The BBC’s hit “Sherlock” is just one of 230 films or television series featuring the great man. Matthew Sweet picks the best
By Intelligent Life, M.S. | LONDON
'SHERLOCK' (2010) BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH & MARTIN FREEMAN
The BBC's hit “Sherlock” is just one of 230 films or television series featuring the great man. Matthew Sweet picks the best...
1891 Illustrations by Sidney Paget Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes—but put more energy into trying to kill him off. So perhaps it's his illustrator who conjured him for us: the lean, feline, frock-coated figure, steepling his fingers in a smoke-wreathed armchair. Paget denied having a model other than the text—but he himself had a long jaw, aquiline nose and high temples. I suspect it was all done with mirrors.
1916 William Gillette Gillette gave Holmes two things that Conan Doyle failed to supply: a libido and a dirty great curved piece of smoking apparatus. One of them became a fixture, the other remained an act of transgression—as all the critics told Gillette, when he played the great detective in his own stage drama, juiced from Doyle's short stories. The author, however, was unconcerned. Gillette cabled Doyle across the Atlantic: “May I marry Holmes?” Back came the reply: “Do what you like with him.”
1920s Eille Norwood The orthochromatic film stock of the silent days was unforgiving: every crack and fissure in the face of Eille Norwood has been preserved for posterity. With black lips, graveyard demeanour, and his hair shaved at the temples for a cerebral widow's peak, he played detective in dozens of British two-reelers—the first Holmes with a touch of Transylvania. When he confronts the Hound of the Baskervilles—hand-tinted with a phosphor glow—it's hard to decide who seems most unearthly.
1939 Basil Rathbone Viewers thrown by the 2010 “Sherlock”, take note: Rathbone was the first self-consciously period Holmes, in the dry-iced Victorian world of the Fox backlot. After two films, his bosses felt the Nazis were a more pressing problem and retooled Doyle's famous speech about the Hun (“such a wind as never blew on England yet”) for Hitler. The delivery is knife-sharp. The cause would not have been more urgent if they had booked Churchill himself.
1959-68 Peter Cushing When Cushing played Holmes for Hammer, the producer congratulated him for having lost weight for the part—his cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut the pages of the Strand. It was, however, dysentery that did it. In the Hammer “Hound” and in a subsequent series for the BBC, Cushing attacked the part as if relieved not to be playing another psychopath. For a man best known as Frankenstein, he is one of the screen's least clinical Sherlocks. 1970 Robert Stephens In the 1970s the intellectuals claimed Holmes. In “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” Nicol Williamson underwent analysis; in “The Private Life of…”, Robert Stephens even talked of a relationship with Watson—albeit as a ploy to avoid having to impregnate a Russian ballerina. Billy Wilder, directing, had Holmes ruled by his heart, not his head. In the character—and the actor, too—it provoked a constitutional crisis.
1980s and 1990s Jeremy Brett For a performance that's now regarded as definitive, Brett's Holmes is a long way from any of his predecessors, and from Conan Doyle. This is Sherlock the addict: twitching, moody, capricious. Watch him in his white nightgown, stretching a colourless hand towards the fags on the mantelpiece—or yelping his way through dinner, veins thrumming with cocaine. Despite this oddness, he's the Holmes in our heads, and the reason why several more recent ones—Robert Downie Jr, Rupert Everett – seem like pretenders.
2010 Benedict Cumberbatch With his cantilevered cheekbones, staring eyes and the glaciated attitude of the Ubermensch, Benedict Cumberbatch could have been painted by Munch. We ought to dislike him. But the modern-dress Sherlock, a big hit for the BBC this year and due back soon, is also a sad casualty of his own brilliance. He doesn't smile much. Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) was never more important as a link between the warm human world and the cold hinterland of when-you-have-eliminated-the-impossible.
"Sherlock" is expected to return on BBC One Autumn 2011.
