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.

In honor of the January birthday of Sherlock Holmes (b. 1/6/1854), my January film notes will concentrate on a few of the more interesting screen re-imaginings of the world’s greatest detective.

The first, in keeping with the season, will be the Granada interpretation of The Blue Carbuncle, which I think did a superior job of transposing a Holmes tale. It had the advantage of being one of the earlier programs in the series, so you have Jeremy Brett, as Holmes, in better form and health than he was in the last installments, and David Burke, the actor who gave us the most faithful Watson.

Brett & Burke

The story, which appeared in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, involves the theft of a rare gem, the Blue Carbuncle, its discovery in the crop (the gullet) of a goose, and the goose finding its way to 221 B Baker Street.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle begins with Watson’s visit to Holmes two days after Christmas, but the filmed version gives us a prologue, as the Blue Carbuncle- “the precious stone”- is passed from one generation to the next, falling into the possession of the Countess of Morcar. The characterization of the Countess is a departure, but an interesting one: in the Conan Doyle story, she remains off stage, but offers a thousand pound reward for the gem, and Holmes observes that the Countess would “part with half her fortune” for its recovery. In the teleplay, she is a tight-fisted miser whose tip to the hotel servants is to be divided “for the three of you”, whose Christmas tree is a limp cheerless affair, who is infuriated by the suggestion that she ought to offer a reward for her own property; actress Rosalind Knight’s rendering of this worldly, lonely miser is shrewd and on point.

Rosalind Knight (left) as the Countess of Morcar; note the sorry-looking Christmas tree in back.

In fact, the entire translation of the tale, from the development of minor characters, the different arrangements of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen supplementing the score and the inspired direction of David Carson, render a visual equivalent of Conan Doyle’s prose with remarkable fidelity. There is a gentle humanity in the details – Henry Baker(who inadvertently comes into possession of the prized goose) whose shillings have not been “so plentiful as they once were”, nonetheless stops to give a coin to a beggar; Holmes groping for a match to light his morning cigarette, just frenzied enough to hint at graver addictions; and the near-farcical episode of Holmes conning a poulterer into a wager -  suggest an understanding of the Canon that is too often lacking in many modern renditions.

David Stuart Davies, in his excellent record of the Granada series – Bending the Willow – credits Brett with certain cynical details that stave off an excess of sentimentality: the early-morning craving for a cigarette, the curt dismissal of the pathetic Henry Baker who is, after all, only “a mere unit, a factor in a problem” (as Holmes remarks in The Sign of the Four). But it is in the comic scene where Holmes finesses a skeptical poulterer  that the episode really shines.

Three degrees of Austen? Jeremy Brett (Holmes) appeared in the TV version of The Merchant of Venice with Sir Laurence Olivier who was Darcy in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice.

And who would have liked this film? Jane Bennet, always optimistic, would have sympathized with Holmes’s release of the culprit, though she might have been less cynical about his future, possibly hoping that he would “come to a right way of thinking”. A mystery involving stolen gems, a Countess, a detective and an unexpected conclusion would have appealed to Catherine Morland’s penchant for sensational fiction and perhaps Mrs. Nicholls, the Netherfield cook, employs her master’s long absence to catch up on reading and hopes for a stroke of good fortune when she rounds up “three couple of ducks, just fit to be killed.”