tells us why it is if not actually impossible, it’s highly improbable for the writers of TV or movie pastiches to stay faithful to one of his most unique qualities. Remember: “He sits motionless,” “He does little himself. He only plans.” Taken at face value, Moriarty is not, as he’s popularly labeled, Holmes’s evil twin. His armchair malevolence is really the mirror-image of the Canon’s great sedentary collection of grey cells, and the inspiration for Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes. But it would take an extremely gifted writer to make an armchair vs. armchair battle of wits gripping, and even such an author would find translating such words on the page (or e-reader screen) to dialogue and moving images daunting.
Similarly, Moriarty’s immobile inhabiting of the center of his web is also nearly-impossible for a pastiche. The Canonical Moriarty has multiple layers insulating him from culpability—a concept brilliantly realized in Bert Coules’s flawless adaptation of “The Final Problem” for radio—where Holmes compares the Moriarty organization to a pyramid, with the Professor at the apex, who has dealings only with the nine members of his High Table. But having the main bad guy only seen issuing orders to his minions isn’t a recipe for dramatic conflict. All of which is to say that it would be a tough sell for studios and audiences alike to have a Moriarty who just sits and thinks at the center of his gang.
If the frenetic previews of Game of Shadows, which contain action sequences similar to those in the first film, are a reliable barometer, they suggest that Jared Harris’s Professor will be mixing it up physically with Downey’s energetic detective.
But if the latest Moriarty ends up striking viewers as less-than-Canonical (hopefully a judgment that takes into account all of his scenes, not just the presumed fight ones), there is ample precedent for a movie Napoleon of Crime who is active in the field, which, I contend, is a necessary departure from the Canon. In the interests of presenting depth rather than breadth, (and justifying this column’s intended-to-be-clever title), I will look at only six predecessors to Harris in essaying the role. Limiting coverage to film and TV portrayals excludes two of the most memorable ones—Orson Welles, in the Gielgud/Richardson radio series of the 1950s, and Michael Pennington, in the standout Merrison/Williams complete audio Canon of the 1990s—but the scripts they benefitted from adhere closely to the language of “The Final Problem.” That advantage would make comparing them to the film versions like comparing apple pips to orange pips.
Basil Rathbone’s first of three different Moriartys, George Zucco in 1939’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, remains one of my personal favorites, and not just because the film was the first Holmes one I’d seen.
The epigraph sets the stage for a movie where the Holmes-Moriarty duel is front and center. The viewer is treated to an excerpt of Holmes’s journal, while a haunting tune, that would later prove a key to a murder mystery, plays in the background: “In all my life I have encountered only one man whom I can truthfully call the very Genius of Evil—Professor Moriarty. For eleven years he has eluded me. All the rest who have opposed him are dead. He is the most dangerous criminal England has ever known.”
(In yet another inexplicable, unnecessary departure from Canon—albeit less egregious than tampering with the dog in the nighttime classic line in the Christopher Plummer Silver Blaze—the signed entry is dated 1894, three years after the Reichenbach duel of the Canon.)
This opening spells out explicitly the immensity of the challenge before Holmes, who has tried to bring the professor to book for over a decade2, a reasonable extrapolation from the Final Problem’s duration of the battle—“For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it.” And the first scene gets right to it—we see a bearded and bespectacled Moriarty in the dock for murder, acquitted moments before Holmes rushes in too late to present his proof that the crucial alibi—giving a lecture before numerous members of the Royal Society, is a fabrication. (Sherlockian film historians have revealed that the explanation for how such an alibi could have been faked was included in the original script, but this is a case where speculating about how Moriarty pulled it off is better than reading what the writers actually came up with.)
We should stop here to note that the Canonical Moriarty would seem to never need an alibi—he’s a planner, not an executioner, or as T.S. Eliot put it in “Macavity, the Mystery Cat,” “And whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!” He wouldn’t get his hands bloody—one of the unresolved issues for me from the Canon is why the Professor, who is not a physically imposing man, and who knew of Holmes’s self-defense prowess, resorted to hand to hand combat, when some remnants of his organization who had escaped the net could have been utilized.
But what Edwin Blum and William Drake’s screenplay—billed as based on Gillette’s play, but apart from naming one of the Professor’s henchman Bassick, resemblances are relatively few—demonstrates is that even such a departure can work when the spirit of the confrontation is preserved. And the scene where a freed Moriarty offers Holmes a cab-ride back to Baker Street is one of the high points of all Sherlockian cinema. Listen to Rathbone’s Holmes: “You’ve a magnificent brain, Moriarty. I admire it. I admire it so much I’d like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society.” Some of the dialogue is lifted straight from “The Final Problem”’s Baker Street encounter. The writers cleverly make Moriarty echo Holmes’s sentiments from “The Final Problem”—during their cab ride together, Moriarty says that “once [he’s] beaten and ruined [Holmes], I’ll retire,” reinforcing the notion that the two men are two sides of the same coin3. Moriarty also displays his hubristic scheming brilliance by telling his adversary that he will “pull off the most incredible crime of the century,” right under Holmes’s nose, a boast that he comes very close to realizing.
That sophisticated, layered plot does have Moriarty as a hands-on criminal, but what choice did Drake and Blum have? To dilute the power of the struggle by introducing an interesting wearer of criminal boots on the ground would lessen the impact of the conflict. Zucco is widely considered one of the best-ever Moriartys, capable of conveying menace with just a subtle facial expression or slight change in intonation, an appraisal that makes up for the ignominy of the actor’s being billed after the boy playing Billy the Page.
The shift of the Rathbone/Bruce series to a contemporary setting put an extra burden on the writers of movies with Moriarty as the villain. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) has Moriarty working with the Nazis, and personally participating in the attempted abduction of an Allied scientist. Lionel Atwill, who was a nicely-creepy Dr. Mortimer in the 1939 Hound, has much less to work with than Zucco, and isn’t given an interesting crime to plan. If his character was renamed Lysander Starr, not much would be different. Substitute Atwill for Zucco in The Adventures, and his portrayal would be more highly regarded.
Henry Daniell (Rathbone’s personal favorite Moriarty, by the way) fares somewhat better in The Woman In Green (1945). A desperate Scotland Yard turns to Holmes to solve the Finger murders, apparently-random atrocities that reawaken fears from the Ripper’s autumn of terror. In a variation of the pretext the Canonical professor used to get Watson out of the way in Meiringen, Daniell’s Moriarty has the doctor lured away with a bogus claim of a medical emergency.
Once he’s done so, he and Holmes have a genteel verbal sparring match, with memorable dialogue lifted straight from “The Final Problem”—
“All that I have to say has already crossed your mind.”
“Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”
This Moriarty uses more human pawns to achieve his ends than Atwill’s, but that fidelity to the organizational model of the Canon means that there are fewer scenes of Holmes and Moriarty together than would be ideal. He does expose his liberty and his life by not remaining at a safe remove at the climax even without
