The Adventures of the Six Napoleons…of Crime

      Whatever else Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows does, it deserves credit for enabling a return to movie prominence of one of the all-time great villains and, arguably, the third most interesting Canonical character, who makes a strong impression all out of proportion to his very limited time on-screen. Watson, our trusted eyes and ears, only sees him twice, but his impact on the Good Doctor’s life could hardly have been greater. I refer, of course, to Professor James Moriarty, the ne plus ultra of arch-enemies, a genius who is “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected” in the London of 1891. But as intriguing a character as Moriarty is, filmmakers using him as the main bad guy have almost always had to depart from one of the most remarkable aspects of his criminality.

It’s always best to return to fundamentals, so let’s revisit Holmes’s (apparently)1 first description of his intellectual equal in “The Final Problem.”

      He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected.

      That passage 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