Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #4. Arthur Conan Doyle
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playing Mycroft Holmes to such perfection that he is brought back to reprise the role 20 years later in the Granada TV series. Christopher Plummer and James Mason make an admirable attempt in 1979’s “Murder by Decree.”
In the above examples we see famous actors cast and miscast to play Holmes and Watson. Perhaps the best compliment for an actor is that we, the audience, get so absorbed in their portrayal of a character that we forget who the actor is. The flip side of this coin, the “worst compliment,” is a situation in which we don’t care who the actor is. Some of this, of course, has to do with the screenwriters. It is a struggle for a good actor to rise above a poorly plotted script dotted by vapid dialogue. It is an equal challenge for a great actor to blend his ego seamlessly into a well-drawn character. And so, we enjoy Basil Rathbone as Holmes even if he’s in a heavy-handed war propaganda film, and we admire James Mason as Watson in a well-written mystery but can’t seem to shake our image of him in “The Boys from Brazil” or “Heaven Can Wait.” Rathbone is Holmes in a bad film, and Mason is … Mason in a good film.
Now, team up popular actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law with action director Guy Ritchie (“Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Madonna’s ex-husband), add 80 million dollars for special effects and computer-generated scenes and what do you get (besides three people who have all been arrested for assault)? An action/adventure film set in Edwardian London something like James Bond meets “National Treasure.” The plot revolves around Holmes and Watson chasing after the snaggle-toothed Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) as he uses black magic and secret rites in Harry Potter-style crypts to dominate a secret society, kind of like the Masons Gone Wild, in an attempt to use their power to take over Parliament and then … the world. As a sub-plot, not well-developed, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) returns from obscurity and, since she is the only woman Holmes has ever [allegedly! —MK] shown romantic interest in, is used as bait by Professor Moriarty (played by no one because he’s always in the shadows) to manipulate Holmes and lead him to Blackwood’s secret. Blackwood’s secret is the employment of a good chemist and electrician to make magical effects and create a remote-controlled weapon that, if it falls into the wrong hands, could dominate the world (sounds awfully similar to the Tobel bomb sight from 1945, or any James Bond plot, for that matter). There is very little deduction and only a smattering of investigation on Holmes’s part, but there is a whole lot of chasing and fighting; at least seven major fight scenes by my count. True, Holmes does have experience as a prize fighter (“Sign of Four”) and as a practitioner of martial arts (‘Baritsu’ in “The Empty House”), but the current film imbues Holmes, Watson and Irene (!) all with super-human, ninja fighting powers. While the film was entertaining, I never felt like I was watching a Sherlock Holmes story.
There are nods to previous Holmes adventures, but these are frustrating. If you haven’t read previous Holmes stories, you won’t care about them; if you are a Holmes reader then you will be irked by their inaccuracy. For instance, Watson seems to limp around with the aide of a cane at times, referencing his wound in Afghanistan (see my story “Watson’s Wound” in SHMM #3 for the “real” story) but the cane vanishes when Watson needs to leap about, fight villains and piggy-back Irene away from a potentially nasty encounter with a band-saw. Another oversight: Watson is engaged to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) and Holmes makes an embarrassing scene at a restaurant when Watson finally gets his friend to meet his betrothed. The reader of Holmes knows that Watson met Mary when she was a client (“Sign of Four”) and so had made Holmes’s acquaintance when she met Watson. Further enraging the reader is Mary’s comment to Holmes that she has read about the great detectives in the writings of Wilkie Collins and Poe, completely ignoring the fact that her fiancé has made Holmes famous by publishing the accounts of his cases.
Robert Downey Jr. cast as Holmes (we deduce something is afoot when we discover that his wife is one of the producers of the film) has the acting chops to explore the dark psychology of the detective, but his interpretation is more of Holmes as daredevil crazy person (more like his character Jim Barris in “A Scanner Darkly”) rather than brilliant eccentric. Perhaps Downey is handcuffed by Michael Robert Johnson’s script or Ritchie’s vision for the film and simply has no leeway to interpret the role more intricately. Downey is also handcuffed to the bed by McAdams, who is cast as a young criminal of lower class than we would expect of Irene Adler, international seductress of royalty and Holmes.
This brings me back to why I and so many others like reading Sherlock Holmes. In the days before radio or TV or feature film, Conan Doyle invented a series of entertaining stories full of rich plotting and action, but most of all, he invented a character who could think. And while Sherlock Holmes can hold his own in fistfights, gun battles, dangerous animal attacks, poisonings and plunges over waterfalls, the action parts of the stories seem to be the framework, the bones that support the real meat of the drama: the process of deduction and investigation. We love being stunned by his minute powers of observation, which he reveals to an astonished Watson as “elementary.” We enjoy his sarcasm when dealing with Lestrade, feel his pain at being a trapped intellect with little outlet for his talent, and are tormented when he plunges into the depths of drug addiction. We are cheered not because he catches the criminal but by his fierce loyalty to his friend. When Watson is shot in “The Three Garridebs,” Holmes yells, “For God’s sake, say you are not hurt!” Watson reflects that “it was worth many wounds to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.”
Setting is important to any story and Conan Doyle froze a moment in history of late Victorian/Edwardian life that has disappeared. And so reading Sherlock Holmes is to step back into that time of wet cobbled streets, gas light, pipe smoke, hansom cabs and formal attire, and to explore the dark interiors from the drawing room to the slaughterhouse. I remember first reading the stories with a flashlight in the hall coat closet because it seemed like the proper, gloomy atmosphere (unless you have a study with a fireplace and a rainy afternoon handy). Perhaps this is why the Granada TV series with Jeremy Brett has become the iconic standard for screen versions of Sherlock Holmes where so many films have fallen short. In the television series, the viewer is rewarded by scenes that play out almost exactly as he/she has imagined them. One watches the episodes and says, “Yes, they got it right.” The Guy Ritchie film does score points on the visuals, creating a very dark interpretation of 19th century London; you can almost smell the place oozing in creosote and feel the damp chill of the wind off the Thames. The score by Hans Zimmer is terrific as well, combining classical and English folk music for thrilling texture.
This is not to say that while we are comforted by Holmes fiction faithful to the Doyle Canon, we cannot be open-minded to exploration. I think that the TV series House is an example of using the characters of Holmes and Watson, re-imagined as Drs. House and Wilson, without trying to compete with Sherlock Holmes stories. The viewer gets mysteries to try to solve before the eccentric, brilliant, drug addicted (medical) detective can deduce the solutions, as well as the strong interplay between two friends. The setting works because we are not removing Holmes from his element, rather we are re-examining the two characters as archetypes. I think Doyle realized the depth that the exploration of friendship brought to the stories and he eventually killed off Mary Morstan so that Watson could move back in with Holmes. In House, Wilson’s fiancée dies and we are glad to see Wilson and House sharing rooms again because we know how lonely each would be without the other.
It is interesting to note that where Hollywood has taken Sherlock Holmes in the direction of action hero and visual extravaganza, television writing has preserved the rich texture of the characters. I was pleased to learn that my nephew, Jackson, was Sherlock Holmes for Halloween this year (while it was the popular thing to be Spiderman, Batman, or one of the Incredibles) and has begun reading the Holmes stories. I won’t tell him about reading in the hall closet; I’ll leave it to him to discover his own dark places of investigation.
A WOMAN OF HER TIME, by Carole Buggé
An Interview of New York City’s Chief Toxicologist
“Conan Doyle? Oh, you mean Watson’s literary agent?”
These words, from Marina Stajic, New York City’s Director of Forensic Toxicology, greeted my question regarding the creator of the world’s most famous consulting detective.
Marina Stajic is a self-described