Holmes Video

By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO, July 1984

For a man whom George Bernard Shaw once called "a drug addict without, a single admirable trait," Sherlock Holmes has done amazingly well himself. Besides, his many radio, television, and stage adventures, he's also appeared in over 130 films. Considering that his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only wrote 60 Holmes mysteries, most of them short stories, that's a remarkable figure.

Just as remarkable is the range of his fans and followers, from A. A. Milne, O. Henry, and Agatha Christie to J,M. Barrie, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mark Twain. There are Holmes societies dedicated to studies of the "Sacred Writings" as far away as Denmark and Tokyo. And now, the great detective has appeared on videotape too.

Sherlock in Bronze
"Let us be done with all this talk of. . . whatever we may happen to dislike in the daily headlines, " wrote Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. "Let us speak rather of those things that are permanent and secure, of high matters about which there can be no gibbering division of opinion. Let us speak of the realities that do not change, of that higher realism which is the only true romance. Let us speak, and speak again, of Sherlock Holmes."

Holmes-infallible, virtuous, eccentric -is a fixed point in a changing age. He is in Starrett's words a "more commanding figure" because he makes sense of the nonsensical ("My name is Sherlock Holmes. My business is to know what other people don't know"), brings order where there was chaos, and overcomes problems instead of letting them overcome him.

But Basil Rathbone, one of the finest actors to portray the sleuth, felt that "there was nothing lovable about Holmes. He himself seemed capable of transcending the weakness of mere mortals such as myself. . . understanding us perhaps, accepting us and even pitying us, but only purely and objectively. It would be impossible for such a man to know loneliness or love or sorrow because he was completely sufficient unto himself.

Yet part of the fascination with the 19th century private detective is that he is not infa:lible. Some inner force drives him to seek out truth, distrust women, take for drugs, blame himself for his mistakes and his failures. Doyle never fully explained his creation, and the blanks are constantly being filled in by curious writers, essayists, and filmmakers..

1976 A.D. (After Doyle)
One of these, Nicholas Meyer, did a good job. His book and film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) examines Holmes' drug addiction, among other problems, and involves him in a clever mystery. A brilliant expansion of Doyle's writings, ably directed by Herbert Ross, the movie takes advantage of our own fascination with the sleuth and offers plausible answers based on the facts.

In the story, Holmes' (Nicol Williamson) dependence on cocaine is finally destroying him. Watson (Robert Duvall) tricks him into visiting Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin) in Vienna, who cures him. And in the course of that cure we learn a great deal about the detective's life. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a romantic adventure of the best sort which humanizes the great detective without depriving him of the qualities we most admire: perception, determination, and a passion for truth.

These 'features are poorly parodied in another film from the same period, The Adventure of Sherlock of Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), which supposedly chronicles the case of Sigerson Holmes. Written and· directed by, Gene Wilder, the movie just uses the Holmes canon as a starting point for a broad farce which has little to do with the sleuth, and rnore to do with Mel Brooks-style cornedy.

Nonetheless, when Smarter Brother succeeds, it does so by acknowledging Sherlock's powers of observation Sigerson wants to be like Sherlock but can't, which touches us all because we too want to emulate the great We want to be able to analyze as selflessly as he does because knowledge is power. We also identify with his insatiable curiosity, with a nervous ferret-like energyt that seeks out and tries to understand everything."Holmes is like a spoiled boy who picks watches to pieces but loses interest in one toy as soon as he's given another," observes the detective's foe, Moriarty, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). "He is perpetually restless, constantly struggling to escape 'boredom."

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in Pursuit to Algiers (1945)

Unfortunately, this is rarely seen in cinematic Holmeses. One of those available on tape, 1935's The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes, a British film starring Arthur Wontner, demonstrates the hardships of the role. Wontner looks remarkably like the detective as depicted by illustrator Sidney Paget-yet his interpretation has none of the energy, dramatic flair, or power that makes Holmes fascinating. Wontner's performance is too studied, while the script for this movie is slow-paced and dull. It's a good mystery, but handled without excitement or intrigue. Triumph, one of five movies with Wontner, is a stilted antique.

Sweet Basil
The viewer would do better with Basil Rathbone, who brilliantly captured the best of Holmes in 14 films and 273 radio adventures. The actor came to the part after a career on stage and in films, mostly playing villains either coldly calculating (David Copperfield) or viciously swashbuckling (The Adventures of Robin Hood). Both these qualities were used to good advantage when Rathbone took over the Holmes part in 1939's The Hound of the Baskervilles. That was a huge success and a sequel, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, was soon released. The latter is probably the best Holmes movie ever made: a classy cat-and-mouse game between the sleuth and Professor Moriarty. One of the first scenes in that film (criminally cut from the tape I viewed) marvelously sets the tone for the rest of the story.

"You have a magnificent brain, Moriarty," Sherlock Holmes intones cooly. "I admire it. I admire it so much I'd like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society."

"It would make an interesting exhibit," replies the professor calmly.

The story-involving murder, theft, and countless red herrings-is well-handled by director Alfred Werker, who keeps things moving at a remarkable pace, employing evocative music, haunting, fog-filled streets, and wonderful camera angles and lighting to capture the flavor of the period. In Adventureshe world can be a frightening, unnerving place.

"Am I in danger?" asks the heroine (Ida Lupino).

"There's no doubt of it," notes the detective. "But I won't be far."

Basil Rathbone (right) and Nigel Bruce in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Werker captures the fear, Rathbone's Holmes gives the reassurance. All this is helped by skillful performances. Nigel Bruce's Watson is not as cretonic as he was to become in later installments, and he has a genuine, warm rapport with the sleuth ("Watson," says Holmes kindly, "you really are the most incorrigible bungler"). George Zucco's Moriarty is a superb interpretation of an often badly overplayed villain: controlled, menacing, and wholly believable, a man who operates on a completely different moral system and is all the more threatening because of that ("You have murdered a flower," he says angrily to a negligent servant. "To think that for merely murdering a man I was incarcerated for six whole weeks").

When Holmes and Moriarty square off it is just as satisfying as the climax of The Seven Per-Cent Solution: melodramatic, nervewracking, and fun. The irony is that for all Holmes' brilliance as a detective, the movie ends not with a mental battle but a furious fistfight. It is fitting, however, as the cat and mouse struggle of the brains becomes a literal one: Holmes stalking Moriarty on the ramparts of Tower of London as Holmes' thoughts become action.

Although Rathbone went through more adventures, none were as rewarding as this one, which so beautifully captures the spirit of Sherlock Holmes. Or, as Vincent Starrett put it in his poem, "221-B":

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die;
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet,for all our fears
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street;
A lonely hansom sPlashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at 20 feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two
survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five. ~