Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ Arthur Conan Doyle and Sidney Paget, the most important figure in the rise of Sherlock Holmes from one-shot detective novel hero to global icon was actor-author William Gillette. Though Doyle had killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” in 1893, the character remained popular—and Doyle, among others, made several attempts to transfer Holmes (and Watson) to the stage. However, Gillette pulled off the trick—combining elements from several stories (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” “The Greek Interpreter”) along with new-made plot-licks and supporting characters in a script which debuted in 1899. Remembered for his trend-setting performance as Sherlock Holmes, Gillette is often overlooked in his capacity as a major writer involved with the character. Gillette didn’t include Mrs. Hudson in his Sherlock Holmes, replacing her with “Billy the Page” (a role once played by a young Charlie Chaplin). Billy become so much a part of the show (he has more to do than Watson) that Doyle—in what now seems an astonishing admission the franchise had got away from him—later wrote the character into “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” In an exchange of cables, which later pasticheurs have used to justify all manner of mischief, Gillette asked Doyle “may I marry Holmes?” and received the reply “you may marry him or murder him or do anything you like with him.”

      Gillette achieved great success in the star role of Holmes, which he played in New York and London. H.A. Saintsbury took over the part when Gillette moved on (and was identified with the role enough to appear in a 1916 film of The Valley of Fear). Gillette returned to the deerstalker and dressing gown for revivals of the play throughout the rest of his life—and even appeared in a radio version. In 1916, Gillette reprised the part in a movie directed by Arthur Berthelet at the Esssanay Company’s Chicago Studios, making his only feature film appearance. A major hit in its day, but also old-fashioned even by the standards of 1916, the film was long thought lost… until the Cinematheque Française discovered a print of the 1919 French release version. This divided the film into four chapters suitable for exhibition run as a serial in the manner of Louis Feuillade’s popular homegrown Fantômas and Judex adventures (in contrast to which, it must have seemed even more mannered). Restored, the film has been screened at festivals around the world with a live musical accompaniment by the pianist Neil Brand (who adds an enormous amount of value to the work). I caught it at the London Film Festival, where it was supported by the very lively short Canine Sherlock Holmes (1912), which involves a couple of other once-famous characters—Hawkshaw the Detective (from Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of 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, СКАЧАТЬ