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SCREEN OF THE CRIME

by Kim Newman

This month, I’m looking back at four films which share a title and highlighting several of the less-familiar screen incarnations of the Great Detective…

Sherlock Holmes Die Graue Dame (1937)

Though subtitled Die Graue Dame (The Grey Lady), this German film isn’t a remake of the 1909 Danish film Den Graa Dame (The Grey Lady). The earlier movie, one of a Holmes series starring Viggo Larsen, was an adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles which substituted a lady ghost for the spectral dog. This is quite another thing, and diverges far more from the Doyle template than other German Holmes films of the period like the 1929 and 1937 movies called Die Hund von Baskerville.

Set in an elaborate if stagebound cosmopolitan London somewhere between the British whodunits published in green Penguin books and telefono bianco haut bourgeois melodramas of contemporary Italian cinema, this Sherlock Holmes offers pudgy, cheerful, cigar-smoking detective Jimmy Ward (Hermann Speelmans), who doesn’t seem that much like Holmes, as a hero. Ward’s manservant John (Werner Finck), who sneezes in the dark while they’re waiting for a break-in and alarms the culprit, is even less like Watson. Then, late in the day, it turns out that Ward is Sherlock Holmes after all (as given away by the title), and he puts on a flat cap and takes up a pipe in a way which makes him resemble the sort of Holmes seen in German films (if not Paget illustrations).

A few neat moments (a rogue pretending to be dead in the street to distract a passing policeman and servants while a confederate slips in to rifle for those papers) are staged effectively, but it’s mostly drawing room or nightclub conversations without even the atmospherics of most of the Edgar Wallace-derived krimis. There is a song, belted out in a smoky dive by Ursula Hercking in a mode somewhere between Dietrich and Weill (fishnets, body-stocking with a heart-shape torn out, shoulder bow). The plot involves stolen plans, shady sisters (blonde Trude Marlen, a goodie; dark Elisabeth Wendt, a baddie), poisoned cigarettes, that bit from “A Scandal in Bohemia” where a cry of “fire fire” drives a culprit to reveal their secret safe, Inspektor Brown of Scotland Yard (Ernst Karchow), Mabuse-like spymaster Barnov (Edwin Jurgensen), and coded-as-gay poodle lover Archibald Pepperkorn (Harry Lorenzen). Written by Hans Heuer and Erich Engels, from the Müller-Puzika play Die Tat des Unbekannten; directed by Engels, who also made two Crippen movies, Dr Crippen en Bord (1942) and Dr Crippen Lebt (1958).

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Sherlock Holmes: The Strange Case of Miss Alice Faulkner (1981)

A live performance of William Gillette’s 1901 play, staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival and recorded by HBO for broadcast in a series of taped music and theatre productions called Standing Room Only. Following Broadway success as Dracula, Frank Langella takes another Victorian leading role; Christopher Lee, Jeremy Brett (who took over from Langella on tour with Dracula), and Richard Roxburgh have also pulled off this double, incarnating the great good and evil Supermen of the 1890s as mirror images.

Though he might have been too louche and romantic for Conan Doyle’s Holmes, Langella is well-cast as Gillette’s… the actor-writer, fashioning the sleuth as a star part for himself, blended elements of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” and other stories but shifted emphases to play up the witty banter and have the cerebral hero eventually discover his own emotions. At the end, Holmes does not sacrifice his life to rid the world of the evil Professor Moriarty (George Morfogen) but follows his triumph over his arch-enemy by abandoning his career for a new-found love interest.

In the 1922 John Barrymore silent version of the play, this seems ludicrous, but Gillette writes Holmes’s realisation of the loneliness and coldness of his life with some subtlety. In the coda, Holmes trades on the gratitude heroine Alice Faulkner (Laurie Kennedy) feels to him for saving her life to manipulate her into handing over love letters that might wreck a Royal Engagement (written to her late sister, not her: Gillette couldn’t have got away with making an immoral adventuress like Doyle’s Irene Adler a heroine). Instantly, the detective is ashamed of his own brilliance and resolves to be a better man in a way that means giving up his profession. With audience reaction audible on the soundtrack (the throwaway “elementary, my dear Watson” gets a round of applause) and performances pitched to the back stalls, the thriller aspect doesn’t really translate to television, but the back-and-forth exchanges of pointed insults are amusing and Langella expresses a delight in his own cleverness that’s quite appealing.

Morfogen rolls his eyes and leers evilly as the Napoleon of Crime and Richard Woods blusters in the Nigel Bruce manner as a Dr Watson who has married and settled down, which means he has less to do but also serves as an example to his friend. Tom Atkins of The Fog and Halloween III does a creditable cockney thug accent as Moriarty’s chief bruiser, Susan Clark (who had mixed with Holmes in Murder By Decree) is the femme fatale, Dwight Schultz of The A-Team is a shady character, familiar taffy-faced bit-player William Duell (the shoeshine boy informant in Police Squad!) is a butler, and a twelve-year-old Christian Slater takes the role of Billy the page. “Sebastian Moran” and “Hugo N. Furst” are listed in the credits as playing roles which turn out to be Holmes and Moriarty in traditionally terrible disguises. Produced for the stage by Peter H. Hunt (1776); directed for television by Gary Halvorson (The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland).

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)

This cheapskate, shot-in-Wales knock-off of the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr. film can’t even be bothered to extend any originality on a title—would Sherlock Holmes vs Spring-Heeled Jack or The Mystery of the Whitechapel Dinosaur have used up too much letraset?—and so filmographies are now forever stuck with two 2009 films that go by Sherlock Holmes. It opens during the Blitz, with an aged Watson dictating one final memoir to a Miss Lucy Hudson (Rachael Evelyn) who, implausibly, has never heard of Sherlock Holmes. Equally implausibly, this is one of those “the world is not yet ready to know” cases—which implies that somehow Holmes managed to keep secret a business which winds up with a giant robot dragon laying waste to half of London and setting fire to the Houses of Parliament in 1882. The mystery proper begins with a giant squid wrecking a bullion ship in the English Channel, which prompts Inspector Lestrade (William Huw) to call in Holmes (Ben Syder), who makes a quick deductive diagnosis (acceptably Doylean) which wraps up an autopsy Watson (top-billed Gareth David-Lloyd, from Torchwood) is supposed to perform so the medical man can be available to assist the great detective.

As it happens, Watson’s first job is pointlessly to dangle off a cliff—an incident which somehow tells him the gold is missing from the wreck he doesn’t even see, and though he notices an apparent drowning man in the waves he fails to mention this when he’s hauled to safety. Then, there’s a dinosaur attack in Whitechapel, as a medium-sized CGI tyrannosaur chomps down on a bank clerk who’s trying to pay for a sixpenny knee-trembler with threepence. The beast shows up in a nearby park and chases a fairly unintrepid Holmes-and-Watson through the undergrowth—rather, a camera runs after the fleeing actors to save on the very few effects shots. The case leads to a copper-wire factory, where the dinosaur attacks again (upstairs) and kills someone who was about to divulge useful information. A unique stone on the dead man leads our heroes to lonely Handsworth Castle, near where Holmes grew up (“that explains a lot,” deadpans Watson). There, everything becomes clear and we get a crowded second half.

The villain, who is only called Spring-Heeled Jack in publicity and never so much as stands on tiptoes let alone leaps (which makes this a bust as the first Spring-Heeled Jack film since The Curse of the Wraydons in 1946), turns out to be Holmes’s brother (Dominic Keating), a police inspector retired after being crippled on the job who blames Lestrade for accidentally shooting him in the back (he didn’t) and has manufactured a range of Jules Verne gadgets to help him get revenge. The brother isn’t Doyle’s Mycroft but a new character named Thorpe Holmes, and his mechanical marvels include a steampunk Iron Man suit which means he can clump around and have fights despite being handicapped, the robot dinosaur and squid (no explanations for how he got them to the scenes of crimes unnoticed), a lady automaton (Elizabeth Arends) he intends to have crash Buckingham Palace as a suicide bomber, and two flying machines (the fake dragon and a combination hot air balloon/helicopter) the Holmes Brothers use to duel in the overambitious climax. All this is even more off-model than Guy Ritchie’s Holmes, but considerably less entertaining—as in the same company’s MegaShark vs Giant Octopus or Snakes on a Train, you get only the most half-hearted attempt at delivering on the promise of wild fantastical action.

Syder is much shorter than David-Lloyd, rarely advantageous in a Holmes, and is furthermore a reedy, floppy-haired, unimposing youth with a thin voice—he may give the worst Holmes performance in a seriously-intended talking picture to date (it’s odd that the more physically suitable Keating didn’t get the job). David-Lloyd, the first Welsh Watson since Dudley Moore, gets a bit more action to justify his billing—he wrestles the terminatrix bomb to the ground outside the Palace, though previously he’d taken a shine to her and invited her to the opera (though he has to cry off to go dinosaur-hunting). With the possible exception of Arends as a robot, no one makes much of an effort to be convincing or even interesting. Catriona McDonald is a hefty Mrs Hudson. As for the details, this is a rare film to put 221 on Holmes’s front door—which makes sense—though Caernarvon can’t really run to anything that looks remotely like Victorian Baker Street. In what might conceivably be a Doctor Who in-joke, it turns out that the hero’s real name is Robert, but he uses his middle name because “no one would remember a detective called Robert Holmes.” Written by Paul Bales (The DaVinci Treasure, 100 Million BC, MegaFault), who might once have read a Sherlock Holmes story: he uses that beggar who pesters Watson but turns out to be the detective in disguise bit, but weirdly gives Holmes the Batman-like trait of never using a gun—except when forced to kill his brother to save his best friend—which doesn’t square with the way the Hound of the Baskervilles was killed, for instance. Directed by Rachel Goldenberg (Sunday School Musical). Given that it’s got Sherlock Holmes and dinosaurs, it really ought to be more fun.

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Sherlock Holmes (2011)

George Anton is one of a new breed of essentially amateur filmmaker, making no-budget, non-professional feature-length efforts which get posted to YouTube rather than given even a token commercial release. He is credited on Sherlock Holmes as director, producer, editor, cinematographer and composer—and I’d not be surprised to find out screenwriter “David Wallace” is a pseudonym. Anton’s earlier Dracula (2009) uses very little of the novel and is mostly perhaps-autobiographical stuff about grubbing on the margins of the film industry, but this is a more focused effort and at least tells a proper story—because, as it admits in the end credits, it’s a close adaptation of The Woman in Green (1945), a Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Holmes film scripted by Bertram Milhauser.

The Woman in Green was one of the series of Universal films which brought the Great Detective into then-contemporary London. Though no locale is actually mentioned, Anton’s Sherlock Holmes doesn’t attempt to disguise its American locations (in Los Angeles and Florida) and includes a few cell-phones and contemporary references to establish that this is the present day. The police, represented by Inspector Gregson (Steve Acker), are baffled by a series of murders in which young women have fingers snipped off by a killer with a set of garden secateurs. Holmes (Kevin Glaser) is called in to investigate. While meeting Gregson in a bar, Holmes conveniently spots movie producer Fenwick (Gary Gansel) drinking with the purportedly glamorous Lydia (Kathy Shook)—the dialogue suggests she could be mistaken for her date’s daughter, but she’s a frankly mature and matronly femme fatale—and somehow tumbles that they’re mixed up in the case. Expert hypnotist Lydia is in league with a loudly-dressed Moriarty (Daniel Rios): their racket is to dupe rich men into believing they are murderers by having them wake up after a date with the mesmerist to find severed fingers in their pockets and then blackmailing them. The plot plays out as it does in the 1945 film, but in drab, hotel-like settings and with any trace of action or excitement rigidly excluded.

Glaser’s Holmes is short, chubby, and wears a flat cap (perhaps after the manner of those German Sherlocks of yore) while sucking on an unlit pipe. For some reason, Anton chooses to cut all Rathbone’s deductions and witty remarks so this sleuth is a tiresome bore as well as a poor stand-in for Doyle’s hero. Watson (Charles Simon) is a blithering idiot who gets lines like “there ought to be a law against fat people owning birds” and responds to an assassin disguised as a beggar with “oh bugger off—I’m on a mission of mercy.” Poor as the leads are, they’re often upstaged by walk-on players—like Ada Span as Mrs Hudson—who can barely get their lines out. Even Shook, the default leading lady, mangles her dialogue, referring to “childless tricks” when she means “childish tricks.” The scene transitions are done with comic book pages that peculiarly run the action backwards.

If you’re a Holmes completist or just curious—www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iad2dYsD7c. Anton has also made Robinson Crusoe (2008), Apocalypse Now (2012), The Passions of Jesus Christ (2012), Aliens (2013), Dead on Arrival (2013), Romeo & Juliet (2014), and Men in Suits (2015).

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Kim Newman is a prolific, award-winning English writer and editor, who also acts, is a film critic, and a London broadcaster. Of his many novels and stories, one of the most famous is Anno Dracula.