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SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker

The Adventures of the Six Napoleons…of Crime

Whatever else Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows does, it deserves credit for enabling a return to movie prominence of one of the all-time great villains and, arguably, the third most interesting Canonical character, who makes a strong impression all out of proportion to his very limited time on-screen. Watson, our trusted eyes and ears, only sees him twice, but his impact on the Good Doctor’s life could hardly have been greater. I refer, of course, to Professor James Moriarty, the ne plus ultra of arch-enemies, a genius who is “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected” in the London of 1891. But as intriguing a character as Moriarty is, filmmakers using him as the main bad guy have almost always had to depart from one of the most remarkable aspects of his criminality.

It’s always best to return to fundamentals, so let’s revisit Holmes’s (apparently)1 first description of his intellectual equal in “The Final Problem.”

He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected.

That passage tells us why it is if not actually impossible, it’s highly improbable for the writers of TV or movie pastiches to stay faithful to one of his most unique qualities. Remember: “He sits motionless,” “He does little himself. He only plans.” Taken at face value, Moriarty is not, as he’s popularly labeled, Holmes’s evil twin. His armchair malevolence is really the mirror-image of the Canon’s great sedentary collection of grey cells, and the inspiration for Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes. But it would take an extremely gifted writer to make an armchair vs. armchair battle of wits gripping, and even such an author would find translating such words on the page (or e-reader screen) to dialogue and moving images daunting.

Similarly, Moriarty’s immobile inhabiting of the center of his web is also nearly-impossible for a pastiche. The Canonical Moriarty has multiple layers insulating him from culpability—a concept brilliantly realized in Bert Coules’s flawless adaptation of “The Final Problem” for radio—where Holmes compares the Moriarty organization to a pyramid, with the Professor at the apex, who has dealings only with the nine members of his High Table. But having the main bad guy only seen issuing orders to his minions isn’t a recipe for dramatic conflict. All of which is to say that it would be a tough sell for studios and audiences alike to have a Moriarty who just sits and thinks at the center of his gang.

If the frenetic previews of Game of Shadows, which contain action sequences similar to those in the first film, are a reliable barometer, they suggest that Jared Harris’s Professor will be mixing it up physically with Downey’s energetic detective.

But if the latest Moriarty ends up striking viewers as less-than-Canonical (hopefully a judgment that takes into account all of his scenes, not just the presumed fight ones), there is ample precedent for a movie Napoleon of Crime who is active in the field, which, I contend, is a necessary departure from the Canon. In the interests of presenting depth rather than breadth, (and justifying this column’s intended-to-be-clever title), I will look at only six predecessors to Harris in essaying the role. Limiting coverage to film and TV portrayals excludes two of the most memorable ones—Orson Welles, in the Gielgud/Richardson radio series of the 1950s, and Michael Pennington, in the standout Merrison/Williams complete audio Canon of the 1990s—but the scripts they benefitted from adhere closely to the language of “The Final Problem.” That advantage would make comparing them to the film versions like comparing apple pips to orange pips.

Basil Rathbone’s first of three different Moriartys, George Zucco in 1939’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, remains one of my personal favorites, and not just because the film was the first Holmes one I’d seen.

The epigraph sets the stage for a movie where the Holmes-Moriarty duel is front and center. The viewer is treated to an excerpt of Holmes’s journal, while a haunting tune, that would later prove a key to a murder mystery, plays in the background: “In all my life I have encountered only one man whom I can truthfully call the very Genius of Evil—Professor Moriarty. For eleven years he has eluded me. All the rest who have opposed him are dead. He is the most dangerous criminal England has ever known.”

(In yet another inexplicable, unnecessary departure from Canon—albeit less egregious than tampering with the dog in the nighttime classic line in the Christopher Plummer Silver Blaze—the signed entry is dated 1894, three years after the Reichenbach duel of the Canon.)

This opening spells out explicitly the immensity of the challenge before Holmes, who has tried to bring the professor to book for over a decade2, a reasonable extrapolation from the Final Problem’s duration of the battle—“For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it.” And the first scene gets right to it—we see a bearded and bespectacled Moriarty in the dock for murder, acquitted moments before Holmes rushes in too late to present his proof that the crucial alibi—giving a lecture before numerous members of the Royal Society, is a fabrication. (Sherlockian film historians have revealed that the explanation for how such an alibi could have been faked was included in the original script, but this is a case where speculating about how Moriarty pulled it off is better than reading what the writers actually came up with.)

We should stop here to note that the Canonical Moriarty would seem to never need an alibi—he’s a planner, not an executioner, or as T.S. Eliot put it in “Macavity, the Mystery Cat,” “And whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!” He wouldn’t get his hands bloody—one of the unresolved issues for me from the Canon is why the Professor, who is not a physically imposing man, and who knew of Holmes’s self-defense prowess, resorted to hand to hand combat, when some remnants of his organization who had escaped the net could have been utilized.

But what Edwin Blum and William Drake’s screenplay—billed as based on Gillette’s play, but apart from naming one of the Professor’s henchman Bassick, resemblances are relatively few—demonstrates is that even such a departure can work when the spirit of the confrontation is preserved. And the scene where a freed Moriarty offers Holmes a cab-ride back to Baker Street is one of the high points of all Sherlockian cinema. Listen to Rathbone’s Holmes: “You’ve a magnificent brain, Moriarty. I admire it. I admire it so much I’d like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society.” Some of the dialogue is lifted straight from “The Final Problem”’s Baker Street encounter. The writers cleverly make Moriarty echo Holmes’s sentiments from “The Final Problem”—during their cab ride together, Moriarty says that “once [he’s] beaten and ruined [Holmes], I’ll retire,” reinforcing the notion that the two men are two sides of the same coin3. Moriarty also displays his hubristic scheming brilliance by telling his adversary that he will “pull off the most incredible crime of the century,” right under Holmes’s nose, a boast that he comes very close to realizing.

That sophisticated, layered plot does have Moriarty as a hands-on criminal, but what choice did Drake and Blum have? To dilute the power of the struggle by introducing an interesting wearer of criminal boots on the ground would lessen the impact of the conflict. Zucco is widely considered one of the best-ever Moriartys, capable of conveying menace with just a subtle facial expression or slight change in intonation, an appraisal that makes up for the ignominy of the actor’s being billed after the boy playing Billy the Page.

The shift of the Rathbone/Bruce series to a contemporary setting put an extra burden on the writers of movies with Moriarty as the villain. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) has Moriarty working with the Nazis, and personally participating in the attempted abduction of an Allied scientist. Lionel Atwill, who was a nicely-creepy Dr. Mortimer in the 1939 Hound, has much less to work with than Zucco, and isn’t given an interesting crime to plan. If his character was renamed Lysander Starr, not much would be different. Substitute Atwill for Zucco in The Adventures, and his portrayal would be more highly regarded.

Henry Daniell (Rathbone’s personal favorite Moriarty, by the way) fares somewhat better in The Woman In Green (1945). A desperate Scotland Yard turns to Holmes to solve the Finger murders, apparently-random atrocities that reawaken fears from the Ripper’s autumn of terror. In a variation of the pretext the Canonical professor used to get Watson out of the way in Meiringen, Daniell’s Moriarty has the doctor lured away with a bogus claim of a medical emergency.

Once he’s done so, he and Holmes have a genteel verbal sparring match, with memorable dialogue lifted straight from “The Final Problem”—

“All that I have to say has already crossed your mind.”

“Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”

This Moriarty uses more human pawns to achieve his ends than Atwill’s, but that fidelity to the organizational model of the Canon means that there are fewer scenes of Holmes and Moriarty together than would be ideal. He does expose his liberty and his life by not remaining at a safe remove at the climax even without the (apparent) necessity the Canonical Professor had because his organization is in tatters. As with Atwill, Daniell is hampered by the script.

A discussion of the next big-screen Moriarty—Hans Sonker’s Professor in 1962’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace—must wait a future column on Worst Sherlock Holmes Films Ever, one which, as editor Marvin Kaye has convinced me, the world is not yet prepared for.4 And while Laurence Olivier, from 1976’s The Seven Percent Solution, is the most noteworthy actor to play Moriarty on screen, Nicholas Meyer’s revisionist take on the character makes discussion of the character’s criminality moot.

So, we’ll jump ahead to 1988, the next time the Professor was in a movie—the unsuccessful farce, Without A Clue. The usually-excellent Paul Freeman, still best-known for his René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is in the same boat as Olivier to some extent. His character is merely a plot device in a movie where murder is played for laughs. In contrast to Zucco’s Moriarty, who’s present from the get-go, Freeman’s Moriarty doesn’t appear until a quarter of the movie has passed. His character gets his hands bloody, and delegates only the most menial chores to his unprepossessing henchmen. This places him in the vulnerable center of the action when the authorities close in on a counterfeiting operation. And it’s hard to imagine the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid ending up in the same fix as does Freeman’s character at the end.

The short-lived, promising, if flawed, Ian Richardson series of television films fell victim to the popularity of Jeremy Brett, but at the outset, Ian McKellen was mentioned as a possible Moriarty. The original concept for an incorporation of the Napoleon of Crime into the series led to one of the most offbeat, ostensibly, straight portrayals—that of Anthony Andrews in 1990’s TV film, Hand of a Murderer (also released as The Napoleon of Crime), written by Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter for Richardson’s Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The movie opens in 1900, with Edward “The Equalizer” Woodward’s Holmes outdoing Rathbone’s. He’s not only gotten Moriarty convicted of murder, but has helped the Professor end up on the gallows (while apparently leaving the Professor’s organization unscathed.) But Holmes isn’t seen before Moriarty, which is what I believe to be a first. Of course, for the story to continue, the execution doesn’t come off, as the result of several contrivances, including Holmes’s absence, and Scotland Yard’s understaffing. Lestrade shuts the barn door after the Professor has fled, setting 300 officers on his trail, though they would have been better-deployed at the gallows.

The script’s failings need not all be enumerated here, but Andrews, whose character is given a love-interest, plays the Professor as a smug, mugging-for-the-camera Victorian Joker as interpreted by Jack Nicholson a year earlier, rolling his eyes and chewing the scenery at every opportunity. Pogue does play at least unconscious homage to The Woman In Green twice, including a scene where Moriarty’s attractive henchwoman mesmerizes someone, and using the same there’s-an-ill-patient-in-need-of-help ploy to get Watson out of the way for a recreation of the Baker Street confrontation, here, alas, devoid of any impact or power. Although “The Final Problem” and The Valley of Fear do not speak to Moriarty’s displays of emotion, there is every reason to believe that in this area, too, he was Holmes’s counterpart.

Thus, Andrews’s Moriarty’s loss of temper during an interrogation is out of character for the Canonical figure; Pogue has his Professor state that “sometimes, rage overwhelms me.” Having Moriarty also be a user of cocaine could have been a nice touch if the plot emphasized the ways in which he mirrors Holmes, but in the absence of such emphasis, it’s just a throwaway detail, as is the Professor’s use of disguise. The ending is as reliant on contrivances as the opening, with the Professor conveniently failing to post guards at his headquarters, an unintended parallel to the unwise police manpower allocation at the gallows.

(DVD-viewing is not this movie’s friend, as the ability to freeze an image reveals that a newspaper report of Holmes’s death is buried in the middle of an article on Venezuela!)

It is always good to end on an upbeat note, and fortunately, one is provided by the Granada TV series adaptation of “The Final Problem.” The script adheres closely to the Canon, and benefits from an addition to the previous aired episode, “The Red-Headed League.” That story ends with the revelation that Moriarty was behind John Clay’s scheme, providing a nice set-up for what was then considered the series’ finale. And the insertion of the Professor into other Canonical stories has a solid basis in the originals. One of the all-time best scholarly essays on the Canon, Robert Pattrick’s Moriarty Was There (fortunately reprinted in 2011’s The Grand Game Volume I), ingeniously picks up on the curious incident of a missing letter s to deduce Moriarty’s hand behind “The Red-Headed League,” and “The Five Orange Pips,” among others.

The John Hawkesworth script also utilizes the idea first advanced by Edward F. Clark, Jr. in 1963’s “Study of an Untold Tale,” that Moriarty’s attempt to steal the Mona Lisa constituted one of the areas where Holmes foiled Moriarty.

And that script was well-served by the standout cast, including the most-faithful-to-the-Canon Professor in the person of Eric Porter, who mastered the reptilian oscillation Holmes chillingly described to Watson. Visually, Porter is the closest fit yet to Sidney Paget’s rendition of the character. And his Baker Street battle of words with Holmes sets a standard that will be hard for future adaptations to match. None of the other five Napoleons of Crime covered here come close to Porter’s ability to convincingly portray a criminal mastermind whose wedding of sophisticated organization to villainy made him the adversary for the Great Detective.

The Ritchie films follow the Granada series in one respect: having Moriarty as a shadowy, behind-the-scenes figure in the first film, before putting him front-and-center in Game of Shadows, adds menace and significance to the character. The way the Professor is portrayed there will renew the debate about where this series adheres to and departs from the spirit, and the details, of the original.

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Lenny Picker, who also reviews and writes for Publishers Weekly, founded the Queens scion society, the Napoleons of Crime. Of his work for that society, it can be accurately said that he did little himself. He still hopes to someday read the great Holmes-Moriarty novel that fleshes out their pre-Final Problem duel. He can be reached via his wife’s email, <chthompson@jtsa.edu>.

1 Squaring Watson’s reaction to Holmes’ account of Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” with his familiarity with the criminal in The Valley of Fear, has challenged Sherlockians for almost a century.

2 And in a more restrained manner than the movie ads—“The Struggle of Super-Minds in the Crime of the Century!”

3 Along the same lines, the script has Moriarty deduce from the presence of a spider’s web on a watering can that his servant has lied to him.

4 I don’t remember discouraging Lenny from writing such a column, but I have a poor memory. At any rate, I will certainly welcome such a column, should Lenny decide to write it for us.—MK