Sherlock’s home

Scores of actors have played Sherlock Holmes since C. H. E. Brookfield’s first stage appearance at the Royal Court in 1893. Everyone has a favourite. There are sex symbols of the big and small screen (John Barrymore and Benedict Cumberbatch). There are clubbable types with bags of English manner (Clive Brook and Peter Cushing). There are imperious action men (Basil Rathbone and Ian Richardson), charming comics (Vasily Livanov) and a right laugh who bring tears to your eyes (Michael Caine). There is the original stage and silent screen icon (William Gillette). There are Danes (Viggo Larsen), Danes (Otto Lagoni) and more Danes (Lauritz Olsen), who dabbled with the case files in the early days of cinema. There are voices from radio dramas (Orson Welles, Cedric Hardwicke and Robert Hardy) and The Voice (John Gielgud). And there will always be the much-missed Jeremy Brett, whose incarnation of Holmes dominated the televised British mystery genre between 1984 and 1994.

Today the British actor Eille Norwood is a less widely known Sherlock Holmes, but between 1921 and 1923 he starred in forty-five episodes across three series for Stoll Pictures (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1921; The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1922; and The Last Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1923), as well as two feature-length films (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1921; and The Sign of Four, 1923). The BFI acquired the full catalogue in 1938. For years a handful of episodes have been available as scruffy DVDs, but the institute is slowly restoring them all. On October 16 silent cinephiles and Holmes addicts were treated to three episodes accompanied by a memorable live score at Alexandra Palace: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Golden Pince-Nez and The Final Problem.

The episode selection for the launch of one of the BFI’s most significant holdings is, to a certain extent, unsurprising. This silent Scandal in Bohemia will not be as titillating to today’s audiences as Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s Cumberbatch-starring BDSM upgrade from 2012, but Doyle’s tale is the closest Holmes ever gets to a conventional romance. As far as The Final Problem is concerned, a Holmes night without Professor James Moriarty, “the Napoleon of crime”, is unthinkable – like drinking vintage champagne without a side of seven-per-cent solution. The Golden Pince-Nez also engages the “evil professor” motif, but the lurid Russian political background of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original story is missing from the 1922 screen adaptation, directed by George Ridgwell. Perhaps the establishment prudes on the British Board of Film Classification forced the film-makers to cut the foreign material. After all, by the spring of 1922, when the film was released, Doyle’s nihilists had been replaced by something far worse in the eyes of the middle-class gatekeepers of British popular culture. The loss of this context renders the screen tale little more than a domestic procedural.

Despite claims that Stoll Pictures produced some of the more faithful adaptations of the canon, they are a curiously bland mixture, having diluted much of Doyle’s rich contextual detail. Uprooted from his late-Victorian milieu, Norwood’s Holmes is deposited in 1920s London; automobiles have replaced horse-drawn hansom cabs and the women, with their shingled hair and shapeless dresses, are in desperate need of a Sidney Paget makeover. On screen, Moriarty’s formidable criminal organization has been recast as a collection of well-dressed drunks at a Mayfair-esque speakeasy. The romantic menace of the Reichenbach Falls is reduced to a weekend holiday at Cheddar Gorge. Perhaps the producers lacked the budget to shoot in Switzerland, or perhaps they were aiming for a “full English” look. After all, before Norwood took on the part, German, American and Danish actors were better known as silver-screen Sherlocks.

One of the chief delights of Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia is Irene Adler’s triumph over the Great Detective. The only time Holmes was ever outmatched, it was by “the Woman” – and an American and Jewish woman to boot. But we wouldn’t know this from Stoll Pictures’ version, as William J. Elliott’s script has de-Judaized the New Jersey-born “Adler” in favour of a posher, less ethnically marked “Adair”. Traces of antisemitism, perhaps? But the anti-feminist slant of the adaptation is more obvious. Although both text and film follow Holmes’s multiple costume changes and elaborate ruses in pursuit of his quarry, in Doyle’s original Adler susses out her adversary, puts on men’s clothes and tracks him to his door at 221B Baker Street before cheekily wishing him goodnight. Holmes is unsettled, unable to place the young man’s voice. Adler later confesses to Holmes that as an actor and independent woman, wearing male attire is second nature to her, as she appreciates the freedom it gives her to roam unmolested. Sadly, Elliott and the director, Maurice Elvey, removed Adler’s crossdressing trick and invented a theatre scene where Holmes impersonates Adair’s leading man on stage and chloroforms her during the curtain call. In this case, and in stark contrast to Doyle, the film-makers seem determined to disempower and humiliate “the Woman”. Although Joan Beverley is a sprightly Adair, her regal ex-lover is a bit long in the tooth. Alfred Drayton’s balding, wizened King of Bohemia is a far cry from the vigorous young potentate described in the original text.

That said, Norwood is one of the more effective incarnations of Holmes. Tall and slim, though lacking the hawkish energy of Rathbone or Brett, he uses his smoky eyes to dangerous effect. There is a deep-banked flicker of humour as he impersonates a French army officer or surly London cabby, befuddling Hubert Willis’s easily befuddled Watson. Forced to observe Adair at close quarters in her latest modern stage melodrama, Norwood’s Holmes can barely contain his ennui. The contrast between Watson’s rapt appreciation and his companion’s undisguised, finger-drumming aesthetic pain raised more than a few chuckles from the audience at Alexandra Palace. But Norwood, who was pushing sixty when he took on the role, was, like Willis, a bit too old for the part. There is more establishment complacence than bohemian self-destruction in his mien. The silk dressing gown, the violin, the tobacco in the Persian slipper, the drop-bowled pipe (actually the American actor William Gillette’s invention, not Doyle’s or Paget’s) are all on display; yet there is something missing. And it isn’t just the empty cocaine syringes that aren’t scattered all over Holmes’s rooms.

Although, at the Alexandra Palace event, the BFI hyped Norwood as Conan Doyle’s “favourite” screen Holmes, William Gillette has as strong a claim. Back in 1899 Gillette wrote and starred in a play based on Doyle’s stories that eventually reached Sir Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. He played Holmes more than 1,300 times until 1932, with hundreds of actors. (Charlie Chaplin had an early break in the 1903 production.) Doyle confessed in a letter to Gillette: “I consider the production a personal gratification … my only complaint is that you made the poor hero of the anaemic printed page a very limp object as compared with the glamour of your own personality which you infuse into his stage presentment.” This is not faint praise, yet Gillette’s stage and screen adaptations were notoriously inaccurate. In their defence, Stoll Pictures’ productions are not only the most complete attempt at a screen catalogue of the canon, but were written and directed by Englishmen. Norwood is also unimpeachably English and the least tainted by Hollywood or the small screen. He is a weathered professional and a safe pair of hands for the nation’s eminent intellectual property.

Watching the episodes in the magnificent setting of Alexandra Palace, accompanied by a live orchestra conducted by Joanna MacGregor, who also composed the scores, it was difficult not to be mesmerized by Norwood’s Holmes, to escape into a past when live musical accompaniments in glamorous picture palaces were the norm. Although stirred by MacGregor’s music for The Final Problem, I missed the faint whirr and click of a 35mm projection – a lonely echo and fading memory of cinema’s magical photographic origin.

J. E. Smyth’s most recent book is Mary C. McCall Jr.: The rise and fall of Hollywood’s most powerful screenwriter, 2024

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