The faces of Sherlock Holmes: So many, so varied. Some so bewildering.
I’m specifically thinking about Mr. Holmes’ countless incarnations on film.
When you look over the list of actors who’ve taken on the
task of playing Sherlock—and if
you’ve somehow evaded forming your own opinions of The Great Detective—then you
might believe the character to be wildly elastic.
There’s a vast range between Basil Rathbone and Benedict
Cumberbatch; bigger still between Roger Moore (James Bond, The Saint) and Tom
Baker (Rasputin…Doctor Who).
Even the guy who played Max Headroom got several turns as
Holmes early during the previous decade.
The old black-and-white Rathbone films simply don’t speak to
me. Not a smidge.
Rathbone’s Holmes is rigid, distant, and terribly off-putting to
me.
The Basil-era Watson comes across as a daft old uncle slipping
into senility. You can’t fathom the two men actually being able to spend a
simple evening together in their Baker Street digs, let alone having a
constructive partnership as crime fighters.
Surely, that
Watson would drive that Holmes to
murder.
Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, it seems to be there
was more very bad miscasting: venerable but dull old British actors (Peter
Cushing, John Neville) and some bewildering choices including George C. Scott
and “I Dream of Jeanie’s” Larry Hagman (it’s true, look it up!).
Things started to improve, at least from my perspective, in
the late 1970s, with Nicol Williamson’s haunted take on a cocaine-addicted Great
Detective in Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven-Percent Solution.”
Soon after came Christopher Plummer’s rather dashing Holmes
in the under-rated “Murder by Decree.”
In both those iterations, Watson finally got an I.Q.
up-grade courtesy of Robert Duval and James Mason.
In 1984, my definitive Holmes at last arrived in the person
of Jeremy Brett.
Particularly in the early going of his sublime array of
Granada adaptations, Brett for me embodies the Holmes that captivated me on the
page.
Once Mr. Brett passed, it took over a decade of this new
century to give me another Holmes in whom I could invest in and take to my
heart in the person of Benedict Cumberbatch.
We all have our favorite or preferred takes on Holmes and
Watson.
I know some actually prefer Robert Downey, Jr. and Johnny
Lee Miller to Cumberbatch. I don’t get it, but to each his own, right?
When it came time to put my spin on Sherlock Holmes for my
new novel, The Red-Handed League, I was aiming for a synthesis of the younger Jeremy
Brett and the current Cumberbatch versions of Holmes.
Given the chance, how would you portray Holmes and Watson? Who would you be seeing in your mind’s
eye as you tried to restore them to life on the page?
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