Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20 - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 7

SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Kim Newman

Sherlock Holmes

After Arthur Conan Doyle and Sidney Paget, the most important figure in the rise of Sherlock Holmes from one-shot detective novel hero to global icon was actor-author William Gillette. Though Doyle had killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” in 1893, the character remained popular—and Doyle, among others, made several attempts to transfer Holmes (and Watson) to the stage. However, Gillette pulled off the trick—combining elements from several stories (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” “The Greek Interpreter”) along with new-made plot-licks and supporting characters in a script which debuted in 1899. Remembered for his trend-setting performance as Sherlock Holmes, Gillette is often overlooked in his capacity as a major writer involved with the character. Gillette didn’t include Mrs. Hudson in his Sherlock Holmes, replacing her with “Billy the Page” (a role once played by a young Charlie Chaplin). Billy become so much a part of the show (he has more to do than Watson) that Doyle—in what now seems an astonishing admission the franchise had got away from him—later wrote the character into “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” In an exchange of cables, which later pasticheurs have used to justify all manner of mischief, Gillette asked Doyle “may I marry Holmes?” and received the reply “you may marry him or murder him or do anything you like with him.”

Gillette achieved great success in the star role of Holmes, which he played in New York and London. H.A. Saintsbury took over the part when Gillette moved on (and was identified with the role enough to appear in a 1916 film of The Valley of Fear). Gillette returned to the deerstalker and dressing gown for revivals of the play throughout the rest of his life—and even appeared in a radio version. In 1916, Gillette reprised the part in a movie directed by Arthur Berthelet at the Esssanay Company’s Chicago Studios, making his only feature film appearance. A major hit in its day, but also old-fashioned even by the standards of 1916, the film was long thought lost… until the Cinematheque Française discovered a print of the 1919 French release version. This divided the film into four chapters suitable for exhibition run as a serial in the manner of Louis Feuillade’s popular homegrown Fantômas and Judex adventures (in contrast to which, it must have seemed even more mannered). Restored, the film has been screened at festivals around the world with a live musical accompaniment by the pianist Neil Brand (who adds an enormous amount of value to the work). I caught it at the London Film Festival, where it was supported by the very lively short Canine Sherlock Holmes (1912), which involves a couple of other once-famous characters—Hawkshaw the Detective (from Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man, 1863) and E.W. Hornung’s arch-thief Raffles (who is a lot less gentlemanly in this outing)—along with Hawkshaw’s intrepid dog Spot. A BluRay/DVD release is available from Flicker Alley.

Sixty-three-year-old Gillette, returning to a role he’d created in his forties, wisely underplays Sherlock Holmes while everyone around him overacts. Coming to this legendary performance after seeing every other surviving Sherlock is a strange experience: whenever Gillette makes a gesture or pulls a face which evokes what Clive Brook, Eille Norwood, Arthur Wontner or Basil Rathbone did with the role, there’s a little spark of realisation that subsequent actors were following conventions this man invented. Brook, in particular, seems to have been cast in a remake of Sherlock Holmes simply because he resembled Gillette—and several of Rathbone’s ever-changing Holmes hairstyles evoke Gillette’s look. There’s even an early instance of deliberately modifying an established image—Holmes plays with his pipe, but later takes up cigarettes instead. A whole sequence involves his glowing cigar-end in a darkened cellar; the most famous theatrical effect in the play, this gambit is reproduced crudely on film. Despite the clutter of incidents, characters and plots, the thrust of Gillette’s play is that the stiff Holmes falls in love with leading lady Alice Faulkner (Marjorie Kay). Gillette exaggerates Holmes’s upright posture and resolute jaw in the early stretches so there’s more contrast when he unbends a little and begins to pitch woo.

Purists still find this Holmes-in-love angle makes the play a hard-sell revival, and pasticheurs have mostly preferred to have the detective seethe with unexpressed or thwarted passions rather than earn a happy ending. However, Gillette had canny commercial instincts and may have sensed that Holmes would only become a universally popular character if he turned Doyle’s calculating celibate into a deeply repressed romantic whose remoteness might intrigue and excite female audiences (in the 1960s, the unsmiling likes of Ilya Kuryakin and Mr. Spock had the same appeal). Gillette, picking up on one or two moments in Doyle, also senses Holmes’s potential as a comic character. Some of his best bits of business come in moments when he is awkward or embarrassed by his emotions and for once Watson (Edward Fielding) gets to patronise him. The curtain of the play, with Holmes giving up detection for marriage, is as final in its way as falling over a waterfall—which, as we know, wasn’t that final at all—in putting an end to the saga. The Holmes we meet in Sherlock Holmes is an established detective, Watson has moved on from Baker Street and the feud with Moriarty (black-eyed Ernest Maupin) is ongoing. Gillette saw the play as a one-off and wrote a finish which mitigated against sequels—showing how different the Victorian stage was from even the early cinema.

Made in the middle of World War One, if before American entry into the conflict, the 1916 Sherlock Holmes is the only Holmes film made before 1939 to have a period setting. Doyle was still publishing Holmes stories, but outside of the topical “His Last Bow” had opted to stick by Holmes’s retirement in 1903 and set them in the late Victorian period. Filmmakers didn’t cotton to this nostalgic element as quickly as Holmes’s creator did. Note how the recent TV series based on Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels has a contemporary setting rather than stick with the 1980s of the books (longer ago now than the 1890s were in 1916) and no one complained that Will Graham was a man out of time (though a key plot point about home movies had to be dropped). Purely because of the war, the London of the film is explicitly identified as a bygone era, with hansom cabs, fussy diplomats out to squelch scandal among the ruling houses of Europe (Bohemia had a lot more to worry about in 1916 than a philandering king), and outdated clothes (including Holmes’s tweed overcoat and deerstalker). In an alteration to get past the Lord Chamberlain, no-better-than-she-should-be cast-off mistress and blackmailer Irene Adler is dropped—the equivalent character is the deceased sister of irreproachable heroine Alice Faulkner, who has inherited incriminating letters after her sister has been driven to suicide. Alice is so noble she wouldn’t dream of blackmailing the rotter, though she’s not above holding the evidence over his head.

Like the play, the film lurches somewhat from act to act. It probably works better as a serial. Part One involves Alice falling in with a couple of scoundrels, James Larrabee (Mario Majeroni) and his sister Madge (Grace Reals). Part Two has the Larrabees enlist Moriarty to get back at Holmes and includes the Professor’s famous visit to Baker Street. Part Three is the cigar-in-the-cellars escape from a gas trap (which Gillette might have borrowed from Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed Box—Doyle’s own gas trap came in “The Retired Colourman,” written in 1926). Part Four tidies up the plot ends and sets up the happy coupledom curtain. Outside of Gillette, only Maupin makes much of an impression—and here Moriarty is meekly led off by the police rather than getting a spectacular death scene. It has glimpses of muddy streets but (unsurprisingly) no sense of London, while most of the drama takes place indoors with plentiful title cards and stark poses. Nearly a hundred years on, it’s an important find and of more than academic interest—thanks to the lively music and careful restoration, it’s even an entertaining evening’s cultural archaeology and proof that what entertained our great-grandparents still works. Now, if only someone could turn up that H.A. Saintsbury movie…

The Abominable Bride

In the past five years, the media image of Sherlock Holmes—taking in the detective himself, his supporting cast and extended world—has changed more than in over a century of stage, screen, illustration, and radio adaptations. Four separate Holmes franchises—the cinema films directed by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey, Jr., the British television series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, the American television series Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller, and the Russian television series Sherlok Kholms with Igor Petrenko (more on that next issue)—abjure the Gillette-Norwood-Wontner-Rathbone-Cushing-Wilmer-Brett image of a straight-backed, authoritative, incisive, dryly good-humored, heroic genius to present the sleuth as a scruffy, bipolar, tragic-absurd, callous, troubled, high-functioning autistic/recovering drug addict. Even the one-off Mr Holmes, with a more traditional-seeming Ian McKellen, is concerned with the shortfall between the man Holmes seems to be and the person he actually is.

As radical is the way these takes on Doyle focus on Holmes (and Watson) almost to the exclusion of their cases. Mysteries sometimes seem like distractions from storylines more concerned with Holmes’s psychological state and his thorny relationship with the version of him popularised by Watson (which is to say, Doyle). The shift in the direction began as early as Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-per-Cent Solution (1974)—outliers for the 21st century Sherlock—though William Gillette probably kicked it off in 1899 by having Holmes fall in love. Typically, contemporary Holmes franchises stay away from “faithful” adaptations of the original stories—fair enough, since they’ve all been done so often that yet another straight Red-Headed League or Baskerville Hound is scarcely worth the effort. Instead, scripts braid together clues, characters, bits of business, the skeletons of Doyle’s plots, fan fiction-like speculations about secondary characters like Mrs. Hudson and Irene Adler, increasingly complicated layers of metafiction, and kinetic displays of illustrated deduction or steampunk action-adventure. The upshot is a series of plot mazes which allow Holmes and Watson to explore themselves rather than simply find out who did it and how.

So we come to The Abominable Bride—perhaps the most convoluted essay in post-modern Holmesiana imaginable. Debuting on New Year’s Day, it’s a feature-length episode of Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s BBC Sherlock, intended as a stopgap between limited-run series which are getting harder to fit into the actors’ busy schedules. In three sets of three adventures (beginning in 2010), Sherlock has presented Holmes (Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) in contemporary London, ingeniously fitting the consulting detective into a world of mobile phones, the internet, 24-hour surveillance, forensic science, and selfies. Here, Watson is still just back from Afghanistan but with post-traumatic stress disorder and a thrill-seeking danger junkie streak. He chronicles his adventures with Sherlock on a blog. Moriarty (Andrew Scott) is a Joker-like giggling nemesis/dark doppelganger/putative slash fiction love interest. Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) is an ex-secret agent. Irene Adler (Lara Pulver) has a website for sexual services. Crucially, it’s all about Sherlock, as the mercurial Cumberbatch misreads social cues disastrously, turns up naked at Buckingham Palace, squabbles childishly with his spymaster brother (Mark Gatiss), fakes his death and is shocked people are upset by the jape and—at the end of His Last Vow, the series three closer—shoots dead the master blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnusson and is sent on a suicide mission to make up for it.

All this is rushed through in a “previously…” montage at the outset of The Abominable Bride before a timer rolls back and we meet an alternative version of this Holmes and Watson in a Victorian setting. There’s a brief remake of the first episode (A Study in Pink) with a setting more closely approximating Doyle’s, populated by people who are Victorian versions of the modernised versions of Victorian characters. Gatiss is buried in a Robert Morleyish fat suit as a Mycroft intent on eating himself to death for a bet, Una Stubbs’s Mrs. Hudson is sulking that Watson never gives her anything to say in his Strand magazine stories, Mary Watson is a simmering suffragette who resents being neglected by her adventure-seeking husband and Lestrade (Rupert Graves) is back to being a grumpy plodder. Only after all this do we get a story nugget—spun out of Doyle’s throwaway mention of Ricoletti and his Abominable Bride (the aluminium crutch has gone missing)—about the veiled and painted Emilia Ricoletti (Natasha O’Keeffe) who publically shoots herself before murdering her abusive husband. Though Emilia is demonstrably now as dead as Jacob Marley, her spectre keeps popping up to kill a series of unlikeable men, which tips the viewer off as to which big issue is going to be raised and then dropped before the show takes another direction and reverts to its usual business of getting under Holmes’s skin.

With the widespread acceptance of the series’ take on Holmes, it was a clever notion to put all the characters into Doylean dress. Even forensic bods Molly (Louise Brealey) and Anderson (Jonathan Aris), essentially inventions of Moffat and Gatiss, show up with false whiskers and starched collars. Some moments of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are paraphrased as Holmes complains about the way Watson has misrepresented him in his stories—with the stinging comeback from his biographer that he has had to work hard to depict “an unprincipled drug addict as some sort of gentleman hero.” In common with Moffat’s tenure as the showrunner of Doctor Who, there’s a strange insistence on having characters usually depicted as altruistic good guys taken off their pedestal as their best friends repeatedly—in long dialogue scenes—tell them what shits they are. Maybe so, but the way modern culture is uncomfortable with the notion of friendship is oddly disturbing. In recent years, many characters traditionally thought of as fast friends have been shown as dysfunctional couples at best and arch-enemies at worst: Batman and Superman, Napoleon and Ilya, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Iron Man and Captain America.

For an hour or so, The Abominable Bride is dazzling. Like its manic-depressive hero, it has great highs as writers and cast seize opportunities to enjoy themselves and lows as they have to get back to a story no one cares much about and which (spoiler) turns out not to be happening at all. It offers more in-jokes than a generation of scholars will be able to catalogue—note the way Holmes assumes a Paget-like ruminative pose which also evokes the way Steve Ditko drew Dr. Strange, the character Cumberbatch is currently playing. Five orange pips pop out of an envelope, and a monstrous regiment of women manifests (Lily Clarke is a great new addition as the Watsons’ know-all maid). The goings get gothic with black Klan hoods and Latin chants and creeping through Hammer Films sets. It’s as much comforting fun as a BBC holiday ghost story of yore. But it can’t last.

A few anachronisms (“a virus in the data”) hint this isn’t a straight historical adventure after all, and the penny drops that all this has been Cumberbatch/Sherlock high on a cocktail of many drugs retreating into his “memory palace” (a feature of the Hannibal franchise too) to explore an unsolved case from the 1880s that bears on the quandary raised in the last minutes of His Last Vow (how can someone blow their brains out and survive to commit more crimes?). So, not only has Sherlock been puzzling out the solution to the abominable bride business while zonked out in a private jet but has masochistically imagined versions of all his friends being horrid to him (and each other), exposing all his failings as a human being and as a detective (he takes the case of a threatened husband in his imagination and then stands back while the odious client is murdered). He even realises this was irrelevant to the Moriarty case too, which means this runaround won’t impact on the ongoing story.

Back in the memory palace/dreamworld/holodeck, Holmes has his imagined versions of Watson and Moriarty join him at an (impressive) waterfall for another group therapy session which will end with someone (or everyone) taking the plunge. Here, the writers acknowledge we’ve been here before—in Sherlock and in every other incarnation of the stories all the way back to “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House”—and that we will be here again as endless variations on the conflict and the outcome play out over and over. Like so much else in The Abominable Bride, it’s brilliant, clever and funny—but feels like a cheat if you tuned in expecting a story.

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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.