Opinion: March 2003

Last issue, editor David Miller laid into the BBC's Christmas offering, the umpteenth remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Now we look across the pond to see how North American television has been treating Sherlock Holmes. As a warning to the purist, it should be said that those who blanched at the British television film for its depiction of the Great Detective as a miserable junkie whose greatest case winds up estranging him from his best friend will find even more cause to splutter over their Baker Street breakfasts.

First up is The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire, fourth in a series of TV movies shot in Canada by Hallmark, the greetings card / cable TV people, starring a hyperactive Matt Frewer as Holmes with a puddingy Kenneth Welsh as Watson. As might be expected, the first three were yet more versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four, and an inflated take on A Scandal in Bohemia retitled The Royal Scandal. With their no-name supporting casts, variable accents and cramped settings, none of these have exactly made an impression - and there's an uncomfortable preamble insisting that these characters are in the public domain but that no-one connected with the Doyle estate has authorized their use.

Having adapted three of Doyle's 60-odd stories, Hallmark evidently feels the well has run dry and so director-screenwriter Rodney Gibbons opts to make up a story from whole cloth - though the fake vampire theme and the odd character name are from the story 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire'. Anyone who remembers the hash Granada made in turning that tale into Sherlock Holmes: The Last Vampyre might well understand why Hallmark sidestepped the problems of spinning Doyle's story to feature length and opted for the old Universal Pictures approach of taking some clues from the books and winding them into a new-minted narrative.

Gurning Holmes

Because we're not rehashing territory raked over in dozens of previous versions, The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire plays a little better than the previous entries, and Frewer tones down his jittery, gurning Holmes performance. Still, one would be hard-put to label this an 'original', since it's rather a drab little picture with an obvious, yet unlikely mystery. The vampirised victims are monks who work in an enclosed (and co-ed!) charitable order in Whitechapel, perhaps evoking The Curse on Mitre Square (one of the first pieces of Jack the Ripper-related fiction, alleging the murderer possessed by the ghost of a Whitechapel monk). The main suspects and victims are freshly-returned from British Guiana, where the head of the order (Shawn Lawrence) has had a public disagreement with a black zoologist (Neville Edwards) about destroying a flock of bats alleged to be spreading rabies. Evoking the Rathbone-Bruce favourite The Scarlet Claw, the implement of death is a modified garden weeder, which gives Watson a rare moment of shrewdness as he makes the medical deduction that the familiar puncture-holes on the neck were not made by any animal 'with a lower mandible'.

As is often the case, there's a smug attempt to give the characters something approaching a screenwriters' seminar arc. Early on, Holmes and Watson have words about religion, with Holmes insisting on scientific rationalism over Watson's muddy trust in providence (there's even Doyleian talk of spiritualism). In an overly nudge-nudge manner, a medium tells Holmes he will be 'saved by the church' and he is later rescued from assassination attempts by a passerby called Church and by a subsidence related to underground railway construction that causes a statue of the virgin to fall on the obvious mystery killer. At the fade-out, the Great Detective is scratching his head and wondering if there's anything in this God malarkey after all. Among the dull support cast, Michael Perron is especially dreadful as approximately Scots-accented Inspector Athelney Jones.

Stay Away!

If your idea of a Holmes movie is something utterly faithful to the letter of the Doyle texts and completely respectful of the beloved characters, then stay away from Case of Evil (aka Sherlock). Another American TV effort, this was shot in Romania with a mostly British cast and crew - the director is Graham Theakston (yes, Jamie Theakston's Dad), whose credits go back to The Tripods. Piers Ashworth's script takes even more liberties than Billy Wilder and Barry Levinson did in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Young Sherlock Holmes: in one scene, the smug young super-detective (James D'Arcy) has a threesome with a pair of actresses who are essentially 19th Century sleuth groupies, and all the characters are radically revised.

It opens with Holmes, working for a mysterious lady (Gabrielle Anwar), gunning down blackmailer Moriarty (Vincent d'Onofrio), who does the George Zucco / Lionel Atwill act of falling into a sewer so the body isn't found. The hefty Watson (Roger Morlidge) is a working coroner (and two-fisted Cambridge boxing blue) who gets together with Holmes as they work a case, a series of mysterious deaths among opium-sellers in London. Mycroft (Richard E. Grant) is here a broken man, sedentary not through corpulence and indolence but because family enemy Moriarty drugged him and brutally operated on his legs. Sherlock, who witnessed this atrocity as a child, is gifted with a lifelong need for vengeance. With this role, Grant arguably matches Christopher Lee's spread of Holmesian performances, which include Stapleton in the BBC Hound and a Sherlock of sorts in Encounters: The Other Side, a TV one-off with Frank Finlay as Doyle.

Moriarty, given an effective James Mason voice by d'Onofrio, is working to transform the narcotics market, refining opium into what we recognise as heroin though he hasn't yet come up with a 'street name' for it. In a variation on French Connection II, Holmes falls into the villain's hands and is used as a test subject for the new product, then has to be weened off the drug by Watson (who has consulted a specialist in Vienna). The finale is a siege in London, staged as if it were the first gangster shoot-out, followed by a more traditional swordfight inside Big Ben (cf: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Robert Powell version) which ends with Moriarty taking a plunge through the clockface and disappearing again. As in the Wilder and Levinson films, Holmes's love interest (Anwar turns out to be an actress named 'Rebecca Doyle') gets killed, suggesting that he'll swear off women from now on.

Rather neater is the running gag about a sleazy reporter (Peter-Hugo Daly) who pesters Holmes and feeds off him for headlines, prompting the detective to muse that his posterity had better be taken care of by Watson, who amends his own case-book to trumpet Holmes' name.

It looks a bit like The Ripper, another Anwar-starring TV movie, with the usual chintzy Victoriana laid on to cover its lack of London locations. The characters are so different from Doyle that it takes a while to get used to the performances - D'Arcy overdoes twitchy neuraesthenia at the outset but settles nicely into the Smallville trick of seeming like the mixed-up kid who will become the character we all know. A running joke is that Watson makes statements about the future along the lines of predicting that no one will ever drive in London once the underground railway is finished; he gives Holmes his distinctive pipe on the assumption that deadly cigarettes will be banned by law long before opium or cocaine (which have medicinal value) are made illegal. The inevitable finish finds Holmes posing with the pipe and a deerstalker sent him by his 'mad aunt Agatha' to become the familiar silhouette for a photograph that seals him in history.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Shivers no.103 (March 2003) pp.50-51 (UK)

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