Almost unrecognizable at first glance, the world’s greatest detective – also the most portrayed literary figure in cinema history – was propelled onto the silver screen in a 30-second short by Arthur Marvin.
Marvin, who directed over 400 films, including early D.W. Griffith movies, presents a rudimentary scenario: a man in a dressing gown is confronted by a burglar in his room. Through a stop-motion technique pioneered by Méliès, the thief vanishes and reappears, while the homeowner tries various methods to ignore the strange occurrence. He lights a cigar, fires a shot in vain, and watches as the recovered loot disappears from his hands, reappearing with the thief who jumps out the window. The robbed man turns to the camera, throws up his arms, and becomes “baffled,” though the film ends abruptly, leaving it unclear.
Sherlock Holmes Baffled bears no relation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, using the character’s name merely to exploit public familiarity. It proves, a century early, that you don’t need to be Guy Ritchie to crudely desecrate the Holmes legacy. Nevertheless, unintentionally, it might be the most inventive depiction of Sherlock’s disguises, as his identity would be a mystery without the title. Amusingly, IMDB lists the actor as anonymous, prompting the question of why no player of “The Great Game” (which attempts to prove Holmes was a historical figure, believed by enough people – also the title of the Sherlock series’ third episode) has identified this as the only filmic record of the “real” Holmes. After all, as he admits in the short story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” “The past and the present are mixed in my nature.”
History lacks sufficient material to judge how this auspicious big-screen debut compares to Sherlock Holmes’ song-and-dance stage appearance in the 1893 musical Under the Clock. Regardless, Sherlock Holmes Baffled – rediscovered in 1968 and now a YouTube treasure – offers a fleeting glimpse into a lost world of silent Holmes. Other survivors include The Copper Beeches (1912), one of eight Franco-British productions featuring George Tréville and overseen by Conan Doyle himself, and Albert Parker’s dull Hollywood feature Sherlock Holmes (1922), a romanticized adaptation for the then-transformation-obsessed John Barrymore.
Most significantly, between 1921 and 1923, 47 films starring Eille Norwood, the undisputed screen Holmes of that era, were produced. These films continue to thrill Holmes enthusiasts due to their contemporaneity (all novels, comprising four and 56 stories, were published between 1887 and 1927). Conan Doyle greatly admired Norwood: “He has that rare quality which can only be described as glamour, which compels you to watch an actor eagerly even when he is doing nothing. He has the brooding eye which excites anticipation, and he has a power of disguise which is absolutely unparalleled. My only criticism of the films is that they introduce telephones, motor cars, and other luxuries which Victorian Holmes could not have dreamed of.” This strategy, as a common method of adapting Sherlock Holmes, persisted into the 1950s. While modern elements were often downplayed, the author turned a blind eye, having passed away in 1930.
2. An Interpretive Portrait
(The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939)
The development of plot through dialogue is characteristic of many detective novels, thus silent films had their own shortcomings in this regard, and sound films, after a decade of difficult development, solved this problem with the emergence of Basil Rathbone’s interpretation of Holmes. Curiously, many 1930s films rewrote the structure of Conan Doyle’s mysteries into chronological narratives, diminishing Sherlock’s astonishing deductive abilities and suggesting that the Victorian flavor of Holmes no longer existed.
Despite creating a good atmosphere and featuring an unusual Holmes (Raymond Masse’s first recorded appearance), The Speckled Band (1931) typically fell into endless dialogue scenes. In his five films (1931-7, one of which is lost), Arthur Wontner’s Holmes usually encountered his nemesis Moriarty, who always lived in cheap, Mabusian underground dwellings. Wontner had his own fans and appearance, which perfectly matched the illustrations created by Sidney Paget, which visually defined the stories, which appeared in the early The Strand Magazine, but he lacked the humor necessary to make Holmes’ “cipher machine” work. Only The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Case (1932) caused some silent expressionist sensation (possibly thanks to production supervisor Rowland V. Lee).
However, humor helped Reginald Owen, who had previously played Watson, to be promoted to play Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1933). Since little other rights were obtained except for the use of the title, the plot of this first Holmes novel was replaced by a Ten Little Indians-style template - was the detective’s confusing move to 221A Baker Street an attempt to cover his tracks? Most of these films survive on poor quality copies: Wontner’s Holmes debut The Sleeping Cardinal (1931) looks like early video art. Nevertheless, the 14 Holmes films (and 220 radio dramas) starring Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were widely popular (Bruce’s comedic performance as Dr. Watson was also influential), and the reason cannot simply be attributed to the restoration of the films.
Although Rathbone and Bruce were only listed second and fourth in the credits for their debut in The Hound of the Baskervilles, their rapid success spawned the only long-lasting era of Holmes films. Rathbone brought unprecedented authority to the role, conveying both the arrogance of Holmes due to his extraordinary intelligence and the cynicism essential to rendering his utter mystery. At the same time, unlike later Watsons who were famously clumsy, the very popular Bruce was praised for solving a lasting problem: his endearing interpretation of the character humanized the relationship between the two in a style similar to Watson’s exaggerated humility when narrating the story, and gave the doctor something to do when he was not involved in the action, which was just to appreciate his friend’s extraordinary wisdom.
Because of its obvious horror film characteristics, The Hound of the Baskervilles has been the most remade Sherlock Holmes detective story. Rathbone’s version has always been one of the best. Sidney Lanfield’s directorial technique is only artisan in the best sense, as Alfred L. Werker did in the next work Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). In addition, both films are noteworthy for their portrayal of the Victorian atmosphere. Werker’s film is adapted from a sensational stage play written by William Gillette and licensed by Conan Doyle, which tells the story of Moriarty trying to steal the crown jewels. Lanfield’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is basically faithful to the original except for the more compact plot; the film also cleverly added a terrible séance plot, and its subsequent evolutions showed how film and later television reshaped the general perception of the constituent elements of classic Sherlock spin-offs.
The two films born in 1939 together prove that the original novel is of no help to a successful adaptation of Holmes. Relying on perfect casting and effective structure, while skillfully combining adventure, wit, and a rich character study of a seemingly incomprehensible genius in a unique way. Each film presents an extremely complete Holmes world, injecting fresh life into Holmes, who has always faced the threat of becoming just a cordial tradition. Although there have been failures and mistakes in his first story A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes is still regarded as infallible, and his obvious dark side is covered by people’s nostalgic love for some familiar details, such as his iconic accessories (violin, strong cigars in Persian slippers…), Rathbone handles these with ease. Although it can be called the beginning of one of the luckiest film eras in history, at the end of The Hound of the Baskervilles he mentioned his far less comfortable (drug use) habits with equal confidence: “Oh, Watson - give me the needle!”
3. Adventures of a Magical Director
(The Woman in Green, 1945)
In the 1940s, the copyright passed from Fox to Universal, which re-employed Rathbone and Bruce with a lower budget and issued a euphemistic statement: “Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, will not age, is unconquerable, and is constant. In solving the major problems of today’s era, he is still - as before - the supreme master of theoretical argumentation.” The two were moved to that era (the sets were also cheaper) to fight the Nazis because of the propaganda mission at the time. The fight began with a radio broadcast from Salzburg in John Rawlins’s pleasant Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942). The film moved Holmes’ famous dialogue in His Last Bow (“The east wind is coming…”) selected as the ending story to a world war.
The prolific and energetic Roy William Neill joined as the director of the next Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (one of Neill’s five works: there are three other Holmes, plus a cult classic Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man!) and continued to direct 10 more films; it is obvious that he is very suitable for leaving a personal mark in the environment of B-level film studios, and soon took over the production power again. Neill’s films use one or two clever ideas from Doyle’s original works but develop them in different directions, cleverly mixing respect and disrespect: at the beginning of Secret Weapon, the disguised Holmes sells a book of The Complete Works of Wilhelm Shakespeare, a completely German writer to the Führer’s agents, and then unlocks the code in The Dancing Men on the way to another. The film’s chilling confrontation between him and Moriarty is unforgettable (to pass the time, Holmes proposed a method that could cruelly depict his death). The Rathbone era is often considered old and charming, but beneath the surface there are contrasting film noir traces. Neill is a master of using miniatures to evoke horror: at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), the overhead push-pull shot of the Musgrave estate in the wind injected a gloomy atmosphere into the entire film; the shot switched to close-ups of the engineer’s accelerating hand or the overturned footstool, producing a terrible impact similar to the extremely tense investigation on the moving train in Terror by Night (1946). On the contrary, the underestimated Pursuit to Algiers (1945) starts with a wonderful plan that suggests that half of London will become the stage for Holmes’ drama, and quickly develops to the detective’s (pretended) death (Bruce turns his back to the camera and expresses Watson’s grief in a wonderful and restrained moment), and then it is all about Holmes’ leisurely moments of wits in the voyage after reversing his identity.
Freedom can be spread, and the responsibility of propaganda is no longer there. These are celebrated by the film The Spider Woman (1944) with black humorous visual jokes: Holmes is trapped in a Hitler mannequin target in the shooting range (the other targets are Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito). Later, Neill directed the series closer to the spirit of the original, although the plot is still arbitrary: The Scarlet Claw (1944) sent Holmes to Canada, where he was shrouded in a hound-like fog as if he had just stepped out of Baskerville Hall. Because a five-pronged garden lawn mower replaced the demon dog, Holmes kept saying that he was confused by this strange thing. The rhythm of Neill’s films is short and fast, and a little quirky (tilted angles, clever use of shadows and mirrors, clever shooting ideas), they have imprinted a new mark on the public’s image of Holmes. Its pinnacle Dressed to Kill (1946) takes the self-aware characteristics of the series to the proto-postmodern extreme: Watson begins to publish Holmes’ adventures, and then falls into the trick he described in his first story - the most quoted sentence “I would be at a loss without my Boswell” directly refers to the grand finale that took place in the library of the Dr. Johnson museum, giving the departure of this great partner a sense of historical consciousness.
In The Woman in Green, the highest achievement of this period, Neill’s smooth stage scheduling achieved a dream montage that concentrated the illusory qualities of this series (contract actors returning to play different roles helped a lot: Henry Daniell, here Moriarty, had appeared twice, once playing Moriarty’s confidant). The Woman in Green merges different stories into a series of elegant hypnotic (often very hypnotic) passages, and is injected with a relaxed atmosphere by Bruce’s comic performance (Watson, Watson… never heard of this person… what, is it me?). A series of women were killed with their index fingers cut off; a noble lady and her equally tempting pool of flowers floated in the “waters of oblivion”; an innocent person went crazy, a virtual murder initiated by another hypnotized person; Watson himself also experienced the spinning wheel illusion (“Of course only people with weak wills will do that,” he said afterwards, with no impression of what happened); finally, Holmes entered the dream of oblivion and was manipulated by Moriarty to walk off the cliff… All this happened in a compact 68 minutes.
4. Adventures of an Absurdist Cartoon
(Deduce, You Say!, 1956)
Paget’s illustrations for The Strand Magazine made Holmes’ deerstalker hat and cape so iconic that they became shortcuts to playing or becoming a detective. Like all (cartoon) materials, the omnipotent Looney Tunes made the best use of them. Other Holmes cartoons are also worth noting, including Hayao Miyazaki’s lovely Sherlock Hound (1984-5), and the great The Great Mouse Detective (1986), which looks - for late Disney - evil in some places, in which Rathbone made a cameo recording, Vincent Price contributed an excellent voice acting (and sang) for the vicious Professor Ratigan, and the 1944 absurdist drama The Case of the Screaming Bishop, which sent the “hair styling comb” into the “Museum of Unnatural History”.
But no character can compare to the crazy and chattering Daffy Duck. By turning the overactive empiricist great hero into a detective who is depressed if he is not active, Chuck Jones showed insight and comedic talent. With his childlike enthusiasm, Daffy contributed a contrast to Holmes’ arrogant demeanor. Deduce, You Say! (1955) paired him with Porky Pig’s Watson, and Porky Pig’s Bruce-style chatter (“Holmes hates pretense”) immediately gained a more interesting halo when compared. The case of the Shropshire Slasher is interspersed with many jokes (celebrities have to pay taxes) and allusions. This unique case was solved by Porky Pig’s inadvertent words, while Daffy was still staggering forward in the heroic and manic Holmes-caused increasing failures. The most wonderful line is a devastating blow to the fabricated Holmes iconic line that only exists in the film: “What kind of school did you learn detective work in?” Watson asked, “Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.”
5. Victorian Combination
(The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1959)
When they woke up from their fear explosion, Hammer Studios arranged for Terrance Fisher to direct their Holmes project, which was a combination in the Victorian paradise (and hell): Sherlock was the ultimate embodiment of rationalists in his era, and Fisher was a master of depicting the disharmony in it. Ten years after the detective got lost in television (such as Sheldon Reynolds’ quirky American TV series Sherlock Holmes in 1954), the 1959 Hound of the Baskervilles brought him back to the big screen and used intense colors for the first time - most memorably a series of dazzling reds, which well matched the film’s treatment of the temptation of sex and violence. Fisher recklessly plunged into the cruel legendary world and gave a dark, fashionable and gorgeous interpretation of the Baskerville myth: a debauched night led to a demon nobleman dying in the fangs of the “giant hound” after killing “that slut” - a helpless country girl. In the rather class-conscious Hammer spirit, the conflict behind the “Curse of the Baskervilles” was reset according to the unbreakable class division, giving the romantic relationship at the center a malicious subtext: sex was set as the unspoken permanent driving force behind oppression and revenge. Holmes re-examined this confrontation from the perspective of “devil” while his completely rational point of view was challenged, which also foreshadowed Fisher’s masterpiece The Devil Rides Out (1968). The vibrant images conveyed a violent romantic invasion: the temptation of the outline of the impossible ghost and the sound on the misty swamp, like the vampire-like teasing of a glamorous woman, will inevitably not be accepted by the logical mind - but Holmes’ move ironically balanced the unbalanced state of the Victorian era. (Conan Doyle became an ardent supporter of spiritualism in his later years, and even contributed praise to the photos of the Cottingley Fairies, which were later proved to be forgeries.)
Not afraid of deviating from the source in pursuit of suspense and subversion, Fisher’s grotesque Sherlock film peak greatly benefited from Peter Cushing’s calm and sometimes even ruthless interpretation (André Morell’s friendly and low-key Watson also made great contributions). Fisher’s use of color and his mastery of Gothic horror films are well-known, and both are fully demonstrated in this film, but The Hound of the Baskervilles also powerfully demonstrates another of Fisher’s underestimated strengths. His attention to sensuality is revealed in his guidance of facial performances, (shooting facial expressions) Cushing’s sharp eyes and Marla Landi’s sexy lips contrast to end the entire film. Unfortunately, Fisher’s second attempt at this detective, the German-produced Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), had its script tampered with by the producer, who also had someone re-dub Christopher Lee’s Holmes in English without the actors’ knowledge. Lee correctly believed that this was one of his best performances, and the ending made Lee even more disappointed than Fisher. His old partner Cushing was luckier, starring in a BBC series in 1968 that weakened the rigorous style of Sherlock’s works, and then returned with many elderly companions to shoot his penultimate film, Masks of Death (1984). Roy Ward Baker, another experienced director from Hammer Studios, directed the calmly eerie Amicus film hodgepodge Monsters Club (1981) and the above work about depression and touching fragility during an outing to shoot a two-episode documentary about “transience”.