Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20. Arthur Conan Doyle
Leave Man, 1863) and E.W. Hornung’s arch-thief Raffles (who is a lot less gentlemanly in this outing)—along with Hawkshaw’s intrepid dog Spot. A BluRay/DVD release is available from Flicker Alley.
Sixty-three-year-old Gillette, returning to a role he’d created in his forties, wisely underplays Sherlock Holmes while everyone around him overacts. Coming to this legendary performance after seeing every other surviving Sherlock is a strange experience: whenever Gillette makes a gesture or pulls a face which evokes what Clive Brook, Eille Norwood, Arthur Wontner or Basil Rathbone did with the role, there’s a little spark of realisation that subsequent actors were following conventions this man invented. Brook, in particular, seems to have been cast in a remake of Sherlock Holmes simply because he resembled Gillette—and several of Rathbone’s ever-changing Holmes hairstyles evoke Gillette’s look. There’s even an early instance of deliberately modifying an established image—Holmes plays with his pipe, but later takes up cigarettes instead. A whole sequence involves his glowing cigar-end in a darkened cellar; the most famous theatrical effect in the play, this gambit is reproduced crudely on film. Despite the clutter of incidents, characters and plots, the thrust of Gillette’s play is that the stiff Holmes falls in love with leading lady Alice Faulkner (Marjorie Kay). Gillette exaggerates Holmes’s upright posture and resolute jaw in the early stretches so there’s more contrast when he unbends a little and begins to pitch woo.
Purists still find this Holmes-in-love angle makes the play a hard-sell revival, and pasticheurs have mostly preferred to have the detective seethe with unexpressed or thwarted passions rather than earn a happy ending. However, Gillette had canny commercial instincts and may have sensed that Holmes would only become a universally popular character if he turned Doyle’s calculating celibate into a deeply repressed romantic whose remoteness might intrigue and excite female audiences (in the 1960s, the unsmiling likes of Ilya Kuryakin and Mr. Spock had the same appeal). Gillette, picking up on one or two moments in Doyle, also senses Holmes’s potential as a comic character. Some of his best bits of business come in moments when he is awkward or embarrassed by his emotions and for once Watson (Edward Fielding) gets to patronise him. The curtain of the play, with Holmes giving up detection for marriage, is as final in its way as falling over a waterfall—which, as we know, wasn’t that final at all—in putting an end to the saga. The Holmes we meet in Sherlock Holmes is an established detective, Watson has moved on from Baker Street and the feud with Moriarty (black-eyed Ernest Maupin) is ongoing. Gillette saw the play as a one-off and wrote a finish which mitigated against sequels—showing how different the Victorian stage was from even the early cinema.
Made in the middle of World War One, if before American entry into the conflict, the 1916 Sherlock Holmes is the only Holmes film made before 1939 to have a period setting. Doyle was still publishing Holmes stories, but outside of the topical “His Last Bow” had opted to stick by Holmes’s retirement in 1903 and set them in the late Victorian period. Filmmakers didn’t cotton to this nostalgic element as quickly as Holmes’s creator did. Note how the recent TV series based on Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels has a contemporary setting rather than stick with the 1980s of the books (longer ago now than the 1890s were in 1916) and no one complained that Will Graham was a man out of time (though a key plot point about home movies had to be dropped). Purely because of the war, the London of the film is explicitly identified as a bygone era, with hansom cabs, fussy diplomats out to squelch scandal among the ruling houses of Europe (Bohemia had a lot more to worry about in 1916 than a philandering king), and outdated clothes (including Holmes’s tweed overcoat and deerstalker). In an alteration to get past the Lord Chamberlain, no-better-than-she-should-be cast-off mistress and blackmailer Irene Adler is dropped—the equivalent character is the deceased sister of irreproachable heroine Alice Faulkner, who has inherited incriminating letters after her sister has been driven to suicide. Alice is so noble she wouldn’t dream of blackmailing the rotter, though she’s not above holding the evidence over his head.
Like the play, the film lurches somewhat from act to act. It probably works better as a serial. Part One involves Alice falling in with a couple of scoundrels, James Larrabee (Mario Majeroni) and his sister Madge (Grace Reals). Part Two has the Larrabees enlist Moriarty to get back at Holmes and includes the Professor’s famous visit to Baker Street. Part Three is the cigar-in-the-cellars escape from a gas trap (which Gillette might have borrowed from Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed Box—Doyle’s own gas trap came in “The Retired Colourman,” written in 1926). Part Four tidies up the plot ends and sets up the happy coupledom curtain. Outside of Gillette, only Maupin makes much of an impression—and here Moriarty is meekly led off by the police rather than getting a spectacular death scene. It has glimpses of muddy streets but (unsurprisingly) no sense of London, while most of the drama takes place indoors with plentiful title cards and stark poses. Nearly a hundred years on, it’s an important find and of more than academic interest—thanks to the lively music and careful restoration, it’s even an entertaining evening’s cultural archaeology and proof that what entertained our great-grandparents still works. Now, if only someone could turn up that H.A. Saintsbury movie…
The Abominable Bride
In the past five years, the media image of Sherlock Holmes—taking in the detective himself, his supporting cast and extended world—has changed more than in over a century of stage, screen, illustration, and radio adaptations. Four separate Holmes franchises—the cinema films directed by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey, Jr., the British television series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, the American television series Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller, and the Russian television series Sherlok Kholms with Igor Petrenko (more on that next issue)—abjure the Gillette-Norwood-Wontner-Rathbone-Cushing-Wilmer-Brett image of a straight-backed, authoritative, incisive, dryly good-humored, heroic genius to present the sleuth as a scruffy, bipolar, tragic-absurd, callous, troubled, high-functioning autistic/recovering drug addict. Even the one-off Mr Holmes, with a more traditional-seeming Ian McKellen, is concerned with the shortfall between the man Holmes seems to be and the person he actually is.
As radical is the way these takes on Doyle focus on Holmes (and Watson) almost to the exclusion of their cases. Mysteries sometimes seem like distractions from storylines more concerned with Holmes’s psychological state and his thorny relationship with the version of him popularised by Watson (which is to say, Doyle). The shift in the direction began as early as Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-per-Cent Solution (1974)—outliers for the 21st century Sherlock—though William Gillette probably kicked it off in 1899 by having Holmes fall in love. Typically, contemporary Holmes franchises stay away from “faithful” adaptations of the original stories—fair enough, since they’ve all been done so often that yet another straight Red-Headed League or Baskerville Hound is scarcely worth the effort. Instead, scripts braid together clues, characters, bits of business, the skeletons of Doyle’s plots, fan fiction-like speculations about secondary characters like Mrs. Hudson and Irene Adler, increasingly complicated layers of metafiction, and kinetic displays of illustrated deduction or steampunk action-adventure. The upshot is a series of plot mazes which allow Holmes and Watson to explore themselves rather than simply find out who did it and how.
So we come to The Abominable Bride—perhaps the most convoluted essay in post-modern Holmesiana imaginable. Debuting on New Year’s Day, it’s a feature-length episode of Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s BBC Sherlock, intended as a stopgap between limited-run series which are getting harder to fit into the actors’ busy schedules. In three sets of three adventures (beginning in 2010), Sherlock has presented Holmes (Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) in contemporary London, ingeniously fitting the consulting detective into a world of mobile phones, the internet, 24-hour surveillance, forensic science, and selfies. Here, Watson is still just back from Afghanistan but with post-traumatic stress disorder and a thrill-seeking danger junkie streak. He chronicles his adventures with Sherlock on a blog. Moriarty (Andrew Scott) is a Joker-like giggling nemesis/dark doppelganger/putative slash fiction love interest. Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) is an ex-secret agent. Irene Adler (Lara Pulver) has a website for sexual services. Crucially, it’s all about Sherlock, as the mercurial Cumberbatch misreads social cues disastrously, turns up naked at Buckingham Palace, squabbles childishly with his spymaster brother (Mark Gatiss), fakes his death and is shocked people are upset by the jape and—at