Silver Blaze

"That was the curious incident..."

This thirty minute curiosity is a one-off, produced in November 1977 under the auspices of an anthology programme, The Sunday Drama. It's an adaptation of what, I believe, is considered to be one of the more cleverly plotted of Conan Doyle's short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.

I won't discuss the plot here- either it will be familiar to you, or I'll risk spoilers. I'll confine myself to saying that this is a very faithful, straightforward version, and very well done indeed, with some nice visual touches- the exposition at the start is done with an admirable economy, in particular. It's an excellent version of the tale.

Thorley Walters is a perfectly good Watson, if a little traditional. But the real standout is Christopher Plummer as Holmes. I've seen his only other attempt at the role, in the slightly later film Murder by Decree. But, unlike that film, this is a faithfully and straightforwardly written version of the character, and allows Plummer to show what he can truly do with the part. He doesn't disappoint, showing us a playful yet focused Holmes.

I had to roll my eyes at the predictable pipe and deerstalker, but I enjoyed this little curiosity very much.

Sherlock Holmes: The Masks of Death (1984 TV Film)

 "Madam, I would not be surprised to learn you were a suffragette!"

This is a very rarely seen 1984 TV movie, not released on any digital format in the UK, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes asnd John Mills as Watson. It also boasts Anne Baxter, in her final role, as Anne Baxter, and even Gordon Jackson as Inspector MacDonald, a surprisingly famous actor for such a part. You may already be thinking that the star wattage is overly bright, And the principle stars are somewhat older than tradition would dictate.

Even the second stringers tend to be very busy character actors like Susan Penhaligon and James Cossins. Yes, there's the distinct feel throughout that the casting was done too much on the basis of star wattage rather than suitability. And it shows. John Mills is fine, though too old as Watson.  But Cushing... well, his technique is excellent as ever but- I say this never having seen his late '60s telly Holmes- he doesn't find the character. He plays certain sorts of parts, but to play a good Holmes one needs an appreciation of humour that the characer lacks to show the appropriate depths: see the line at the top. While Cushing was doing this TV film, Jeremy Brett was doing Holmes sublimely on ITV. This performance is good geneic actng but the very frail-looking Cushing, in one of his rare post- Star Wars appearances- no longer quite convinces as Holmes, much as we all love the man. At least Anne Baxter- in her final role- is a superb Irene Adler.

The script is good, though, judged as a whodunit, although the gas masks are surreal and the title is a total spoiler. And, while the fruity dialogue and voiceover from Watson evokes Conan Doyle and sneakily speeds along the pace, it doesn't feel quite like Sherlock Holmes. That's in spite of the fanwank- after all, both Irene Adler (who eventually does very little) and Inspector Mac are featured. And Roy Ward Baker directs the whole thing as though it was a '70s Amicus horror anthology- lots of shocking moments but ill-judged for a script that wants to be serious.

Having said that, this is flawed but still quite good overall. Its flaws are fascinating from the viewpoint of 2021. And this cast is always worth watching.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

“I’m on my honeymoon!!!!”

I’m not going to repeat the things I said about Guy Ritchie’s distinctive directorial style in my blog review for this film’s prequel. Nor am I going to point out that this is pretty much an action film version of Sherlock Holmes (though this film emphasises this less), or that Robert Downey Jr is ridiculously good here and undoubtedly the greatest leading man working in Hollywood today. Yes, he’s even a bit better than Johnny Depp. He’s that good.

This film is far more respectful of the source material than its predecessor. Although not exactly a version of The Final Problem, it borrows from it heavily, including the apparent deaths of Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, although of course we’re not expected to believe that Holmes actually died. Are you listening, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss? If that wasn’t enough, Stephen Fry gives us a version of Mycroft which is both extremely entertaining and extremely faithful to the source material.

Moriarty’s dastardly scheme is delightfully nefarious, if a little dependent on the writers’ knowledge that the First World War would break out twenty three years after the end of the film. Moriarty’s plans to make a gun running fortune from a massive war gives us a good excuse for lots of big budget hijinks as Holmes and Watson speed through France, Germany and, of course, Switzerland.

The bromance between Holmes and Watson is handled rather hilariously, with best man Holmes not being best pleased about Watson’s upcoming marriage. This nice little character point gives Downey a chance to show what a great actor he is, and gives Jude Law a chance to show what, in my opinion, a great actor he isn’t. Jared Harris is a surprisingly middling Moriarty, and one surprisingly faithful to what little references there were to the character in the regional stories. In fact, this faithfulness is taken a little too far: is there really any need to include Colonel Sebastian Moran? Incidentally, doesn’t Moran sound a bit common for a colonel in the Victorian army?

Still, this is enormous fun to watch, if slightly long, and I have to admit it was excellent. In fact, I would admit this film to that elite club of sequels that are better than their originals.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

“No girl wants to marry a doctor who can’t tell if a man’s dead or not.”

Before you buy this DVD on film, you might want to consider that it forces you to watch an advert for Blu-Ray lasting several minutes before you get to the menu. This is unacceptable, frankly, and if, unlike me, you don’t prefer your films with subtitles, you’d be much better off recording it off the telly.

Not that my first film to be reviewed in 2012 is particularly great, although Robert Downey Jr’s superlative central performance and Guy Ritchie’s brilliantly executed set pieces make it well worth seeing anyway. It’s a nice idea- Sherlock Holmes as action film- which actually works quite well. Downey’s Holmes is decidedly bohemian, physical, fast-moving and decidedly not asexual, and while this is arguably a departure from “canon”, it’s no more so than many more boring interpretations. And this treatment of the Sherlockian world may not be as good, quality-wise, as Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ superlative Sherlock, it’s no less legitimate an interpretation.

There’s a touch of plywood to Jude Law’s performance, but Downey really shows what a first class actor he is, arguably the single best leading man in contemporary English-speaking cinema. His rakish charisma is reason alone to make this film worth watching, and he’s superb at physical comedy. His facial acting is first class, and it’s very noticeable that he spends the whole film speaking in an accent not his own (flawlessly, I might add, and I’m British) without forgetting to act as well, something which is all too common. His Holmes is as suited to the big screen as Benedict Cumberbatch’s is to television.

Mr Madonna is also a dab hand behind the camera, giving us enough adrenalin-fuelled action sequences to be worthy of a Michael Bay film, although the style is noticeably the same as Lock, Stock and Snatch, despite the period setting. Victorian London looks great, though, if a bit CGI-ey. Except… there’s a certain lack of substance to the storyline, although there’s certainly enough bangs and excitement to carry us through. This Watson, far from being a bumbler, is full of back-chat; I like that. But the characterisation of Holmes suffers from a slight problem. Actually it makes a lot of sense for him to be an action hero, but the deductive skills fall flat, often relying more on obscure chemistry factoids than the sort of deductive leaps that you really expect.

The plot is a rather odd mish-mash of tropes and explosions, taking us from an attempted virgin sacrifice by cowled figures (a nice familiar trope, that!) to alchemy and a vast conspiracy theories involving thinly veiled Freemasons which seem to come straight out of Alan Moore’s From Hell (if you haven’t already done so, read it!). Lord Blackwood seems to be based on the real life Francis Dashwood, leader of the Hellfire Club during the Eighteenth Century. His plan, bizarrely, involves conquering the United States, one of Britain’s main trading partners at the time, which would be a particularly stupid thing to do as it would entirely bugger up the British economy, and the whole point of the British Empire was to make money. Sorry, my bad: I probably shouldn’t be looking too hard at the plot.

Oh, and the scene where Dashwood is hanged is quite visceral and shocking. I don’t object to the violence per se, but people were still being barbarically killed like this well within living memory, and may presumably have living relatives.

There’s a fair bit of what we Doctor Who fans call fanwank here. The inclusion of Irene Adler (the rather good Rachel McAdams) is surprisingly justified here, though, establishing the non-asexuality of Downey’s Holmes, and I suppose Moriarty is in the film to do a bit of sequel-hunting. It tends to work out. If I might nitpick, though, Tower Bridge is still under construction, which would place this film in 1892. This is rather at odds with the Conan Doyle canon, as Holmes is supposed to have fallen down the Reichenbach Falls in 1891 and disappeared for three years. Not, of course, that this kind of obscure wankery is any excuse not to use a good idea for a set-piece.

So this is a rather good action film, although nothing special, but it’s worth watching for Downey’s performance alone.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

“Dust, Mrs Hudson, is an essential part of my filing system.”

Wow. That was amazing. Fanwank this film may be, and somewhat light on star wattage, but the script just sparkles with wit and metatextual knowingness. This is certainly the finest Sherlock Holmes film I’ve seen to date. It’s the only Billy Wilder film I’ve seen to date, but it certainly not the last.

I know little about Robert Stephens (Holmes) and less about Colin Blakeley (Watson), and both of them reminded me, rather oddly, of Leonard Rossiter in their styles of performance. Stephens gives us an arch, knowing Holmes, who always seems to be aware of his nature as a character in a film; we know when the film’s final act is dawning because Holmes tells us so! Blakely plays Watson more-or-less as the buffoon of legend, although he’s shown to be an intelligent and competent physician, and as something of a ladies’ man.

The first scene proper (after a short modern-day framing device)  starts the metatextual fun straightaway, as Holmes compares the “reality” with Watson’s published stories, complaining that the public now expect him to wear the ridiculous clothes from the illustrations in The Strand! We then move on to a rather interesting bit of speculation as to Holmes’ sexuality. This is a rather obvious thing to do, perhaps, but 1970 is probably about as early as it could be done in a Hollywood film. A rather haughtily attractive Russian ballerina with seemingly supernatural menopause-dodging powers (“I must say that she doesn’t look 38.” “That is because she is 49…”) wants to spend a week shagging Holmes so she can have a child by him as an exercise in eugenics. Nice work if you can get it.

Holmes isn’t keen, though. So much so, that he resorts to claiming that he’s, er, like Tchaikovsky, a previous choice (“You couldn’t go wrong with Tchaikovsky.” “We could, and we did.”, and claims to be shagging Watson. This has unfortunate consequences for the good doctor, who has up to this point been having rather a lot of fun with some attractive young ladies. He’s not in the best of moods, unsurprisingly, once he gets back to Baker Street and, this being 1887, starts to fret about scandal, leading to some wonderfully arch retorts from Holmes. The whole sequence ends with Holmes refusing to discuss his sexuality, which remains a great big question mark.

This sequence takes up the first thirty minutes, after which the main plot begins. The whole thing is rather more coherent than might at first be expected, though. The sequence sets up the theme of the film- Holmes’ relationship with women, and the question which it poses is more or less answered.

The arrival of a mysterious, amnesiac Belgian lady, Gabrielle Valladon, starts off the larger part of the film, and this leads to some rather sexually charged scenes between her and Holmes. The case doesn’t get very far, however, before Holmes receives a summons from his brother Mycroft (the justly ubiquitous Christopher Lee). There’s a delicious little retcon here, as we’re told that the outwardly eccentric “Diogenes Club” is in fact a front for British Intelligence. Mycroft warns Holmes off the case which, of course, only encourages him.

Holmes seems to make a real connection with Mme Valladon, and they have a rather interesting discussion about his experiences with women. Most interestingly, he claims, in an interestingly light-hearted tone, that his mistrust of women ultimately stems from his fiancée (!) inconveniently dying just twenty-four hours before their wedding. Are we to believe this, or do we have a case of unreliable narrator syndrome here? We should probably remember Holmes’ fourth wall-breaking tendencies at this point.

To Inverness, then, and some rather gorgeous location filming in the Highlands. It soon becomes clear that things are mixed up with the legend of the Loch Ness Monster- oops! This is a bit of a clanger, as the legend of the Loch Ness Monster is not anywhere near as old as you’d expect, dating back only back to 1933. The whole thing really kicked off with a famous photograph which appeared in 1934. April 1^st 1934, to be precise…

The monster, it turns out is mechanical. It seems that Holmes is close to solving the mystery, when he receives a summons from Mycroft. It’s revealed that the “monster” is an experimental submersible, and that Mime Valladon’s husband died accidentally while testing the device. In a nice twist, it’s revealed that “Mme Valladon” is in fact an agent of the Kaiser, Fraulein Von Hofmannsthal, and that she has rather cleverly enlisted Holmes to do all the work for her. He’s fallen hook, line and sinker for her charms.

The best bit’s near the end, though. Queen Victoria- a Holmes fangirl, naturally- is such a delight. Wonderfully, she refuses to allow the submersible project to continue, because it’s “unsportsmanlike” and “un-English”!!! She dismisses Mycroft’s protests by insisting that she will write to her nephew Willie (who won’t succeed his grandfather and his unfortunate father as Kaiser until next year, but never mind!) and get him to abandon any similar plans by Germany.

We end, sixteen months later, on a sad note, as Holmes reads of Fraulein Von Hofmannsthal’s death at the hands of the Japanese, having been caught spying. He’s clearly deeply affected. It seems that Holmes is, after all, susceptible to certain women (although he may still be asexual). She did, after all, defeat him.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

“I knew a Watson in Capri- a notorious white slaver. Nice fellow, though. A relation of yours?”

Yes, all right; it didn’t take me long to get back to Hammer. I can’t say there won’t be more in the near future, but there will be a diverse array of other films too, honest, guv.

We get the requisite lettering and weird, unsettling music as the film open with that familiar, Technicolor, stylised landscape which still manages to look unnatural in spite of the fact it was clearly filmed in your actual Dartmoor.

We open with Francis de Wolff narrating a tale of Sir Hugo Baskerville, presiding over a Hellfire Club-style decadent party during the eighteenth century. He’s evil, all right. Not only does he shove a bloke’s head into the fire for objecting to his daughter being kidnapped and abused, he also decides to have said daughter brought down to be gang-raped by all of his equally nasty mates. The girl has escaped, though, and Sir Hugo flies into a rage.

None of this detail is in the book; it’s clearly here to titillate, and makes uncomfortable viewing in our age. We may be less prudish now in 1959, but we’re far less comfortable with the use of implied sexual violence to titillate. Still, Sir Hugo is off hunting, with his sinister pack of hounds. In the dark, Dartmoor landscape we get a strong impression of the Wild Hunt, with its pagan associations of Woden or Herne the Hunter. In contrast to this, the girl takes sanctuary in a church, but this is no escape. Ultimately, though, Sir Hugo is killed by another, monstrous hound which is not quite of this world.

It is now revealed that all this has been narrated to Holmes and Watson by Dr. Mortimer, who seeks to engage Holmes on behalf of the new baronet, Sir Henry Baskerville. And here we meet Holmes (Peter Cushing) and Watson (Andre Morell). Oddly enough, the only real example of Homes’ deductive cleverness comes in his reasoning that Mortimer has really come about events on the previous Friday, glancing at a newspaper.

This film is very much in the house style of other early Hammers, although a little more faithful to the source material than most: the fast pace; the extra little moments of gore and excitement (the tense scene with the spider is a nice little addition!); and, most of all, the little digs at pre-1960s morality by the Angry Young Men generation who are making this film. It may be more deadpan and subtle than, say, the 1960s Batman TV series, but the same sort of humour is there, and Cushing is playing the part straight only in the sense that Adam West did.

Sir Henry is from South Africa, not Canada, presumably so that Lee doesn’t have to attempt a Canadian accent. He’s a rather arrogant, unlikeable, patrician sort. Then again, beneath the surface one suspects that he’s meant to be. Like The Mummy, this is conspicuously set in a world where country gentlemen hold all the power and can do whatever the hell they like. While The Mummy sees an absurdly deferential attitude on behalf of the police to the country gent hero, in this film the country gents decline to bother the pretty little heads of the constabulary at all, in spite of the numerous deaths and in contrast to Conan Doyle’s original novel. Holmes even takes it upon himself to ensure that Mrs Barrymore is not prosecuted. It’s hard not to see some class resentment in the script here; that Sir Henry is so unlikeable is, I suspect, no accident. On the way to Baskerville Hall he even expresses support for capital punishment, the bastard.

Holmes is, incidentally, very much one of these “gentlemen” here; she ostentatiously refuses Mortimer’s offer of a “generous” reward, insisting that his fees are “on a fixed scale, except where I remit them altogether”. Of course, he is in fact quite happy to accept a rather large sum at the end of the film, which rather undercuts this! This is very much the Sherlock Holmes film that Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon would have written.

Oh, and I love the way that everyone pronounces “Devonshire” as “Devonshaaah”!

It’s a joy to see John Le Mesurier as Barrymore but then, of course, it’s a joy to see John Le Mesurier in anything. And, much as Francis de Wolf may be playing Mortimer in a slightly red herring-ish sort of way, it’s obvious that Stapleton is a baddie as soon as we see him. Bishop Frankland, on the other hand, is a figure of pure comic relief, and reminds me very much of the sort of pomposity-puncturing absurd authority figure soon to be seen in the likes of Beyond the Fringe and the rest of the “satire boom”. There’s a particularly hilarious camp moment, played dead straight, where Holmes assures this bibulous, forgetful old dunderhead that he, Holmes, is “fighting evil, as surely as you do”.

The adventures of Watson and Sir Henry as they encounter the escaped convict on the moor leads Sir Henry to start having those heart palpitations that the plot occasionally requires. Watson, of course, prescribes the traditional Hammer remedy of brandy. What else? And, given the amount of alcohol we see being drunk, most of the characters in this film must spend a fair amount of the time half-cut.

I love Holmes’ absurdly dramatic behaviour here; threateningly brandishing a dagger around in front of Mortimer, casually announcing his survival from the collapsing mine, and being deliberately rude to Sir Henry just so he can use him as bait for his final trap for Stapleton.

The conclusion is dramatic, although there is an extra twist from the book; Stapleton’s daughter (as she is here), here named Cecile, is a deliberate conspirator who relishes taunting Sir Henry at the climax, and it is she, not Stapleton, who drowns in the mire.

Another enjoyable Hammer, this, although the format is now becoming amusingly familiar.