Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1 - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 5
ОглавлениеSCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
The Curious Incident of the Hound in the Night-time, or, Why The Hound of the Baskervilles is unfilmable
THE CURSE OF THE HOUND —
There have been many movie and television adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, yet, as I come to my computer screen in a direct line from repeated marathon viewings of eight of the nine most recent serious versions, I am setting down some thoughts and observations as to why, for this longtime Holmesian at least, none have come close to capturing the essence of the best-known and most popular Sherlock Holmes story, which pits the ultimate rationalist against a supernatural legend. I have been grappling with the challenge The Hound poses for filmmakers for over fifteen years; as an admirer of Granada Television’s series starring Jeremy Brett, I was stunned at how inadequate Granada’s adaptation was and began to wonder why it was a failure. (That view, by the way, is one that was shared by one of the preeminent authorities on that version — as will be discussed below.) That led me to analyze the original story itself, and to undertake a close study of the problems it has presented to other media, film in particular. I will touch on the 1939 (Rathbone), 1959 (Cushing), 1968 (Cushing), 1972 (Granger), 1983 (Richardson), 1988 (Brett), 2001 (Frewer) and 2002 (Roxburgh) versions; as a copy of the 1982 BBC production starring Tom Baker has eluded me, I have not relied on my twenty-three-year-old memories of it for this column. In this column, I will try to identify those challenges, to look at how various directors and screenwriters have tried to meet them, and to suggest possible approaches for the next brave and foolhardy souls to take a crack at bringing The Hound to life.
[SPOILER ALERT: Those who have not yet read The Hound of the Baskervilles, please be warned that the novel’s secrets are revealed below. —MK]
THE BOOK —
The plot of The Hound is doubtless familiar to all readers of this magazine, but a brief synopsis may be useful for the discussion to follow. Holmes is consulted by Dr Mortimer, who recounts a seventeenth-century legend of a curse plaguing the aristocratic Baskerville family of Dartmoor, ever since a decadent family member fell victim to the jaws of a demonic hound. Mortimer proceeds to describe the recent mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville, who was found with his features horribly distorted, as if he had died of sheer terror, and in proximity to traces of the fabled monstrous dog. Mortimer, fearing for the life of Sir Henry Baskerville, the successor to the estate, seeks Holmes’s guidance. When the heir, undeterred by a warning letter, the theft of two boots, and a sinister shadow, decides to inhabit Baskerville Hall, Watson is assigned to accompany him, both as a bodyguard and on-the-scene investigator. He diligently reports his observations and speculations to Holmes, stuck in London on another case. Watson meets the neighbors — the naturalist Stapleton and his attractive sister Beryl, and Frankland, a local litigious crank estranged from his daughter. Watson himself hears a “long, low moan,” which Stapleton identifies as the sound the local peasants attribute to the hound of the Baskervilles. Sir Henry rapidly falls in love with Beryl. Suspicious nocturnal ramblings by the Baskerville butler, Barrymore, first suggest his involvement in the plot against the family he has served, but the good doctor and Sir Henry discover that the servant has been providing supplies to his brother-in-law, Selden, a murderous escaped convict in hiding on the moor. Their pursuit of Selden is unsuccessful, but during it, Watson spots a mysterious figure outlined against the moonlight. When Sir Henry agrees to keep Selden’s whereabouts a secret until he can leave the country, Barrymore shares a clue suggesting that a woman had lured Sir Charles to his fatal appointment. Watson not only traces the woman, Laura Lyons, but tracks down the mysterious figure, who is revealed as Holmes himself. To keep his investigations free from scrutiny, the detective had been hiding on the moor himself, putting together clues that led him to label Sir Charles’ death a murder, and Stapleton as the culprit. But, as proof of the scientist’s guilt is lacking, Holmes plots to catch him red-handed, a strategy that seems to fail when the hound claims another victim. This time, Selden, who had been wearing the baronet’s cast-off clothing, is the victim. To lure Stapleton into a trap, Holmes and Watson pretend to return to London; instead, they lie in wait as Stapleton sets his beast on Sir Henry, fatally shooting the animal just in the nick of time. The creature is revealed to be a huge ferocious dog, daubed with phosphorous to create a supernatural aura; its master, in reality Sir Henry’s cousin with eyes on the succession, who had forced his wife to pose as his sister to tempt his relative, flees into the mire, and is apparently sucked into its depths.
Of course, such a Monarch Notes-like summary cannot begin to conjure up the incredible experience of reading the book itself. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it as a way to sate the public’s demand for more Holmes, without bringing Holmes back permanently, so he set The Hound before the fateful Reichenbach Falls death-struggle with the Napoleon of Crime; yet it is not only one of his best stories, The Hound is unquestionably one of the great Gothic mysteries of all time, if not the greatest: replete with memorable lines (“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”, “forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.”) and unforgettable scenes — especially Chapter 14’s climactic appearance of “the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the fog.” Watson’s reports to Holmes from Baskerville Hall vividly create a mood of dread and suspense that most others authors labor at in vain. While locked-room aficionados can legitimately debate which John Dickson Carr puzzle is the trickiest impossible crime yarn ever, no rivals to The Hound immediately spring to mind (a quick challenge to the reader — name one without thinking for a few minutes).
FILMING THE STORY —
For many readers, it is only natural to seek to extend the pleasures of a favorite book by experiencing the story in a different medium such as film. And in some cases, movies have actually improved upon the original, preserving the original structure while altering minor plot details to make the story more logical or more resonant. (For example, the Peter Ustinov version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which was far superior to the overly-faithful and listless recent David Suchet version).
Ironically, because The Hound is so well-loved, translating it to film is harder than adapting a lesser-known story — as Bert Coules, the supremely-gifted head writer on the BBC’s recent radio dramatization of the complete Canon, has observed, “Because people love the best known stories — The Hound of the Baskervilles, ‘The Speckled Band,’ — they have very fixed ideas about what can and cannot be done with them.” But “harder” is not the same as “impossible.” A few years ago, many devoted Tolkien fans would have been skeptical that any film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings could do that master work of romantic fantasy justice, and yet, in the loving hands of Peter Jackson, three superb films were made that have not only brought Tolkien’s epic to a wider audience, but satisfied many of his most devoted fans. So what is it about The Hound that has been so difficult to master?
Space limitations preclude a more-detailed critique of each film, or an enumeration of the gratuitous and often odd changes to the story. For example, the impact of the 1939 Dr Mortimer’s account of his observations of traces upon the ground was somewhat dissipated because it came before the legend was recounted, making the presence of a pawprint ominous, not merely odd.
DOGS THAT DON’T HUNT —
It should go without saying that any film version of The Hound that does not scare, startle, or give viewers the creeps has not done its duty; the original story is more of an eerie thriller than a study in ratiocination. And yet none of the film versions have evoked such feelings in me. A large part of the answer lies in the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of matching the drama of the book by creating “an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.” The images our individual imaginations have conjured of the creature, with “[f]ire burst[ing] from its open mouth, its eyes glow[ing] with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap … outlined in flickering flame” may never be satisfied by another’s vision. I will not spend time here comparing the dogs who have been miscast, or, as in the latest BBC version, mis-computer-generated, in the story’s title role — suffice to say that none have struck me as being scary, and some (especially the 1959 animal, “enhanced” with a rabbit-skin mask) have been unintentionally silly-looking.
But many versions also make the mistake of showing their hand (or paw, as it were) too early, leaving little doubt from the outset that a flesh-and-blood dog is involved. The 1983 Ian Richardson version, for example, has a long opening scene of a dapper Sir Charles awaiting a visitor inside a summer-house actually connected to Baskerville Hall itself, before a ferocious black dog breaks through the glass doors and attacks him (magically leaving no marks on the body.) The makers of 2001’s The Hound with Matt Frewer have their canine appear in broad daylight, at one point staring up at Sir Henry as he looks out of his ancestral home towards the moor. Even the 1939 Basil Rathbone vehicle shows a dog pushing Selden to his death. These explicit depictions lessen the force of the story’s climax — we have seen the hellhound several times before the attack on Sir Henry, and so there is less for us to be startled by.
Pacing is another basic component to a tale of suspense. The comatose pace of the Granada production was perhaps its biggest shortcoming. As noted above, my dim view of the 1988 Granada production is not idiosyncratic. In David Stuart Davies’s comprehensive Starring Sherlock Holmes, the author cites a conversation he had with Jeremy Brett not long before the actor’s untimely passing. When Davies asked Brett “if he could have a final crack at one of the unfilmed Holmes stories, which would it be? Without hesitation he replied, ‘I’d like to do The Hound again. I think we can do much better than that. I was terribly unwell making the film. It was underconceived. The script drifted — which is fatal. Holmes was away too long.”
And although a Hound-like plot, complete with a glowing marsh monster, was employed to great effect in Rathbone’s later, non-period The Scarlet Claw, his Hound, with a surprising lack of mood music, often failed to grip. By contrast, one of the areas in which the 2002 Roxburgh Hound succeeded was in its dramatic, pulse-pounding, and very different opening, with the inquest into Sir Charles’ death punctuated with flashbacks to his autopsy.
None of these would seem to be insurmountable obstacles. CGI technology that can create a plausible Gollum should be able to create an animal that matches Doyle’s words. (According to Sherlockian film expert Phil Cornell, in a recent issue of the scion publication, The Passenger’s Log, there was some talk in the late 1970s of Peter Cushing appearing in his third version of The Hound, which would have featured a stop-frame animation hellhound from special effects master Ray Harryhausen.) And a subtle hand could content itself with terrifying off-screen howls, suggestive silhouettes, or other tried-and-true tricks of the trade to ratchet up the suspense, even among those members of the audience who can recite the text of Watson’s second report from Baskerville Hall verbatim.
HOLMES AWAY FROM HOLMES —
Perhaps as equal a difficulty for the screenwriter is to stay true to the spirit of the book while finely adjusting the storyline so that there is more Holmes. The Hound is the only one of the long stories without a lengthy back-story set in India or America, but it still goes for a fairly long stretch without Holmes’ presence. “This works really well in a book, as we associate with Watson on his own, for after all he is our story-teller, he holds the point-of-view. But in a film that is not the case, and the audience feels dislocated not to be with Holmes,” observes David Pirie, author of The Dark Water, the only recent pastiche that succeeds in pitting a Holmesian sleuth against an evil that may be otherworldly.
The 1973 Hound with Stewart Granger expands Holmes’s role by having him initially accompany Sir Henry, Mortimer and Watson to Dartmoor, before concocting an excuse that will enable him to continue his inquiries in secret. In theory, such a liberty could work, but given the poor casting and production values of that effort, it is not so easy to visualize that plot alteration in a better-quality adaptation. Perhaps someone with imagination could craft an early Holmes-Stapleton encounter that would prove to reveal an important clue.
At the other extreme is the 2001 Matt Frewer production, although many may feel that the decision not to have his quirky, self-parodying Holmes reveal himself on Dartmoor until he shucks off a disguise and takes potshots at a blinded hound that hunts by smell alone to have been a wise choice under the circumstances. The lack of intelligence in that version’s script is demonstrated by its inclusion of a scene in which Kenneth Welsh’s very able (if elderly) Watson tracks down Holmes’s lair in the stone hut, without actually tracking down Holmes himself.
Other productions, most notably the 2002 BBC version, tack on lengthy invented scenes to play up the Holmes-Stapleton battle of wits, seeking to elevate the secret Baskerville to Moriarty-like dimensions of villainy. Once again, with the right cast, and writing faithful in spirit to the Canon, such scenes could address the problem of the missing Holmes, but the efforts thus far have sacrificed fidelity to the story’s spirit for action or post-modern recursions (when Richard Roxburgh’s Holmes insists that Stapleton’s schemes will leave little mark on the world, his adversary knowingly counters that he will achieve immortality because of the fame of Holmes himself, a conceit that just doesn’t work).
One option that has not been attempted comes from Denis O. Smith, the brilliant author of some of the best pastiches ever written, including “The Secret of Shoreswood Hall,” one of the very few tales to capture the spirit of The Hound, and who richly deserves to be widely read both within Sherlockian circles and the general mystery-loving public. He has suggested that a screenwriter could give Holmes more actual detective work to do while on Dartmoor than would actually be shown; perhaps more grilling of Dr Mortimer and/or Stapleton about the ancient legend that could expose questions about its provenance (after all, as commentators have long pointed out, the text says nothing about how Sir Charles’s predecessor met his end, and if he did not die in a manner consistent with the legend, why would Sir Charles have taken it so seriously?)
THE ACTOR PLAYING SIR HUGO DUNIT —
Many mystery readers don’t focus on the fact that, as Bert Coules puts it, “Most of Doyle’s stories are not detective stories in the modern sense of the word.” The solutions in the Canon are often either not particularly surprising, or not based on fair-play clues carefully sprinkled beforehand. In some ways, The Hound is more of a mystery than many others of the original sixty. Denis Smith has commented that The Hound “is also notable for being one of the very few of Doyle’s stories which is presented pretty much in the form which was to become popular later in the 1920s and ’30s, that is, an initial mystery plus a cast of innocent-seeming, if somewhat eccentric local characters, one of whom, you suspect, may in fact be the villain. It is also almost unique among Doyle’s Holmes stories in having a sub-plot (the business with Selden and the Barrymores) which is dragged across the path of the main plot like a red herring, to confuse the issue.”
Even so, Doyle unveils the man behind the dog earlier on in the book than might be deemed ideal. (Bert Coules, again — Doyle “gives away the identity of the murderer quite incidentally. It’s almost thrown away, a long way before the end of the story.”) And some film versions give the show away even earlier than that by casting the same actors (1972’s William Shatner and 1983’s Nicholas Clay) as both Sir Hugo and Stapleton without taking any pains to make the family resemblance a subtle one. Others (the 1988 Granada for one) show too much of the mysterious figure dogging Sir Henry in London to make his identity much of a mystery.
Suspense concerning the hand on the devil-dog’s leash could be enhanced by delaying the revelation of the villain’s identity (although Basil Rathbone in 1939 only risked his client’s life a second time by not sharing his suspicions with Watson until the very end of the film), or, as Denis Smith suggests, by writing in “in a few extra encounters with Frankland and Mortimer, to try to make them appear a little furtive or suspicious, and possibly making a little more of Laura Lyons’s absconding husband.” Efforts along these lines have been attempted — the 1939 and 1959 versions do make token efforts to transform the genial young Mortimer of the book into a scowling, belligerent figure with some secrets to hide, but fail to develop the concept. (Many Holmesian scholars have noted plot inconsistencies in the original — how did the doctor’s spaniel make its way to the heart of the Grimpen Mire? — that suggest to them that Mortimer and Stapleton were in league. And the first Cushing Hound featured a half-hearted attempt to cast suspicion on Frankland, now both an entomologist and a bishop, by introducing a deadly spider into the action. The 1983 Richardson adaptation substitutes a brutal drunkard Geoffrey Lyons, complete with Roylott-like poker-bending strength, for Frankland, but then undercuts the logic of the plot by not only having his wife strangled, thus eliminating any residual belief that unearthly forces might have been at work in Sir Charles’ death, but by showing Lyons snoring downstairs while she is murdered., thus eliminating him as a suspect. Having Laura Lyons killed by Stapleton — but in a way that suggests she fell afoul of the legendary hound — could be a logical amplification of Doyle’s story — after all, the original text has Holmes remarking that she had had a “fortunate escape,” having had Stapleton in her power.
UNPLUMBED DEPTHS —
There are abundant variations on the basic plot that could give a film version a better shot at creating menace, fear and suspense. The supernatural angle could be played up. Intriguingly, one of the few (if not the only) interesting aspects of the Granger Hound is its very ending, when a mournful howl echoes over the moors after Stapleton and his beast have sunk into the Grimpen Mire, suggesting that the curse has not ended after all …
A similar notion was to be the basis of an unmade Keith McConnell Holmes film, The Werewolf of the Baskervilles, which reportedly postulated that the family had been haunted by a lycanthrope all along. Incorporating aspects of the various myths that may have been the “west county legend” Fletcher Robinson recounted to Doyle also could provide new angles that could help. (The Roxburgh Hound does portray the beast of the legend as a loyal pet defending his mistress’s honour, rather than an instrument of satanic forces, but does virtually nothing with this innovation.) Given Holmes’ encyclopedic knowledge, it would not be surprising that a man who kept entries in his commonplace book for vampires would be aware of the Whist Hounds or the Black Dog of Dartmoor, and be able to employ that knowledge to uncover Stapleton’s scheme.
A NEW HOPE? —
Perhaps, despite the pessimism of this column’s subtitle, The Hound is not an unscalable peak. When analyzed, flaw by flaw, the problems with these films should be susceptible to correction. Perhaps we, as the second Hugo Baskerville might have put it, (if he were alive today, and a reader of SHMM), should learn then from this essay not to fear the fruits of these past adaptations, but rather put to use them as a prism to highlight Doyle’s original remarkable act of creation. And when the next version hits the screen, just maybe it will be the product of a Sherlockian Peter Jackson, who could be out there, even as I write, preparing a film that deserves Doyle’s own description of his work, a film that is “a real Creeper.”
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Leonard Picker, an inspector general in New York City, has written on the Master for Publishers Weekly, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and the Baker Street Miscellanea, and is fortunate to be married to someone willing to sit through six straight hours of Hound movies without complaint. He may be contacted at chthompson@jtsa.edu.
