J A N E T I L I T Y

In glancing back at January’s focus on a few screen renderings of Sherlock Holmes adventures, I see that half of my subjects – The Blue Carbuncle and The Hound of the Baskervilles – addressed films adapted from Conan Doyle stories, and half – Murder By Decree and A Case of Evil – were original material incorporating the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Rathbone

Sherlock Holmes, as the subject of adaptations – pastiches, sequels, mash-ups, modernizations and assorted character cadging – has only one rival: Jane Austen, generally; Pride and Prejudice, particularly and Mr. Darcy, specifically. If Jane Austen derivative works outnumber Conan Doyle’s, it is only because some of Doyle’s property is still protected by copyright (in the US) and Austen’s work and characters are in the public domain. To an eager aspirant, “public domain” translates as “open season”; or, as Conan Doyle rather snappishly replied to William Gillette, when Gillette wanted to know if he might marry off Holmes in a stage adaptation, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

Williamson

Yet, given license to marry or murder or convert to vampires or transport to the twenty-first century, the nagging consideration is not, “What can we do?”, but “What should we do?” What license or should you take with a work or a character that was not of your own invention?

Cushing, as Holmes

In Edgar W. Smith’s cogent essay on the character of Sherlock Holmes- “The Implicit Holmes” – he asks, “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” and I think it’s that “what is it we love” that ought to define the limits of license. After all, haven’t Conan Doyle and Jane Austen – or, more specifically, Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Darcy – been singled out because they represent qualities that have a timeless appeal? And if that is true, should not special care be taken to retain those fundamental qualities even when the superficial trappings change?

Cushing, as Darcy

The first part of Smith’s essay defends the requisite of keeping Holmes in his era and place. Some may disagree; however, there was a social canon that shaped Holmes’s character (and Darcy’s) that risks appearing quaint, or alien or artificial when he is taken out of his time. Holmes and Darcy were gentlemen when “gentleman” described caste as well as conduct; when they are transplanted, their conduct may become irrelevant in the context of a modern setting, or is coarsened to adapt to a modern age. Even the Canon suggests this. In its most cringeworthy tale – The Adventure of the Three Gables – Holmes’s language and conduct are frequently appalling. So much so, that some scholars reject Conan Doyle’s authorship. The truth is more to the point – more to Smith’s point: The Three Gables was published in the late 1920s, when detective fiction inclined toward snappy dialogue and conditional morality. (Holmes could subscribe to conditional justice, but never conditional morality). In succumbing to the influence of a more modern style, Doyle’s Three Gables Sherlock is barely recognizable as the gentleman who was once prepared to commit an act that is “morally justifiable though technically criminal” because “a gentleman should not lay much stress upon [personal risk] when a lady is in most desperate need of his help”. Likewise, Darcy’s revulsion at the prospect of acquiring relations whose “condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own”, loses its credibility if he is taken out of his era, as does the extent of his chivalry when he lowers himself to “meet, to frequently meet, reason with, persuade and finally bribe” Wickham.

D'Arcy, as Holmes

Cumberbatch, as Holmes

For both characters, a re-imagining that cannot retain the fundamental blend of “Galahad and Socrates” (Smith’s phrase) risks losing what we love, however entertaining the substitute may be.

Putting Sherlock Holmes on the track of Jack the Ripper is unquestionably tempting; the Ripper murders occurred at a time when Holmes would have been an ambitious thirtysomething detective and quite receptive to a complex and challenging case. There has never been a positive identification of the Ripper, nor any explanation (other than the obvious: he died, emigrated, was incapacitated or imprisoned) for the abrupt termination of the killings. Drawing Holmes into such an intriguing, open-ended puzzle has invited the talents of authors Ellery Queen, Michael Dibdin,  Edward Hanna, Carole Nelson Douglas and Lyndsay Faye.

 Holmes vs the Ripper has been the subject of a couple films as well, and one that is both the most and least satisfying is the 1979 film Murder By Decree. Here, the plot exploits one of the more colorful theories: that the murdered women had knowledge of an illegitimate child who was the result of an affair (or unofficial marriage) between the Duke of Clarence, second in line to the throne, and the lowborn Annie Crook. Defenders of the heir confine Crook to an asylum and pressure her to reveal the child’s whereabouts while they systematically kill off the prostitutes who were privy to the liaison.

The most laudable aspect of the film – in fact the only laudable one – is in the casting. Christopher Plummer (Holmes) and James Mason (Watson) are on the somewhat mature side, but there is a wonderful compatibility that is not often (read: “almost never”) depicted in translations of the Canon. Mason does make one appreciate that Watson may be the harder role to pull off; with fewer props on which to string a performance – no pipe, no violin, no disguise, no displays of agility or temperament – an accomplished actor has to flesh out the dimensions of character without sinking into caricature. The fact that Mason can express his indignation at Holmes’s “squashing a fellow’s pea” without lapsing into the blustering inanity that was the default mode of other actors (read: “Nigel Bruce”) is commendation enough. Plummer is equally engaging – without ever lapsing into uncharacteristic sentimentality, his performance hints at the “great heart as well as of a great brain”: commanding, compassionate, humorous and completely authentic, even when saddled with the deerstalker and Inverness.

Mason, Finlay (as Lestrade) and Plummer

There is an impressive supporting cast as well: Donald Sutherland, David Hemmings, John Gielgud, Anthony Quayle, Frank Finlay and particularly Susan Clark as Mary Kelly, and Genevieve Bujold as Annie Crook; their scenes with Plummer are the most poignant moments of the film. (As an interesting side note, Finlay, who portrays Lestrade here, also portrayed Lestrade in another Holmes vs the Ripper film, the 1965, A Study in Terror; Quayle, who here is Sir Charles Warren was Doctor Murray in the ’65 film).

Plummer with Clark (as Mary Kelly)

Plummer with Bujold (as Annie Crook)

As for the everything else: watching this again (I had seen it years ago), I realized what is unsatisfying about it. For a film that offers an intriguing theory about the Ripper that brings together a royal conspiracy and a vicious serial killer with literature’s most famous detective, the film is rather suspenseless. Perhaps it is the jarring score that forecasts every crime so relentlessly that the crime itself becomes almost anticlimactic. Perhaps it is the reticence with which the crimes are rendered – one can be shocking without being explicit. And, perhaps, it is the awkward angling of the exterior shots to camouflage the use of sound stages. At any rate, it remains just good enough to make a viewer wish it had been better.

Which Austen character would have enjoyed Murder By Decree? Colonel Brandon would certainly have admired Holmes for risking his life and reputation in a just cause; Frank Churchill would have understood keeping secrets out of self-preservation, and Mary Bennet may have drawn a useful lesson from the prostitutes’ conspiracy: that one false step can involve a woman in endless ruin.

And three degrees of Austen: Particularly easy here, since Donald Sutherland, who plays the psychic Robert Lees, was Mr. Bennet in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.