Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 11 - Jack Grochot - Страница 5

SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker

The Devil’s Feet: The Cornish Horror On TV and Radio

For many admirers of the Canon—whether diehard Sherlockians or just casual fans—the most memorable passage in the sixty stories is Watson’s description of witnessing the terror of The Hound of the Baskervilles first-hand (“A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.”) But for evocation of horror, there’s another, less-well-known passage that gives Stapleton’s demon dog a run for its money—after all, Watson was expecting to see some type of canine at the time:

“I had hardly settled in my chair before I was conscious of a thick, musky odour, subtle and nauseous. At the very first whiff of it my brain and my imagination were beyond all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul. A freezing horror took possession of me. I felt that my hair was rising, that my eyes were protruding, that my mouth was opened, and my tongue like leather. The turmoil within my brain was such that something must surely snap. I tried to scream and was vaguely aware of some hoarse croak which was my own voice, but distant and detached from myself. At the same moment, in some effort of escape, I broke through that cloud of despair and had a glimpse of Holmes’ss face, white, rigid, and drawn with horror—the very look which I had seen upon the features of the dead.”

This section, with its air of Lovecraftian menace (published six years before HPL’s first story, “The Alchemist,”) is, of course, from “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” which Doyle himself ranked as his ninth favorite short story. As with Hound, its power stems from the introduction of a supernatural element into the hyper-rational world of the Master. And the murderer must surely rank as one of the most sadistic in the Canon. The plot framework is familiar and easily summarized, although a bare bones description does not remotely do justice to the story.

SPOILER ALERT—If you haven’t read the story, please stop and do so before proceeding—you will regret it otherwise, as an analysis of treatments of it require discussion of the solution.

It’s 1897, and Holmes has given in to concerns about his “iron constitution,” leading to a rare vacation with Watson in Cornwall. The setting affords Watson a prime opportunity to display his descriptive chops:

It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim humour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest and protection.

In that remote part of the world, Holmes’s researches into the Chaldean roots of the Cornish language are interrupted, and his vacation becomes a busman’s holiday. Tragedy has struck the Tregennis family, leaving Brenda dead, and her brothers Owen and George raving mad. The sole unscathed family member, their sibling Mortimer, had left them affably playing cards, with the only portent of what was to come a brief glimpse by George of an unknown something moving in the bushes outside the dining room window. And soon, the killer strikes again, leaving Mortimer also amongst the dead, on his face the same look of fear that marked his sister, and leading the local vicar to believe his parish is “devil-ridden.” Displaying his typical brilliance, despite the strains to his system, Holmes deduces that Mortimer used the powder of rax pedis diaboli, devil’s foot root, an obscure African plant, burnt in the fireplace, to remove Owen, George and Brenda from the scene. Holmes, less brilliantly, had tried the powder out, with almost fatal consequences for him and his Boswell. When Brenda’s love, Dr. Leon Sterndale, who brought the devil’s foot back with him from his travels, realizes what has happened, he achieves his own form of justice, one that, under the circumstances, Holmes and Watson endorse.

One of the many benefits of being a Sherlockian in 2014 is the easy availability of audio and video adaptations of the Canon that were lost to earlier generations. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found references, in books like Michael Pointer’s The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes, to Arthur Wontner and the Rathbone/Bruce radio series almost as tantalizing as the good doctor’s notorious untold tales. But today, much is accessible, and a recent viewing of the BBC’s first Sherlock Holmes series, starring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock, on DVD, prompted an assessment of how different writers have adapted the Tregennis case.

Eille Norwood played Holmes 47 times on screen in a series of silent films from Stoll Pictures; the second, from 1921 (as part of a series titled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) was “The Devil’s Foot” (hereafter, just Devil). You can find the half-hour adaptation by Googling it; given Norwood’s mark on the role in the era before the talkies, it’s worth the time. The story is, naturally enough, compressed. The first title card sets the stage, with Watson reminding his companion, “Don’t forget, Holmes, you’re down here for a rest. Thank goodness there won’t be any work for you here!” The pair then discover the Tregennises themselves—here all three, not just Brenda, are dead, perhaps because conveying the brothers’s condition from the original—“singing snatches of songs and gibbering like two great apes”—was too hard to pull off in a silent film. There are some other minor changes—it is Holmes, not Watson, who pulls his friend to safety from the idiotic experiment Holmes undertakes to test the poison powder first-hand, but the general contours are included, even the clue of the gravel. The most jarring aspect, for me, was the inappropriate soundtrack, with jaunty music even at scenes of tension, and no segments where the instruments enhanced, rather than detracted from, the tension and suspense. And it’s an uphill battle almost a century later to find a silent drama engaging.

1931 saw the first radio adaptation, starring Richard Gordon and Leigh Lovell, one that I have not yet been able to trace. But the second-oldest, from 1936, with Louis Hector and Harry West as Holmes and Watson, was easily locatable online. It’s hard to tell if audio degradations over time have taken their toll, but the voices are an obstacle to engagement. Hector, in particular, sounds more like W.C. Fields to my ear than John Gielgud. This version opens traditionally, with Watson setting the stage—Holmes’s breakdown—before providing a word picture of the gloomy setting for their retreat from London. Perhaps guilding the lily a bit, the radio play’s writer has Holmes point out that the treacherous bay called Mounts Bay in the Canon is known by the locals as “the Devil’s Cauldron,” and that the region was rumored to have been a center for satanic worship. The “strange monuments of stone” from the original are turned into remnants of a temple to the Dark One, who fled into the bay after its destruction, and whose “hoof-beats” could still be heard on moonless nights. The additions can’t help put me in mind of the cinematic legend that a version of The Taming of Shrew was credited to Shakespeare with “additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” Doyle’s more subtle descriptions are far more effective. Another problem is the climactic experiment scene, with Watson, instead of being possessed by a “freezing horror,” narrating what he sees as if a play-by-play announcer, in what would seem to be an inevitable challenge for any audio adaptation. The adapter also has Sterndale identify the killer of his love to Holmes, who reacts, surprisingly, with surprise—when you eliminate one of two viable suspects, whomever remains, however probable, must be the guilty party. (See below for why Holmes should have regarded Sterndale as a suspect in all three Tregennis deaths).

Next to tackle the Tregennis case was the Sherlock Holmes for generations.

Basil Rathbone, in a radio play costarring Nigel Bruce as the lovable if unCanonical bumbler of a Watson. Sadly, I was not able to track down a recording, but surely Rathbone’s iconic Holmes voice, with its air of superiority, made it a memorable one; and the other scripts for the long-running series adapted from the Canonical 60 took relatively few liberties. After Rathbone tired of the role, Bruce partnered with Tom Conway on the radio, and in 1947, the pair tackled Devil.

Conway does an excellent Rathbone, and by extension, an excellent Holmes. The script has some elements in common with the Hector version, e.g., the Devil’s Cauldron, not too surprising with Edith Meiser at work on both series, and lifts whole sections intact from the 1936 version. Its Sterndale is only a neighbor of the Tregennis family, not a relative. Just two years later, Devil was again on the air, with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley in the leads. Like Conway, Stanley’s rendition of the Master owed a lot to Rathbone’s. The episode used a standard series device—presenting as prologue a climactic scene—here Holmes and Watson racing up some stairs in response to maniacal laughter by a man chanting “The Devil’s Foot! The Devil’s Foot!” After the sponsor’s message, the listener actually hears all the Tregennis family in life, playing cards, and the scene includes Mortimer’s reported observation of a lurking thing; hearing this first-hand makes more of an impact—the victims are characters the listener has encountered, and there’s no reason at that stage—pre-horror—to be skeptical of Mortimer’s account. That choice illustrates the range of options a creative adaptor has to enhance a Holmes story for the ear; for example, Bert Coules brilliantly opened his “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” with the murder already having occurred.

Unsurprisingly, Sherlockian Michael Hardwick’s 1962 radio play was the most faithful to date, in keeping with the overall approach of the series featuring Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley. Unlike the other radio productions mentioned above, Watson’s chilling depiction of the ill-conceived experiment was conveyed directly, with Shelley more than capable of evoking the terror his character felt at the horrific effects of the drug on his mind. And this productions’s Mortimer actually comes across as a sympathetic victim at the outset, which better sets up the eventual reveal of his villainy. Hardwick’s choice in making minimal changes to the text is validated by the finished product.

1965 saw the first video adaptation in over four decades, as part of the BBC shows featuring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock. It’s a pretty straightforward version, and one of the best in a sometimes too low-key series. It opens with the disconcerting images of the stricken Tregennis brothers and their dead sister, with wide-eyed Owen and George looking into the camera, gibbering out of their wits. This choice, in contrast with the Jeremy Brett version discussed below, plunges the viewer straight into the story, before introducing Holmes and Watson. The writer—Giles Cooper—takes advantage of every reasonable opportunity to supplement the story. Holmes checks what was visible in the bushes from the outside as well as from within. He’s given a pawky quip to deliver at Watson’s expense when the latter suggests the person in their cottage was just the housekeeper, Mrs. Pascoe—“not unless she’s taken up smoking cigars.” Watson has some valuable investigative work to do—interviewing the vicar to confirm Sterndale’s statement that he’d wired him about the disaster, and after encountering Mortimer as well, he’s able to help the case by sharing his impressions with Holmes, who clearly values them. It’s Watson who experiments with a lamp to provide the baseline for determining when the one in Mortimer’s sitting-room must have been lit. The viewer sees how exactly Holmes deduces that Mortimer dressed in haste on his last morning—a wrongly-buttoned waistcoat. The experiment scene is creepy with a bulging-eyed, crazy-looking Wilmer conveying the dramatic effects of the drug on his system.

Disappointingly, Cooper decided to tamper with one of the best-known exchanges in the whole Canon, as Holmes speaks to Sterndale in the final scene:

“You then went to the vicarage, waited outside it for some time, and finally returned to your cottage.”

“How do you know that?”

“I followed you.”

“I saw no one.”

“That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.”

The punchline, encapsulating the endearing arrogance of the character, is changed here, with Wilmer stating, “Quite understandable” in response to Sterndale’s bafflement. Viewers may not share that characterization as the prolonged scenes of Holmes shadowing the explorer are short on actual stealth by the sleuth.

The richness of the source material made the 1988 telefilm for the Granada series one of Jeremy Brett’s best outings. The opening is a bit of a spoiler—someone is seen breaking into a house, locating a vial as African drums play on the soundtrack, and pouring some of its contents into a container, leaving little mystery for a newcomer as to the cause of the Tregennis’s sufferings. It’s not clear why writer Gary Hopkins made that choice, which reminds me of the 1983 Hound, where a scene of Laura Lyons being strangled midway through removes any doubt that the scourge of the Baskervilles is an ordinary man. Edward Hardwicke’s capable Watson pegs Mortimer a liar early on for claiming to have a blood disorder, which further vitiates the whodunit aspect of the story. Hopkins is more subtle elsewhere in tipping his hand; he shows Mortimer’s version of events, with his brother looking past him out the window into the bushes, but rather than show Mortimer’s false report of seeing something moving, he simply shows Mortimer narrating that part.

This is perhaps the most-familiar version for today’s Sherlockians, and it’s memorable for three things. Holmes’s time alone recuperating is linked to his drug use, and the cocaine addict buries a syringe in the sand to signify his having kicked the dangerous habit—this is done well in advance of the experiment, and is not, as would have been contrived, a reaction to it. The experiment sequences features a nightmarish vision for Holmes, complete with images of Eric Porter’s Moriarty, and a bleeding Holmes. But it’s Holmes’s recovery from the toxic smoke that caused the most comment—coming to his senses, Brett’s Holmes yells out, “John!” This was apparently an ad lib by Brett, who noted:

“Well, Holmes is semiconscious at the time, right? It really was the one time that he could call him John. I think in extremis he might have said ‘John.’ It gives another slant to it. I slipped in ‘John’ just to show that, underneath it all, there was just something more than what they say, that Holmes is all mind and no heart.”

Damien Thomas’s Mortimer is a bit too shifty-eyed from the outset, but Freda Downie’s Mrs. Porter—the Tregennis’s housekeeper, whose recollections of the fateful night—and the horror of her discovery the next morning—are presented, and especially Denis Quilley’s Sterndale are outstanding. (Gary Hopkins’s recollections of his experience writing the script can be viewed online in a video entitled The Case of the Youngest Pen.)

As always, the BBC radio Holmes, with the ever-brilliant Clive Merrison and Michael Williams, enables me to end on a high note. Bert Coules opens with a depiction of the stress Holmes was under before his forced break in Cornwall—wrapping up a three-month case against an unnamed gang, and collapsing as a result of combining malnutrition with illness and a resort to the needle. Mortimer, the vicar and Sterndale are all introduced well before the first poisoning. The horror is conveyed with the sound of laughter, increasing in volume before degenerating into wild, despairing shrieks. Holmes’s nightmare features the baying of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and manic laughter. The guest cast is solid, with Patrick Allen (Granada’s Colonel Moran) as Sterndale, and Coules adds a joke Holmes makes at Sterndale’s expense (when Watson wonders at his presence in England, Holmes speculates that, “perhaps he’s finally succeeded in killing all the lions on the continent.”). All in all, it is a perfect translation of the story to the form, and likely to remain as the gold standard for the foreseeable future.

Now, back to Sterndale himself as a viable suspect; a cynical reader of the story would note that he alone of the Tregennis clan (“upon my Cornish mother’s side I could call them cousins,” he tells Holmes) survives the action intact, and no other heir to the estate is identified in the text. Brenda is not around to confirm his account of their relationship, and Sterndale was much better placed than Mortimer to know of the effects of the Devil’s Foot root, and to use it. Perhaps some future adapter will choose to add this theory to the plot, even if just for Holmes to consider and discount it, as he reasonably would have.

Lenny Picker, who is always seen when he follows anyone (not that that is a regular occurrence), writes regularly for Publishers Weekly, and can be reached at lpicker613@gmail.com.