frank Finlay is still playing Lestrade, Anthony Quayle still an authority figure with a sinister cast to him. David Hemmings as a secret-service type may be helping or hindering, Donald Sutherland as a psychic may be about to beam off the planet, and that’s not even mentioning imperiled females Susan Clark and Geneviève Bujold, or John Gielgud as the prime minister. On the downside, the narrative is as lumpy as it is purposefully confusing, and finally lurches into bald exposition as Holmes comes to conclusions based on information never shared with the viewer. Nevertheless, Murder by Decree deservedly enjoys a cult as one of the most interesting of Holmes pictures. Happily, it’s just been reissued on DVD—and elements of it turn up in the new Guy Ritchie movie.
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Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) has Holmes and Watson meeting as schoolboys nearly two decades before they began sharing quarters at 221B Baker Street. Shy country boy Watson (Alan Cox) falls in with star pupil and budding detective Holmes (Nicholas Rowe) just in time to become embroiled in a bizarre series of murders-by-hallucination. Before the case is solved, Holmes has gone through several father-figures, met the love of his life, and taken the first decisive steps toward becoming a brilliant but barely tolerated outcast from polite society. All of which sounds promising, except that this Steven Spielberg production written by Chris Columbus and directed by Barry Levinson insists on being a mega-spectacular. The picture pushes quaintness like cotton candy, and there are times when the sets seem to dictate the action, veering far from Conan Doyle country into something we might call “Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of Doom.” Rowe, a long, pale reed of a young man, does nicely suggest the youthful Sherlock hovering between auspiciousness and melancholy. It was also charming to note in 1985 that he bore a certain resemblance to whiz-kid Spielberg, and Sophie Ward as his beloved even more strongly resembled Spielberg’s then-wife, Amy Irving. Enchantment is fleeting. Incidentally, stay with it through the end credits, because the background action carries the film to its most interesting moment.
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All right, it’s true that Sherlock Jr. (1924) has only glancing connection to Sherlock Holmes, and there are a couple of hundred other titles clamoring for a spot in this gallery. Sue us. At a mere three-quarters of an hour in length, Sherlock Jr. is as brilliant, exhilarating, and unmatched as, oh, any other cardinal masterpiece, and we’re not about to squander the chance to say so. Buster Keaton directed as well as starring (though rumors persist that his old boss Roscoe Arbuckle was hovering on the periphery). He plays a movie projectionist who, falsely accused of stealing his girlfriend’s father’s watch, drifts off to sleep on the job. Dreaming, he recognizes himself and the various parties to his present dilemma in the characters on the moviehouse screen—and so he steps into the film-within-a-film to solve his own case as Sherlock Jr. That name, and the notion of a super-sleuth with extraordinary powers, are the only connections with Conan Doyle—though the detective’s loyal helpmate (Ford West) bears the name Gillette, in tribute to William Gillette, the actor-playwright celebrated for his definitive stage portrayal of Holmes. Sherlock Jr. remains a literally amazing experience, in which continuity is maintained from one incredible visual coup to the next, licensed by the logic of dreaming, the integrity of the photographed image, and the illusory depth of the two-dimensional screen. You might even say: “Elementary!”
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The one great film treatment of literature’s supreme sleuth, Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was a flop in 1970. Conceived and shot as a reserved-seat special running more than three hours, the movie was cut by United Artists to a length of just over two hours and given a standard release—or was it the bum’s rush? Reviews were lukewarm to scornful, and ticket-buyers stayed away in droves. Then again, Wilder had been officially in decline for some time, and some critics were so clueless as to accuse him of having given Holmes a cocaine habit as a desperate appeal to the so-called Film Generation of that Easy Rider era. The director knew his Conan Doyle even if his critics didn’t, and recognized that the spell woven by the Holmes saga had less to do with the detective’s much-vaunted eccentricities, or the inherent storybook aura of his times, than with the very nature of casting legends. Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond invented a wealth of detail—atmospheric, incidental, psychological—that would have done Conan Doyle proud. Much of it seems throwaway, merely for charm’s sake. Then, as the tale of Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Watson (Colin Blakely) and the Bolshoi Ballet and the Belgian engineer’s wife (Geneviève Page) progresses, we realize that nothing has been gratuitous. Everything is circling back to complete a shiveringly good tale and supply a new, unexpectedly moving insight into the private and public myth of Sherlock Holmes. Alexandre Trauner’s production design brings Baker Street to life as never before or since, and the music score by Miklos Rosza is, like the film’s final moments, heartbreaking. Against all odds, a masterpiece.
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SHERLOCK’S IGNOBLEST HOUR (actually, 68 minutes)
You begin to appreciate the enormity of the blasphemy that is the 1932 Fox Films Sherlock Holmes when we tell you that the great man is preparing to commit matrimony. The movie doesn’t even have the decency to mention that Holmes has heretofore been a misogynist, because as far as the filmmakers appear to be aware, he hasn’t. The plot further abuses the spirit of Holmes storytelling by involving such elements as a ray gun (invented by Holmes) to disable criminals’ getaway cars, a bank-robbery attempt via tunnel, and a scheme by Prof. Moriarty to consolidate the various gangs of London to extort protection money from local businesses (apparently he’d been watching American gangster movies). Clive Brook had starred in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929), the first Holmes talkie, but his characterization here comes very close to the cliché silly-ass Englishman. And yet—such is the maddening unevenness of the Holmes movie legacy—the film boasts the most striking of screen Moriartys, a towering study in daft enigma by the Scottish actor Ernest Torrence.
First published at Movies/MSN in December 2009