Sherlock Holmes is the human literary character most often portrayed in movies. In our new series for paid subscribers, Holmes Movies, we’re looking at how the portrayal of the great detective has changed over the last century and a quarter. For this first essay — available to all our subscribers — we begin at the beginning: the beginning of film, the beginning of a new century, and the beginning of Holmes on screen. The frames are afoot!
Let us begin at what appears to be the end, as so many of Holmes’s cases do; and also, as so many cases do, with a death. In 1893, in The Final Problem, Arthur Conan Doyle finally rid himself of Sherlock Holmes by throwing him into the roiling mists of the Reichenbach Falls. He hoped that by doing so, he could devote more of his time to writing historical novels, which he considered far more worthy of his talents than his silly detective.
The problem with The Final Problem wasn’t that it wasn’t final; the public did not agree about the value of Conan Doyle’s historical novels, and in 1903 he was forced to bring Holmes back1. (He did this by asserting that the detective had only pretended to be dead after toppling over the Falls.) After that he continued writing Holmes stories into the 1920s, although in the fictional universe Holmes’s last case takes place just before the outbreak of the First World War.
During that ten-year gap between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House (1903), a few things happened that would have an eternal impact on the future fame of Sherlock Holmes.
In 1896 a train pulled into the station at the Provençal town of La Ciotat. In itself this was unremarkable; what was remarkable was that the Lumière brothers filmed it, and then showed it to astonished audiences. The Lumières’ films were sensations; a whole new medium was being born.
Then, in 1899, the American actor-manager William Gillette produced his play Sherlock Holmes on Broadway. It was a massive hit, running in New York for 260 performances and in London for 200. The play was based on a script by Conan Doyle, but Gillette — who played Holmes himself — freely adapted, pulling bits and pieces in from many stories and inventing other stuff wherever he felt he needed to.
And then, in 1900, Sherlock Holmes finally appeared on film in a short called Sherlock Holmes Baffled. The film doesn’t really have much to do with the Sherlock Holmes of the stories; it is just a little sketch in which a detective is constantly thwarted by a villain who uses film trickery to evade him. The thief disappears from Holmes’s grasp through a series of jump cuts before leaping out of a window, leaving the detective bewildered and alone.
Finally, in 1916, all the elements came together when a movie was made of Gillette’s play. Here at least was a feature film of a Sherlock Holmes adventure: Sherlock Holmes. For a long time the film was thought lost, but in 2014, almost a hundred years later, a serialised version was found in France.
What’s remarkable about Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes is that it was a contemporary of the books. It was made as the fictional detective was still being written, and was released two years after 1914, the year in which the last story was set. When we watch it we are seeing Holmes in something close to his actual milieu, with reliably period-accurate scenery and costumes. Because when it was made, it wasn’t ‘period’; it was now.
Mind you, lot of that period scenery is theatrical flats. This is really just an ‘opened out’ play with a camera pointed at it. The characters frequently stand in a row as they talk to each other, as if making sure they can all be seen from the other side of the proscenium arch. Everyone waves their arms and pops their eyes to make sure every emotion can be read by the gallery.
But, to be fair, it also tries to do something beyond the stage. The Holmes stories are typically told in the first person by Dr Watson; we see what Watson sees and miss what he does not observe, to paraphrase the detective. The camera gives director Arthur Bertelet new ways to hide things from the audience: an unidentified hand knocks at a door, a character looks out of a window without revealing what they’re seeing.2
Equally interesting is what the camera reveals. In the stories we know little about the actions of the criminals until Holmes tells us about them in retrospect. In Sherlock Holmes the villains’ stories run concurrently to Holmes’s investigations, and the film cuts back and forth between the two. Indeed, the editing is used to create suspense or dramatic irony.
The new medium required the stories to be structured in a new way. It also required Holmes to have a new kind of character. The Holmes of the film does not do a great deal of detecting. There’s also no atonal sawing away at his violin as he sits before the fire in thought, and no gentle ribbing of Watson over the breakfast table. Gillette’s Holmes is a lot like of a traditional crime fighter in the pulp mode.
Cinema is, after all, a medium of action. In enabling us to capture movement, it demands it. And so Holmes becomes an action hero. Likewise the plot, which is very much an adventure serial. Conan Doyle’s stories are deeply pulpy, full of ludicrous contrivances and lurid details, but the plot of Sherlock Holmes is very much an adventure serial, especially in the surviving episodic version, which has plenty of cliffhangers, dastardly menacing of maidens, and the hideous threat of the ‘Stepney Gas Chamber’.
The Holmes of the books isn’t a stranger to action; he’s a formidable boxer and swordsman. But he is definitely a stranger to the ladies, a decided aromantic. As Watson puts it in A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) (one of the stories from which Sherlock Holmes draws some plot elements):
It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions.
And yet the Holmes of the film falls in love with the girl he saves. In a cable to Conan Doyle, Gillette asked: ‘May I marry Holmes?’ Characteristically, Conan Doyle was less interested in canon than his fans were. As with many professional writers, his first concern was for the money. He later remarked: ‘I was charmed both with the play, the acting, and the pecuniary result.’
But as well as defying the characterisation of the detective from the stories, the play and the subsequent film also defined it. Gillette introduced the curved calabash pipe, which is easier to talk around than a conventional pipe and whose shape allows the audience to see Holmes’s face clearly. And then, at the end of the film, what should Sherlock Holmes put on his head as he ventures out to face Moriarity but a deerstalker hat. There he is, at last: the cinematic Sherlock Holmes.3
This is a Holmes who no longer belongs to Conan Doyle, and is no longer defined by the stories. He has escaped the canon, and has become canonised as a secular saint. He has his defining symbols, his cap and pipe and magnifying glass; he has his unearthly powers of deduction; and he has his tutelary patronage: scientific detection.
You can see this in Sherlock Holmes Baffled, where the great detective’s name is used as a synecdoche for all detectives. You can see it in Sherlock Holmes, where he is depicted as already famous and feared by the underworld. And you can definitely see it in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924).4
In Sherlock Jr Keaton plays a young projectionist who has been unjustly accused of robbery. He falls asleep during a detective film and dreams he climbs into the screen to take charge of the mystery. It is, being a Keaton film, still delightful and hilarious a century later, and it is remarkable to see how the language and technology of film had developed in the eight years since Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Sherlock Jr is a film head over heels (literally, in Keaton’s case) in love with film. It is a bravura example of using the medium to tell a story, capture insane stunts, and create magic (in this case, through camera trickery and the double exposure of the dream sequence). At one point the film itself turns on Keaton, jump cutting him from seaside to mountain top to busy street; you can see the inventive cinematic lunacy of Chuck Jones coming towards you with the velocity of an ACME anvil.
This love of technology is appropriate to Holmes. He was, after all, invented during the age of engineering, and inherited the technical approaches of Eugène-François Vidocq, who pioneered the application of science in criminology. Although we cannot help but see Holmes as Victorian, he was in his moment a modern man, at the centre of a web of train lines and telegraphs and newspapers, a contemporary of the emerging cinema.
Given that the character of Sherlock Jr features only in the film (within a dream) within the film, it is perhaps not very surprising that Sherlock Jr does not use any Holmesian iconography beyond a magnifying glass. Instead uses the name alone to evoke not just detection, but detective movies. The implication is that by 1924, Holmes was already the paradigmatic cinematic detective.
Which makes a lot of sense. Detective stories are extremely useful narrative structures; they contain their own inciting incidents, antagonistic characters, rising action and driving motives. They can be happily used as a skeleton for all kinds of stories and larger themes. Movies were always going to find the detective structure useful; and for writers and directors looking for a detective, Holmes was the most famous contemporary example of the genre.
You can also argue that the detective is the perfect twentieth century protagonist. They are the hero of legalistic democracy, an everyman figure who can shoulder the burden of public morality, walk through mean streets to pursue justice without fear or favour, and apply scientific method and modern technology to fight some of the oldest human failures.
With the beatification of Sherlock Holmes and the costume choices of William Gillette (and, to be fair, the original illustrator Sidney Paget), we now have a perfectly iconic detective: a figure who is immediately visually recognisable with his deerstalker and pipe, and whose meaning and purpose are universally understood. An ideal protagonist, in order words, for the new twentieth century storytelling media.
You know who else played Sherlock Holmes on screen? Tom Baker, better known as a completely different icon of British culture:
The Genesis of the Dads
An occasional series looking at popular stories of Doctor Who, a peculiarly British kind of TV hero, and the cultural contexts that influenced the ever changing character and his stories.
Following the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901
Perhaps the most charming visual storytelling trick is the use of close ups to show us details, especially useful in detective stories. However, the early technology meant this could only be achieved by physically moving the camera closer. This means that for every zoom all the actors on screen had to freeze in place while the camera was picked up and carried to them, then everyone could start acting again.
One delightful consistent inconsistency in the film is Watson’s first name. It is a famous problem in Holmesian nerdery: Watson gives his name as John but his wife calls him ‘James’. Conan Doyle claimed that this was an anglicisation of his middle name ‘Hamish’ and not because Doyle himself couldn’t be bothered to look it up. Anyway, the film gives Watson’s nameplate on his front door as ‘G. Watson, M.D.’ G? Gamish? Games? Gohn? The plot thickens.
In another silent comedy connection, the part of Billy the pageboy in Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes play was originally played on the London stage by a teenaged Charlie Chaplin.
I like the way you describe Holmes in the context of the late 19th early 20th century. Bear in mind that it was the time of scientific and technological revolution (Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, etc...), of the death of god (Nietzsche) and not least Freud and the exploration of the subconscious and its impulses and instincts. Not surprising that, as you cite, all passions were abhorent to him. Necessarily so, because at the time people thought that the perfect observer was external to the observed, and that such a thing was possible. The perfect reasoning machine indeed, but only possible in the context of the early 1900s. That changed, later detectives became as much the subject of investigation themselves as the crime they investigated (Philip Marlow, Colombo, ...).
Good article. I’m surprised you didn’t include Doyle’s reply to Gillette: “you can marry him or murder him or anything you like.” Also in your note on Watson’s first name, Dorothy Sayers came up with the Hamish idea. Doyle himself couldn’t care less.