Latest 'Holmes' movie sparks homage to previous Holmeses

By: By Susan King | LOS ANGELES TIMES
Published: December 13, 2009

HOLLYWOOD

Sherlock Holmes, the latest incarnation of Arthur Conan Doyle's analytical, cocaine-loving sleuth, opens Christmas Day, starring Robert Downey Jr. as the Baker Street detective and Jude Law as Watson, his cohort in crime-solving.

So it's elementary that the game is afoot to pay homage to previous cinematic Holmeses.

On Monday at the Billy Wilder Theatre, the UCLA Film and Television Archive is screening 1944's The Scarlet Claw and The Spider Woman, which star the most famous celluloid Holmes and Watson: Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

On Tuesday, Lionsgate is releasing the DVD of the 1979 thriller Murder by Decree, with Christopher Plummer and James Mason as the sleuthing duo. From Friday through Dec. 31, the Paley Center for Media Studies in Beverly Hills is presenting "The Blue Carbuncle," a yuletide episode of the respected 1984-94 PBS series Mystery!: Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett. Finally, Turner Classic Movies is celebrating Christmas with its "Holmes for the Holidays" programming, which features 17 Holmes mysteries, including 13 starring Rathbone and Bruce.

Rathbone and Bruce began their stint as Holmes and Watson in 1939 when 20th Century Fox produced two handsome thrillers, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Three years later, the series moved to Universal, where the studio took the sleuths out of the Victorian era and put them in the middle of World War II and the Nazis.

Although Conan Doyle purists generally don't approve of these updated Holmes mysteries, they are still a lot of fun thanks to the chemistry between Rathbone and Bruce and the taut direction of Roy William Neill, who directed the majority of these low-budget Universal productions.

"You have got to love Neill's lighting and his atmosphere in the films," said Jan-Christopher Horak, the head of the University of California, Los Angeles, archive. "They didn't spend a huge amount of time on them, but they look great."

Baby-boomer Horak said he grew up watching these movies.

"To me, Basil Rathbone is Sherlock Holmes," he said. "It was a real career-changing move for Rathbone. He had played mostly villains before that time, but he had the perfect personality to be this slightly acidic, always ironic, articulate, bon-mots-at-the-tip-of-his-tongue-while-he-was-sleuthing character."

Writer-director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) is one Holmes purist who rarely has liked the cinematic versions. In the 1970s, he wrote three Holmes novels that were true to the Conan Doyle canon: The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer and The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution. Meyer adapted the latter for the 1976 film version starring Nicol Williamson as Holmes.

"I suppose I rather like Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,'' Meyer said, referring to the 1970 romantic thriller starring Robert Stephens. "I think it's such an uncharacteristic film for a cynic like Wilder. I think it has this Viennese melancholy romanticism along with his wit."

But for the most part, Meyer said, "when Hollywood tackles Holmes, I think they paint with a very broad and rather insensitive brush. Watson is always portrayed as an idiot, and I never understand why a genius needs to hang out with a buffoon."