of The Hound of the Baskervilles which substituted a lady ghost for the spectral dog. This is quite another thing, and diverges far more from the Doyle template than other German Holmes films of the period like the 1929 and 1937 movies called Die Hund von Baskerville.
Set in an elaborate if stagebound cosmopolitan London somewhere between the British whodunits published in green Penguin books and telefono bianco haut bourgeois melodramas of contemporary Italian cinema, this Sherlock Holmes offers pudgy, cheerful, cigar-smoking detective Jimmy Ward (Hermann Speelmans), who doesn’t seem that much like Holmes, as a hero. Ward’s manservant John (Werner Finck), who sneezes in the dark while they’re waiting for a break-in and alarms the culprit, is even less like Watson. Then, late in the day, it turns out that Ward is Sherlock Holmes after all (as given away by the title), and he puts on a flat cap and takes up a pipe in a way which makes him resemble the sort of Holmes seen in German films (if not Paget illustrations).
A few neat moments (a rogue pretending to be dead in the street to distract a passing policeman and servants while a confederate slips in to rifle for those papers) are staged effectively, but it’s mostly drawing room or nightclub conversations without even the atmospherics of most of the Edgar Wallace-derived krimis. There is a song, belted out in a smoky dive by Ursula Hercking in a mode somewhere between Dietrich and Weill (fishnets, body-stocking with a heart-shape torn out, shoulder bow). The plot involves stolen plans, shady sisters (blonde Trude Marlen, a goodie; dark Elisabeth Wendt, a baddie), poisoned cigarettes, that bit from “A Scandal in Bohemia” where a cry of “fire fire” drives a culprit to reveal their secret safe, Inspektor Brown of Scotland Yard (Ernst Karchow), Mabuse-like spymaster Barnov (Edwin Jurgensen), and coded-as-gay poodle lover Archibald Pepperkorn (Harry Lorenzen). Written by Hans Heuer and Erich Engels, from the Müller-Puzika play Die Tat des Unbekannten; directed by Engels, who also made two Crippen movies, Dr Crippen en Bord (1942) and Dr Crippen Lebt (1958).
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Sherlock Holmes: The Strange Case of Miss Alice Faulkner (1981)
A live performance of William Gillette’s 1901 play, staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival and recorded by HBO for broadcast in a series of taped music and theatre productions called Standing Room Only. Following Broadway success as Dracula, Frank Langella takes another Victorian leading role; Christopher Lee, Jeremy Brett (who took over from Langella on tour with Dracula), and Richard Roxburgh have also pulled off this double, incarnating the great good and evil Supermen of the 1890s as mirror images.
Though he might have been too louche and romantic for Conan Doyle’s Holmes, Langella is well-cast as Gillette’s… the actor-writer, fashioning the sleuth as a star part for himself, blended elements of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” and other stories but shifted emphases to play up the witty banter and have the cerebral hero eventually discover his own emotions. At the end, Holmes does not sacrifice his life to rid the world of the evil Professor Moriarty (George Morfogen) but follows his triumph over his arch-enemy by abandoning his career for a new-found love interest.
In the 1922 John Barrymore silent version of the play, this seems ludicrous, but Gillette writes Holmes’s realisation of the loneliness and coldness of his life with some subtlety. In the coda, Holmes trades on the gratitude heroine Alice Faulkner (Laurie Kennedy) feels to him for saving her life to manipulate her into handing over love letters that might wreck a Royal Engagement (written to her late sister, not her: Gillette couldn’t have got away with making an immoral adventuress like Doyle’s Irene Adler a heroine). Instantly, the detective is ashamed of his own brilliance and resolves to be a better man in a way that means giving up his profession. With audience reaction audible on the soundtrack (the throwaway “elementary, my dear Watson” gets a round of applause) and performances pitched to the back stalls, the thriller aspect doesn’t really translate to television, but the back-and-forth exchanges of pointed insults are amusing and Langella expresses a delight in his own cleverness that’s quite appealing.
Morfogen rolls his eyes and leers evilly as the Napoleon of Crime and Richard Woods blusters in the Nigel Bruce manner as a Dr Watson who has married and settled down, which means he has less to do but also serves as an example to his friend. Tom Atkins of The Fog and Halloween III does a creditable cockney thug accent as Moriarty’s chief bruiser, Susan Clark (who had mixed with Holmes in Murder By Decree) is the femme fatale, Dwight Schultz of The A-Team is a shady character, familiar taffy-faced bit-player William Duell (the shoeshine boy informant in Police Squad!) is a butler, and a twelve-year-old Christian Slater takes the role of Billy the page. “Sebastian Moran” and “Hugo N. Furst” are listed in the credits as playing roles which turn out to be Holmes and Moriarty in traditionally terrible disguises. Produced for the stage by Peter H. Hunt (1776); directed for television by Gary Halvorson (The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland).
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)
This cheapskate, shot-in-Wales knock-off of the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr. film can’t even be bothered to extend any originality on a title—would Sherlock Holmes vs Spring-Heeled Jack or The Mystery of the Whitechapel Dinosaur have used up too much letraset?—and so filmographies are now forever stuck with two 2009 films that go by Sherlock Holmes. It opens during the Blitz, with an aged Watson dictating one final memoir to a Miss Lucy Hudson (Rachael Evelyn) who, implausibly, has never heard of Sherlock Holmes. Equally implausibly, this is one of those “the world is not yet ready to know” cases—which implies that somehow Holmes managed to keep secret a business which winds up with a giant robot dragon laying waste to half of London and setting fire to the Houses of Parliament in 1882. The mystery proper begins with a giant squid wrecking a bullion ship in the English Channel, which prompts Inspector Lestrade (William Huw) to call in Holmes (Ben Syder), who makes a quick deductive diagnosis (acceptably Doylean) which wraps up an autopsy Watson (top-billed Gareth David-Lloyd, from Torchwood) is supposed to perform so the medical man can be available to assist the great detective.
As it happens, Watson’s first job is pointlessly to dangle off a cliff—an incident which somehow tells him the gold is missing from the wreck he doesn’t even see, and though he notices an apparent drowning man in the waves he fails to mention this when he’s hauled to safety. Then, there’s a dinosaur attack in Whitechapel, as a medium-sized CGI tyrannosaur chomps down on a bank clerk who’s trying to pay for a sixpenny knee-trembler with threepence. The beast shows up in a nearby park and chases a fairly unintrepid Holmes-and-Watson through the undergrowth—rather, a camera runs after the fleeing actors to save on the very few effects shots. The case leads to a copper-wire factory, where the dinosaur attacks again (upstairs) and kills someone who was about to divulge useful information. A unique stone on the dead man leads our heroes to lonely Handsworth Castle, near where Holmes grew up (“that explains a lot,” deadpans Watson). There, everything becomes clear and we get a crowded second half.
The villain, who is only called Spring-Heeled Jack in publicity and never so much as stands on tiptoes let alone leaps (which makes this a bust as the first Spring-Heeled Jack film since The Curse of the Wraydons in 1946), turns out to be Holmes’s brother (Dominic Keating), a police inspector retired after being crippled on the job who blames Lestrade for accidentally shooting him in the back (he didn’t) and has manufactured a range of Jules Verne gadgets to help him get revenge. The brother isn’t Doyle’s Mycroft but a new character named Thorpe Holmes, and his mechanical marvels include a steampunk Iron Man suit which means he can clump around and have fights despite being handicapped, the robot dinosaur and squid (no explanations for how he got them to the scenes of crimes unnoticed), a lady automaton (Elizabeth Arends) he intends to have crash Buckingham Palace as a suicide bomber, and two flying machines (the fake dragon and a combination hot air balloon/helicopter) the Holmes Brothers use to duel in the overambitious climax. All this is even more off-model than Guy Ritchie’s Holmes, but considerably less entertaining—as in the same company’s MegaShark vs Giant Octopus or Snakes on a Train, you get only the most half-hearted attempt at delivering on the promise of wild fantastical
