Charles and I came home at 10 last night and we ended up watching dueling 1950’s versions of Sherlock Holmes stories. His was a 26-minute adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” filmed in Britain in 1951 as the pilot for a proposed Holmes TV series that was never made. Retitled “The Man Who Disappeared” for TV, the show was an estimable try even though the uncredited screenwriter made some small but crucial alterations in the story line that actually weakened it. In the original, Neville St. Clair (played in the film by Hector Ross) turns out to have been an aspiring journalist who was assigned by his editor to write an article about London beggars. To learn about them he decided to become a beggar himself, adopting a disguise that made him look suitably pathetic and pitiable so people would give him money — and in fact so many people gave him money that he realized he could make more money as a beggar than as a reporter, so he quit his job at the paper, rented a room above an opium den (making its proprietor his confidante), went out to work every weekday and changed into the disguise that would allow him to collect from passers-by big-time. He kept this up so long that he was even able to marry, telling his fiancée that he had a job as a stockbroker in The City (London’s financial district) and somehow convincing her that she should never inquire any more than that about where he worked or how he made his living. The film, directed by Richard M. Grey, follows the story fairly closely for the first half but changes St. Clair’s motivation for begging — in this version he sells matchboxes and he’s been blackmailed by the opium-den proprietor into using this business as a cover for drug dealing (the drugs are concealed inside the matchboxes) — and ends in a big fight scene quite different from the quieter and more effective conclusion of the story. The show is surprisingly well cast: Holmes is played by John Longden, and though he was a bit long in the tooth for the part (this was 22 years after he made the only film on his résumé anyone is likely to have seen today, as the detective in Hitchcock’s Blackmail) he’s effective in this virtually impossible role. His Watson is Campbell Singer, a bit overbearing but at least not Nigel Bruce-level stupid, thank goodness, and the rest of the cast and Grey’s direction are effective within the limits of the script.
Afterwards I trotted out mine, an archive.org download of episode 6 in the much more famous 1954 Holmes series featuring Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford (the “H.” stands for “Howard,” in case you were wondering — which is probably why they went with just the initial: a TV series cast list in which the second-billed actor had the same first name as the first-billed actor’s last name might have got confusing) as Watson. The episode we were watching was number six out of 39 (the show was apparently a success but lasted only one season) and was called “The Case of the Shy Ballerina.” It suffered from the fact that, like all the other episodes in this series, it did not take its storyline from one of the original Conan Doyle Holmes tales. Instead it told a seriocomic story of Watson and another man accidentally leaving their club with each other’s hats and coats, and when Watson traces the man whose coat he has on instead of his own he goes out to his home to retrieve it — only to find that the man, an aspiring ballet composer, is dead. Holmes and Watson take the case on behalf of the widow, Elaine Chelton (Natalie Schaefer, who later played the wife of Jim Backus’s millionaire character on Gilligan’s Island), who accuses her husband of having had an affair with ballerina Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), whom he met in St. Petersburg and took up with again when the Royal Ballet of Russia appeared in London as part of a tour. It turns out that the real adulterer in the Chelton marriage was the Mrs., and her paramour was the ballet’s director, Serge Smernoff (Eugene Deckers, outfitted with one of the most ridiculous arrangements of false facial hair an actor has ever been cursed with having to wear) — and she killed her husband to eliminate him and clear the way between her and Smernoff. Oddly, I didn’t find this one as well cast as the failed pilot with John Longden: Ronald Howard is a good Holmes but he’s a bit too overbearing and nasty to be a great one, and H. Marion Crawford is more or less just there as Watson, with Archie Duncan as a sleazier and nastier Inspector Lestrade than usual, Still, both shows were fun to watch, indications of how well half-hour crime dramas could work with strong enough plots and actors to pull them off. — 6/18/10
••••••••••
Charles and I broke open the box from Mill Creek
Entertainment of the complete Sherlock Holmes series from 1954-55 (it only ran one year and virtually all the
stories were originals by the series producer, Sheldon Reynolds, rather than
drawn from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originals) and watched the first two
episodes, “The Case of the Cunningham Heritage” and “The Case of Lady Beryl.”
Ironically, both were about women who were framed to take the fall for murders
actually committed by men. In “The Cunningham Heritage” it’s Mrs. Cunningham
(Meg Lemonnier) who’s framed for the murder of her boyfriend, a rich man who
secretly married her just one week before — only the real killer is the
murdered man’s brother and, after blackmailing his brother over the marriage,
he killed him when he refused to pay anymore. In “The Case of Lady Beryl” it’s
Lady Nina Beryl (that’s right, Beryl is the family’s last name, though I couldn’t help but joke that writer
Reynolds should have named her Beryl Beryl — and indeed one of the most
fascinating characters in the Holmes canon, Mrs. Stapleton in The
Hound of the Baskervilles, is named Beryl),
played (in a nicely etched performance that showed her fall from grace in
mainstream movies hadn’t eroded her acting chops) by Paulette Goddard, who’s
accused of committing a murder that actually was done by her servant Ross
(Duncan Elliott). The series regulars were Leslie Howard’s son Ronald as Holmes
(though he’s not at the Basil Rathbone/Robert Stephens/Jeremy Brett level he’s
quite a good Holmes), H. (short for Howard) Marion Crawford as Watson (a bit
too fussbudgety and Nigel Bruce-ish for my taste) and Archie Duncan (whom I
remember as a florid character actor in quite a few British films around this
time) as Lestrade — whose name is pronounced “Les-TRADE” and not “Les-TRAAD” as
it was in the Rathbone-Bruce films. The first episode, “The Cunningham
Heritage,” actually contains an account of Holmes’ and Watson’s first meeting
quite close to the one Conan Doyle gave in A Study in Scarlet (though with Mormonism in the news these days and a
Gay ex-Mormon on the cover of the new Zenger’s I would have much rather seen the rest of the story
Conan Doyle wrote than the rather wimpy, at least by comparison, one Sheldon
Reynolds came up with) — one wonders if producer Reynolds’ deal with the Conan
Doyle estate included a proviso that though he could write original stories he
had to keep some elements of the
canon in his scripts, the way the writers of the Rathbone-Bruce films were
obliged to do (much to the benefit of the series as a whole, actually) — and
one thing I give Reynolds points for was shooting the series in 1890’s period
instead of updating it as most previous Holmes adaptations had done. Indeed,
Reynolds’ director, Jack Gage, shot quite creatively, making expert use of
overhead crane shots at a time when U.S. TV shows (even ones made on film
rather than broadcast live) were pretty plainly directed and photographed. The
series also benefits from the relative brevity of the half-hour format — all
too many modern-day policiers on
TV seem padded to fill a full hour’s running time now that the half-hour time
slot is used only for comedies — and nicely incisive performances by Howard and
Crawford (Duncan gets way too
overbearing) and some quite good supporting actors — most of the cast was
British, though according to imdb.com the series was actually filmed in France
(well, it wasn’t that far for
them to get to work), and overall the shows are good entertainment even though
they don’t sound quite the depths of the best Holmes features (The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Rathbone
and the last three-fourths of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with Stephens). — 4/26/12
••••••••••
I ran the third episode in the sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie
Howard’s son) as the great detective and H. Marion Crawford as Dr. Watson. This
episode was called “The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun” and was actually a fairly
close adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Valley of
Fear — the original motive for the crime
was changed from Conan Doyle’s elaborate one about labor unrest in America (the
supposed victim was a person who had moved from the U.S. to Britain and set
himself up in a castle to avoid vengeance from the former members of the
“Scowrers,” a militant miners’ organization based on the real-life Molly
Maguires which he had infiltrated and busted as a Pinkerton working for the
mine owners) to a simpler quarrel over a mining claim, but the other basics
were there: the supposedly impregnable Birlstone Castle with its 40-foot moat
(which was supposed to make it impassable when the drawbridge was up — an
intriguing variant on the locked-room mystery) and the payoff that the supposed
“murder victim” wasn’t in fact murdered at all: he turns up alive towards the
end, hiding in a sealed room in the castle, while the corpse was another person
altogether and the murder weapon, a double-barreled shotgun, blew the true
victim’s face to smithereens so no positive identification was possible. (An
early scene establishes that Holmes is interested in furthering the science of
fingerprint identification and is getting pooh-poohed by the authorities.) This
time the blundering representative of law enforcement is not Inspector Lestrade
but someone named McLeod (Russell Waters), but otherwise it’s the usual mix,
though this time around Sheldon Reynolds directed as well as producing and
writing the script, and Reynolds seemed to revel in the more campy aspects of
the Holmes character, especially his (supposed) preoccupation with fishing (a
hobby he knows nothing about — how refreshing to see Sherlock Holmes trying to
deal with a subject he truly knows nothing about — though his fishing gear comes in handy when he has to fish out
documents that were thrown into the moat and weighted down with one of a pair
of dumbbells and which are key to his unraveling the case). This was a nicely
done episode of what was on the whole a nicely done series, and it’s a surprise
it only lasted one year, especially with Ronald Howard quite good as Holmes
even though not quite at Basil
Rathbone’s level (but then to me, to paraphrase Conan Doyle himself, Basil
Rathbone will always be the
Sherlock Holmes. — 4/29/12
••••••••••
The last two nights Charles and I have watched episodes from
the boxed set of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series in sequence. Episode four was called “The Case of the Texas
Cowgirl” and showed how the series’ makers, producer Sheldon Reynolds, director
Steve Previn and writer Charles and Joseph Early, were really going for camp.
Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son, who worked both in the U.S. and Britain but
did mostly television and B-movies and never came anywhere near his father’s level of stardom) is a properly
authoritative Sherlock Holmes, very much in the Basil Rathbone manner, and H.
Marion Crawford as Watson isn’t as much of a doofus as Nigel Bruce but is similarly cast in the mold of a
comic-relief sidekick. One of the interesting aspects of this series is that
producer Reynolds seemed to be particularly interested in stories in which a
woman is framed on a murder charge by a man, and Holmes (of course) sorts out
the truth and exonerates her. In this case the woman is Minnie O’Malley, played
by Lucille Vines (an actress who’s so obscure her imdb.com page doesn’t even
specify whether she was American or British, though by the sound of her voice
I’m inclined to think she was a Brit doing her best stab at an American accent)
in a charmingly campy way owing a lot to the obvious prototypes for the Wild
West woman she’s supposed to be playing (like Betty Hutton in Annie
Get Your Gun and Doris Day in Calamity
Jane) but still getting all she can out of
her character, a stunt tomahawk thrower in “Bison Jack’s Wild West Show” (Bison
Jack — no points for guessing what real-life character he’s based on — appears
briefly in the latter part of the show and is played by Bob Cunningham) who’s
framed for murder when a man she’s never seen before is tomahawked to death in
her hotel room. Her main concern is that she’s met and fallen in love with a
young man from the British nobility and she’s worried that if she’s publicly
accused of murder, that’s going to blow her chances of marrying into the
peerage. The show features a marvelous scene in which Dr. Watson is lassoed and
forced into the covered wagon Minnie uses for transportation, even on the
London streets, and it also has a nice ending in which Watson, who’s caught on
to the art of lasso-throwing surprisingly quickly, lassoes the villain at the
end.
Last night’s was episode five, “The Case of the Belligerent
Ghost,” an intriguing little tale (this time written by Charles Early solo) in
which Dr. Watson is accosted by a man he’s already seen die, and while I
thought for a while it might be the brother of the dead man (à la the Conan Doyle story “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk,” in
which one brother impersonated another to make it seem as if the same person
was in two different places at the same time) it turned out that the plot
involved a scheme to steal a priceless (and fictitious) painting called
“Moonlight Madonna” by Leonardo da Vinci by substituting a forgery, and the
first appearance of Watson’s mysterious “ghost” was the actual thief, Van
Bentham (Lou Van Berg), curator of the museum at which the “Moonlight Madonna”
was being exhibited, who hatched a plan to steal it by hiring a former counterfeiter
(the person Watson actually pronounced dead) to paint a copy, following which
the evil curator knocked off his confederate, did the switch himself, hid the
painting in his home behind another in the same frame, only Sherlock Holmes
figured it all out. Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode as well as producing
the entire show, and he came up with one inventive shot — a corpse’s-eye view
as Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) — and the script
staged the action so that once again Watson had the satisfaction of actually
vanquishing the villain (by literally pulling a run out from under him as he held a gun on Holmes, thereby
getting the gun to fly out of his hands and into Watson’s). This Sherlock
Holmes series didn’t have that much to do
with the letter of the Conan Doyle canon (aside from episode three, “The Case
of the Pennsylvania Gun,” which was a fairly close adaptation of The
Valley of Fear), but aside from the overlay
of campiness (reflected here mostly in yet another proletarienne, Maggie Blake, the dead man’s landlady, played by
Gertrude Flynn) it seemed reasonably faithful to the spirit, and though not in
Rathbone’s league (who was?), Ronald Howard was a quite credible and
authoritative Holmes and it’s a mystery why he didn’t become at least as
important a star as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. or Jane Fonda. — 5/4/12
••••••••••
I ran the next two episodes in sequence of the Sherlock
Holmes TV series from 1954-55 with Ronald
Howard as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson. One was “The Case of the Shy
Ballerina,” a neat little story in which a British diplomat named John Chelton
is murdered — and Holmes and Watson get involved before he’s killed, when
Chelton’s and Watson’s overcoats are mixed up at their club (they’re visually
the same but of different sizes), and when Watson’s hat is found at Chelton’s
murder scene (Chelton visited Baker Street and he and Watson exchanged coats
but then Chelton mistakenly left with Watson’s derby hat, once again identical
in appearance to Chelton’s own except for being larger) he’s briefly suspected
of the murder. Sheldon Reynolds directed as well as produced but Charles Early
wrote the script, in which it turns out that Chelton let slip some British
government secrets to Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), a Russian ballerina he
was dating on a posting to St. Petersburg (if she was a Russian wouldn’t she
have used the female form of the last name, “Yaclanova”?), and for this he was
being blackmailed — only it turns out towards the end that the supposed
“affair” between John and Olga was only a cover for the real intrigue, which was an affair between John’s wife
Elaine (Natalie Schafer, who later played Lovey Howell, trophy wife of Jim
Backus’s multimillionaire character Thurston Howell III, on Gilligan’s
Island — and ironically both she and Backus
made films with James Dean, though Schafer’s was only a bit part in Has
Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which Dean only
had a bit part as well, and her bit in that film was left on the cutting-room
floor) and the ballet’s choreographer, Serge Smernoff (played by Eugene Deckers
as the predictable crazy Russian “genius” stereotype, complete with blatantly
fake handlebar moustache and beard), and it turns out Elaine Chelton murdered
her husband so she could be with Serge — though he’s appalled by the idea,
especially since Elaine deliberately framed Olga for the crime by committing it
with a prop dagger Olga used when her character was supposed to commit suicide
in one of her ballets. One of the gimmicks is that John Chelton was an amateur
composer who was writing a ballet for Olga, “The Spider’s Web,” in which he
wanted her to play the spider — only the work, of which we only hear the
opening (a series of heavy, dissonant chords), is supposed to be terrible even
though it doesn’t sound half-bad to me. For that matter, one annoyance on this
TV show is Holmes’ violin playing; the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
described him as quite competent on the instrument (in A Study in
Scarlet Watson notes “that he could play pieces,
and difficult ones,” and what got on his nerves about Holmes’ fiddling wasn’t
lack of technical command but the way he would improvise aimlessly as one of
his ways of ruminating over the details of a case), but Sheldon Reynolds’
Holmes is a fiddler at Jack Bennyan levels of incompetence, barely making it through a scratchy,
largely out-of-tune version of Dvorák’s “Humoresque” which prompts Watson, when
Holmes asks him if he likes Dvorák, to say, “Certainly. You must play him
sometime.”
The other episode we watched last night was “The Case of the
Winthrop Legend,” in which an old family curse — supposedly the Winthrops have
regularly died young and have received a handful of silver coins when they were
about to be dispatched, and a gold doubloon was found on their bodies once they
finally croaked — serves as an excuse to stage a reasonably engaging
old-dark-house story in which John Winthrop (Peter Copley) decides to defy the
curse by reopening the old Winthrop Manor, which has been closed for the last 30
years since his father died, supposedly from a fall downstairs but with the
dreaded gold doubloon on his person. Holmes’ client is John’s brother Harvey
(Ivan Desny) — we’re told he’s older than John but he looks considerably
younger — who’s worried that if John dies early he will be suspected
because John inherited the entire family fortune but the will specifies that it
will pass to Harvey on John’s death. There’s also John’s blind wife Alice (a
nicely chilling performance by Meg Lemonnier) and Harvey’s fiancée Peg Hall
(identified in the imdb.com credit listing merely as “Karen”), who turns out to
be the killer of John Winthrop once he exits permanently. There’s nothing
particularly new about this story and it’s not all that exciting, but it’s
engaging and writers Reynolds and Harold Jack Bloom and director Jack Gage
expertly create a sinister neo-Gothic atmosphere that makes it a winner. —
5/7/12
••••••••••
The Sherlock Holmes
episode, the eighth of 39 in this very interesting if somewhat cheap-looking
series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion
Crawford as a pretty campy, Nigel Bruce-esque Watson, was written by Lou
Morheim and directed by the series’ producer, Sheldon Reynolds, and it opens
with a quite atmospherically directed scene in which sailor Jocko Faraday
(Gregoire Aslan) is intimidated when the foot of a dead chicken is hung over
his table at a cheap dive where he’s been drinking; he’s lured outside and is
stabbed to death by a man wielding a sword cane. After that the show becomes a
bit dull as it spends 10 minutes giving us the exposition — Holmes has traced
another person murdered similarly, also with a chicken’s foot given to him as a
warning first, and the clue leads him to the island of Trinidad (where giving a
chicken’s foot to the man you’re about to kill is a native superstition) and to
Dr. Jonas, who’s just received the obligatory chicken foot and once served as a
ship’s doctor — only just after Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade of
Scotland Yard (Archie Duncan) leave his office, a mysterious apparition wearing
black clothes, a jet-black wig and dark glasses to make him look blind (though
since the episode is called “Blind Man’s Bluff” we can easily guess he isn’t blind even before the script tells us that) who’s
been sitting in the doctor’s waiting room enters Dr. Jonas’s office and gives
him the sword-cane treatment. Holmes traces all the victims to a ship that
sailed from Trinidad to England five years earlier and deduces that the next
victim will be the ship’s captain, Pitt, who’s now a supervisor at Scotland
Yard — only Holmes arrives at Pitt’s home too late to save him, though he does encounter the villain, Vickers (a nicely honed
performance by Eugene Deckers), and finds out his motive: he was in love with a
Trinidadian native and had married her, fathered a child with her, and paid 100
pounds to Captain Pitt — a notorious smuggler of undocumented immigrants — to
bring his wife and child to Britain, only just out of Southampton the ship was
apprehended by customs vessels and, rather than get caught with the
merchandise, Pitt had the immigrants tied to chains and weighted down with
anchors so he could drown them all before he was caught with them. Holmes hears
Vickers out and responds as Vickers promises he’s going to track down every
other crew member of that ship and kill them as well, and Holmes asks what end of justice all
that bloodshed will serve. “Before you go out that door, look in the mirror,”
Holmes tells Vickers — and in the mirror the criminal sees Watson, Lestrade and
police sergeant Wilkins (Richard K.Larke), and the two official officers are
just waiting to disarm and arrest him. This is the odd sort of mystery that
gains when you already know who
the bad guy is and aren’t trying to second-guess the author, but within that
limit it’s a fine film and Deckers’ performance really makes it. — 6/3/12
••••••••••
The show was the next in sequence from the Sherlock
Holmes boxed set containing all 39 episodes
from the short-lived TV series, shot in France but with British actors in the
leads (and in English!), made by producer Sheldon Reynolds in 1954-55 with
Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son, as Holmes and H. (short for Howard) Marion
Crawford as Watson. The show was called “The Case of Harry Crocker,” and Harry
Crocker turned out to be a Houdini-like escape artist who had twice escaped
from police custody after he was arrested following the murder of a chorus girl
he was attempting to pick up. Eugene Deckers (whose last name sounds Belgian),
who had been in two previous episodes of the series — as the stereotypically
crazy Russian choreographer in “The Case of the Shy Ballerina” and in a superb
performance as the villain in “The Case of Blind Man’s Bluff” — played Harry
Crocker, and played him as so obnoxious you wanted to strangle him whether he
was guilty of the chorus girl’s murder or not. Directed as well as produced by
Reynolds, “Harry Crocker” was written by Harold Jack Bloom and went a lot more towards the campy direction than most of these
shows — down to Holmes showing Crocker the key to a trunk escape that his
father had performed perfectly but which had always baffled Crocker fils — with too few suspects to make for much of a
mystery. The culprit turned out to be Charlie Willis (Harris Towb), who had met
the victim in Manchester, been attracted to her, got her a job with the show in
hopes of getting together with her and then got jealous when she started dating
Crocker instead. Also, this show seemed to come to an abrupt ending just before
the final credits, suggesting the print available to Mill Creek Entertainment
when they prepared this box had some missing footage at the end. — 6/8/12
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence from the
1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV box — and it
turned out to be the best show in the season we’ve seen so far. It was called
“The Mother Hubbard Case” and started with a sequence in which a young man is
lured by a little girl into giving her a ride home, whereupon he disappears.
Sherlock Holmes is hired by the young man’s fiancée, Margaret Martini (Delphine
Seyrig, an actress who went on to a major career in France and worked on such
prestigious films as Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie) — a last name which inspired
Charles and I to add the names of cocktails to the other characters’ names:
“Sherlock Holmes Manhattan,” “Dr. Watson Gimlet,” “Inspector Lestrade Sloe Gin
Fizz” — and while at 221B Baker Street she’s accompanied by her father, George
Martini (Jean Ozenne — remember that though set in 1890’s Britain this show was
actually shot in France and that’s why the proliferation of French actors in
the supporting roles), who makes it clear that he never liked his daughter’s
boyfriend. Holmes realizes that his disappearance is identical to those of
seven other men in the previous two weeks, and he decides to go after the
killer himself, trying to deduce where the killer will strike her grandmother
to use the new “address” to which she’s supposed to lure the next victim — they
use a different house each time and pick out residences whose owners are away
for the summer (including one who’s interviewed at Brighton next and where the
child (who, it develops, is an innocent victim and doesn’t know what’s going
on) will pick up the next would-be victim. He meets the child and takes her
home after overhearing her being coached by because the last victim’s body was
found at his house — a ghastly actor who wears a handlebar moustache and a
swimsuit of the period and whose accent is neither fish nor fowl, credible as
neither British nor French) — and in a plot twist screenwriter Lou Morheim
pretty obviously borrowed from the play Arsenic and Old Lace the grandmother, Mrs. Enid (Amy Dalby) — and yes, it
was a bit chilling that the villainess’s last name was the same as my mother’s first name! — has been luring the young men to her
apartment out of sheer loneliness and offing them, not with elderberry wine
laced with arsenic, but with divinity fudge laced with strychnine. “The Mother
Hubbard Case” has a truly interesting bad girl — there are enough hints of the
darkness that motivates her to give the story power without overexplaining her psychopathology as would be the case
in a modern crime story that would have to have a full hour (less commercials)
of running time to fill instead of the half-hour here (though shows have so
much more commercial time now
that the difference is 25 versus 43 minutes) — and also is generally
refreshingly free of the camp interludes that marred this series. The campiest
moment of the show is also, for a change, genuinely funny: Watson is making
Holmes tea but can’t find the Chinese tea he wants to use; Holmes hands him a
large bottle labeled “SNAKE POISON” and assures Watson it actually contains tea
— Holmes broke the tea container and happened to have an empty jar of snake
poison handy in which to put the tea — but Watson has his doubts, and the looks
on H. Marion Crawford’s face as he puts the teacup to his lips and samples a
brew that just might be lethal are priceless. — 6/13/12
••••••••••
I ran the next episode in sequence from the boxed set of the
1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series with
Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson.
This one was called “The Red-Headed League” and, as the title suggests, it drew
its plot not from the head of producer Sheldon Reynolds or someone on his
writing staff, but from the actual Holmes canon as created by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle — and what’s more, Lou Morheim’s script was a quite close adaptation of
the original story even though I’d always thought of the red-headed pawnbroker
James Wilson (whose actual business was not made clear in the TV script) as
shorter and rangier than Alexander Gauge, who played him. The plot, as Holmes
buffs will remember, deals with James Wilson being hired by “The Red-Headed
League,” ostensibly an organization offering stipends to red-headed men for
“nominal duties” — in Wilson’s case, copying the entire Encyclopaedia
Britannica in longhand. For this Wilson was
paid four pounds per week until one Saturday, when he showed up at the League’s
office and saw a sign stating that “The Red-Headed League is Dissolved.” What
was really going on was that Wilson’s assistant, Vincent Spaulding (Eugene
Deckers), and the ostensible office manager of the League, Duncan Ross (Colin
Drake), cooked up this plot to get Wilson out of his office, which happened to
be located next to a major bank that was getting in a gold shipment that they
planned to rob by tunneling under
the bank from the basement of Wilson’s pawnshop. The script omitted Spaulding’s
real identity, John Gray, and that his ears were pierced (“He said a gypsy did
that to him when he was a boy,” Wilson told Holmes in the story), and that his
cover story for spending so much time in the basement was that he was an
amateur photographer and had set up his darkroom there, but aside from that it
told the same story Conan Doyle had and told it effectively, though with a few
decorations — at the beginning Holmes is firing bullets from a revolver into a
straw bale in his living room, which makes Watson and Wilson scared (Wilson
actually faints outside Holmes’ door) but Holmes is clearly attempting to
invent the ballistic test. — 6/28/12
••••••••••
I showed the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV show, produced in France (but in
English) by Sheldon Reynolds for American TV with Ronald Howard (Leslie
Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson — who, I was
gratified to note, delivered an opening narration in which he pronounced the
“t” in “often.” It was called “The Case of the Shoeless Engineer” — and was
based on an actual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, though Conan Doyle’s original
was called “The Engineer’s Thumb” and had a macabre twist that was bowdlerized
in this version. It deals with a young man named Victor Haterley (David Oxley)
who’s set up in business for himself as a consulting hydraulic engineer and is
making such a wretched deal of it financially one wonders if Conan Doyle was
drawing on his own impoverished past as a young eye doctor in Edinburgh; he
made so little money that one year he declared just 146 pounds as his annual
income on his tax form, and when the examiner at the Bureau of Inland Revenue,
thinking Conan Doyle was cheating, wrote, “Very unsatisfactory” on his tax
return and sent it back, Conan Doyle resubmitted it after adding the words, “I
entirely agree.” He sees a way out of his difficulties when a mysterious man
named Col. Lysander Stark (Richard Warner) stops by his office one evening and
offers to hire him then and there, paying 50 pounds to repair a hydraulic press
on his property in the country. Col. Stark gives him a cock-and-bull story
about wanting him to compress the fuller’s earth he’s mining on his land so his
neighbor, whose property he covets, won’t realize they’re both sitting on
deposits of a valuable mineral. But Stark’s mute housekeeper, Ruth Connors
(June Shelley), tries to warn Haterley, both with gestures and by slipping him
a note — although she’s caught doing the latter by Stark’s sinister assistant,
Bruno Carreau (Georges Hubert), and is beaten. Holmes stumbles on all this when
he and Watson are taking a vacation in the country and they encounter Haterley
and Ruth fleeing from the Stark manse — he unconscious but clearly weakened and she conscious but in shock.
Eventually he comes to, thanks to some restorative brandy Watson feeds him
(Charles joked that though Watson is supposed to be a doctor, we never see him
prescribing any normal medications — just alcoholic potables), and tells Holmes
his strange story — about how he finally repaired Stark’s hydraulic press and
then was locked inside it, Stark apparently having made it a habit of eliminating
anyone who came to fix his machine by putting them in it and having their
bodies compressed. Holmes deduces that the real reason Stark and Carreau wanted a hydraulic press
was to manufacture counterfeit coins, and eventually he summons Inspector
Lestrade (Archie Duncan) and Stark is caught in his own trap while Carreau is
arrested. In the original story Haterley escaped the press when Ruth set him
free, but not in time to keep one of his thumbs from getting caught in the
press and severed; in this version, perhaps bowing to TV codes of conduct, he
merely loses a shoe (but not his foot) in the device and Holmes recovers it and
presents it to him after the crime is solved. Despite the bowdlerization, it’s still a pretty macabre tale and a workable story, and Ruth
Connors’ regaining her ability to speak for once doesn’t seem like a cheap
device but a legitimate response to her being freed of the terrors of living
with two unscrupulous baddies who so casually knock off the tradesmen. I’m not
sure why the Sherlock Holmes
series producer, Sheldon Reynolds, ran two canonical stories in a row after all the previous episodes had been
newly concocted tales from himself or his writers — but just as the Perry
Mason series episodes that used Erle
Stanley Gardner’s actual plots were consistently stronger than the ones merely
based on his characters, the Sherlock Holmes episodes that drew on the canon were better than the
ones that didn’t (and this had held true for the earlier radio shows, including
the series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, as well). — 7/6/12
••••••••••
I screened Charles the next episode in sequence from the Sherlock
Holmes boxed set — the episodes from the
1954-55 TV series produced by Sheldon Reynolds, shot in France and with Ronald
Howard, Leslie Howard’s son, as a surprisingly effective Holmes (though H.
Marion Crawford’s Watson was too campy, too Nigel Bruce-ish, for my taste). The
show was called “The Case of the French Interpreter,” and was based directly on
a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — only for some reason screenwriter Lou
Morheim changed the title from “The Greek Interpreter” and adjusted the
character names appropriately. He also wrote Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft
out of the story — it still begins in the Diogenes Club, the notorious
establishment whose members were strictly forbidden to say word one to each
other except in the Strangers’ Room, but there’s a long comic scene as Watson
bursts in and breaks the no-talking rule right and left to get Holmes’
attention — but the tale is still pretty much the same as what Conan Doyle
wrote: interpreter Claude Dubec (Lou Van Berd) — he was called Melas in the
story — shows up at 221 B Baker Street with a wild tale of being accosted by a
man named Lattimer and told that his services as an interpreter would be
needed. He’s taken to the house where he is to do the work in a cab with its
shades kept carefully closed, and Lattimer tells him that he doesn’t want him
to know the location — and even threatens him with a gun. When he gets there he
sees a man tied up and being held against his will and starved, and Lattimer
and his associate Judd (a marvelously snickering performance by Charles Brodie)
explain that he is to tell the man they’ve got tied up that he is to sign a
paper and if he doesn’t do it he will be tortured and ultimately killed. Dubec
sneaks questions of his own into the conversation to find out who the mystery
man is and why the baddies are holding him and forcing him to sign — a plot
device that, as Charles pointed out, was far more believable in the story, not
only because Greek is a more unusual language than French to a British resident
but because in the story the interpreter and the victim are writing out the conversation, and since Greek is written in
a non-Roman alphabet the interpreter could play his dangerous game with much
less fear of discovery than he could asking out loud a French person’s name and
risking that the baddies would recognize its sound immediately. As in the
original story, the interpretation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the
victim’s sister, who appears to have been seduced by Lattimer but still harbors
family feelings for his brother and recognizes his voice instantly when he
calls out in pain from the torture. The interpreter is paid off and told not to
mention what happened to anyone — and Lattimer catches him outside Holmes’
office and kidnaps him, but not before Holmes has interviewed the interpreter
and pieced together clues to the house’s location from what he heard and felt
during his trip there. In the end, Holmes, Watson and Lestrade find the house
in time to rescue the man and his sister from the baddies. It was a well done
program, though as usual during this series I found the “comic relief” bits a
bit of a trial, and despite the arbitrary changes (probably the interpreter was
made French because the show was shot in France and it was presumably easier
for them to find an actor who spoke English with a French than a Greek accent)
it was a decent adaptation of the story and gained strength from being based on
one of Conan Doyle’s original Holmes tales. — 8/5/12
••••••••••
Eventually Charles and I ran the next episode in sequence of
the 1954-55 TV series Sherlock Holmes,
made for U.S. television by British actors in France (according to its imdb.com
page the shows weren’t aired in the U.K. until 2006!). The show was called “The
Case of the Singing Violin” (one wonders what else a violin would do — bark?)
and featured Delphine Seyrig, a French actress best known as the heroine of Alain
Resnais’ deliberately obscure Last Year at Marienbad in 1962, as Betty Durham, who as the show begins is
asleep in her bedroom when the ghostly image of a man playing a violin appears
before her, finishes whatever it was he was playing, then approaches her and
leaves her screaming. Her boyfriend then turns up in a cab in front of Sherlock
Holmes’ (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson’s (H. Marion Crawford) home at 221B
Baker Street, only as the cab pulls up two gunshots are heard and when Holmes
and Watson go out to see what’s happened, they find the boyfriend dead. It
turns out it’s all a plot by Guy Dunham (Arnold Bell), Betty’s stepfather and
sole survivor of a partnership that monopolized virtually the whole British
market for tea, to keep her from getting married by driving her crazy and
having her committed, because the will of Betty’s real father (Guy’s late
partner in the business) stipulates that the stepfather will hold the tea
fortune for her in trust until she gets married, when it will go to her. Charles
said he thought there was a non-canonical (i.e., not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Holmes story
which contained a similar plot twist — I couldn’t think of one and he couldn’t
recall enough about it to allow us to identify it, but certainly there were
plenty of Holmes stories Conan Doyle did write in which the gimmick was a sinister parent, step-parent or
relative anxious to keep a young woman from marrying for fear he’d lose access
to her fortune if she did (including one in which the stepfather adopted a
disguise and courted his stepdaughter himself, aiming to get her to promise him
that if anything happened to him she would never date again). This episode was
written by Kay Krausse and directed by Steve Previn, who staged an effective
near-silent final climax (rare in a series that if anything tended to overuse a few musical themes until we either got totally
sick of them or wanted to wave to them and say hello) that makes up for the
fact that Krausse’s script revealed whodunit way too early to sustain interest — but it was still a
fun show. — 9/21/12
••••••••••
We watched the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes boxed set, “The Case of the
Greystone Inscription,” which like “The Singing Violin” wasn’t based on an
actual story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but recycled common plot elements Conan
Doyle did use in the canon; in
this case, the plot was a pretty obvious rehash of “The Musgrave Ritual” that
employed many of the same elements. Holmes gets involved when a young woman named
Millicent Channing (Martina Mayne) shows up on his doorstep with a story that
her fiancé John Cartwright (Tony Wright) had stumbled on an old inscription
that would mean fame for both himself and the Greystones, an eccentric old
family living in a moldering castle in Scotland. By now the Greystones are down
to just two people, father Thomas Greystone (Archie Duncan, a regular on this
series who usually played Inspector Lestrade but this time got cast as the
principal villain instead) and his son Walter (Eric Micklewood), and needless
to say they’re suspicious of outsiders. It seems that a fragment of the
Greystone inscription had survived on the mantel of the Greystones’ fireplace
but John Cartwright had stumbled on a complete version that gave the location
to a secret treasure King Richard II had buried on the Greystone grounds just
before the assassins hired by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry
IV, caught up with him. Needless to say, the Greystones aren’t happy to see
Millicent Cartwright turn up on their doorstep asking about her boyfriend, and
they’re even less happy when Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson (H.
Marion Crawford) turn up and slip past Thomas Crawford, who’s posing as a mute
butler (since Archie Duncan’s makeup makes him resemble Boris Karloff in his mute-butler role in The Old Dark House that’s actually not surprising; indeed, there’s a
nice frisson when we realize the
man is neither mute nor a servant but is the Master of the House himself). It
turns out that the Greystones received John Cartwright in a similarly
uninviting way but changed their minds about him in a hurry when he revealed
that he was looking for a treasure on their property — whereupon they locked
him up in a tower on the castle grounds and tortured him to get him to reveal
the secret location of the treasure. Holmes, who also has a copy of the
complete inscription, uses it to figure out the hiding place but insists that
Richard’s treasure belongs to the Crown and says he won’t let the Greystones keep
it for themselves — whereupon the booby-trapped secret entrance closes and
Holmes, Watson and the Greystones appear trapped inside. Only the last two
lines of the inscription give away the secret of how to open the door again (by
tapping twice on the head of a lion statue in the room) and Our Heroes are able
to overpower the Greystones, free John Cartwright, reunite the lovebirds and
return the treasure to Queen Victoria, from whom Holmes gets a letter of
congratulations while Watson is wearing on his watch-chain a coin he filched
from the stash. (Shame on you, Watson!) While I could have done without the
tacky music that accompanied the action climax (Steve Previn, the director of
“The Singing Violin,” helmed again this time but did not stage the climax without music, as he had in the
earlier episode), “The Greystone Inscription” was a perfectly nice bit of
Holmesiana and Ronald Howard, as he showed elsewhere in the series, was one of
the better Holmeses in what I like to refer to as “the long interregnum”
between the Basil Rathbone series in the 1940’s and Jeremy Brett’s TV
performances in the complete Conan Doyle Holmes canon for British TV in the
1970’s. — 9/23/12
••••••••••
For the last two nights Charles and I had watched episodes
of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV
series; the night before last we’d seen “The Case of the Laughing Mummy,” which
had a promising title but was a disappointment — Reggie Taunton (Barry MacKay),
an old medical-school friend of Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford), reports that a
mummy he recently received from his uncle Joseph, an Egyptologist doing an
excavation work among the surviving tombs of the Pharaonic era, has started
laughing and making other odd noises. Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) makes
short work of that mystery — he
finds that the “mummy” noises have a perfectly normal explanation, a weather
vane Reggie installed on his roof one month before (exactly when the mummy
started “laughing”) — but he uncovers another one: as a house guest of Reggie,
his girlfriend Rowena Featheringstone (June Crawford) and Prof. Von Gaulkens
(Paul Bonifas), Joseph Taunton’s partner in Egyptology, Holmes realizes that
the mummy case is properly authentic for the 14th Dynasty but the
mummy itself is modern, and deduces that Von Gaulkens had killed Joseph and
mummified him to get the body out of Egypt. Von Gaulkens confesses that there
was a struggle between him and Joseph over the mummy case, but says Joseph died
of a heart attack — and Holmes eventually realizes that the mummy case was booby-trapped
with a hollow needle filled with asp venom by the ancient Egyptians who built
the mummy case in the first place and therefore Von Gaulkens is innocent of
murder. It’s an O.K. episode but the characters are too full of high camp —
like Watson’s old buddies in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies, Reggie is
played for comic relief (Charles Early wrote the screenplay and producer
Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode himself) and the old-school-twit gags really get to be too much — and so does the trick ending in
which the mummy starts making noise even after the weather vane has been
removed.
Last night’s episode, “The Case of the Thistle Killer,” was
considerably better: a macabre tale obviously inspired by the real-life Jack
the Ripper, it was about a serial killer who targets young women alone at night
and manages to gain their confidence to trust him before he kills them. As the
movie opens we see him working on his sixth such victim — one more than the
real-life Ripper (who was matched against Sherlock Holmes in the 1961 movie A
Study in Terror, directed by James Hill
with John Neville, later the Duke of Marlborough in the BBC series The
First Churchills, as Holmes) — and we see a
cleverly staged scene (by director Steve Previn, working from a script by
Charles and Joseph Early) in which the mystery killer accosts a young woman,
wins her confidence (she boasts that she would never talk with a stranger she’d
just met on the street even as we see her doing just that), offers her caramels
and then kills her by strangulation (it seemed to me that he didn’t strangle
her long enough for her actually to die, but give Reynolds, Previn and the
Earlys a break: it was just a half-hour show), all shown (at least until the
girl falls to the ground, dead) with both characters seen just from the waist
down. The reason for this becomes apparent later on — I guessed it at about the
start of the second act, though the Earlys saved the big reveal until later:
the killer is actually a police officer, John Phoenix (Richard Watson), who’s
committing the murders to taunt Scotland Yard. Holmes deduces the motive behind
the murders when he realizes that the locales of the first six murders are
London neighborhoods whose names begin with P, H, O, E, N and I, respectively and
even the three thistle plants the killer leaves on top of every body after he’s
done are code for Scotland (the thistle is the national plant of Scotland,
something Charles had known before and I hadn’t) Yard (there are three of them,
and there are three feet to a yard). But he doesn’t realize the killer is a cop
until the final sequence, when they send a policewoman (a “police matron,” as
she’s called in the script) to act as a decoy once Holmes has deduced the name
of the neighborhood beginning with “X” where the Phoenix killer will strike
next. “The Thistle Killer” is a genuinely chilling, low-keyed (but a bit overly
scored) vest-pocket thriller and represents the sort of villain the Holmes
story needed — intelligent enough at least to have a fighting chance against
Holmes’ brilliance — and marred only by some bizarrely obvious dubbing of the
voice of the actor playing the superintendent of Scotland Yard (he’s credited
as “William Smith” on the imdb.com page for this episode but is obviously a
French actor — the Sherlock Holmes
series, though made for American TV and starring British actors, was filmed in
Paris and most of the supporting players were French or Belgian — and Smith may
be the British actor who dubbed him, in a vocal acoustic that makes the dubbing
obvious even though the lip movements match surprisingly well, probably because
the French actor we see on screen was at least attempting to speak English). Even the comic-relief scene — an
innocent man, Herbert Brown (Roland Bartrop), gets busted for trying to neck
with his wife in Xerxes Park, the location where Holmes has deduced the Thistle
Killer will strike next — is for once genuinely funny. — 9/26/12
•••••••••••
I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie
Howard’s son) as Holmes, H. Marion Crawford as Watson and Archie Duncan as
Inspector Lestrade. This one was called “The Case of the Vanishing Detective”
and was one of the sillier ones so far: Watson and Lestrade become convinced
something dire has happened to Holmes because he’s left the flat at 221B Baker
Street for over a day and didn’t take his razor, and left his violin outside of
its case on the living-room table. They trace him to an “old curiosity shop”
run by an eccentric — the moment we
see the proprietor we know it’s Holmes in disguise, but it takes Our Doofus
Anti-Heroes about 10 minutes’ worth of running time before Holmes finally
“outs” himself and says he’s after a prison escapee, serial killer John Carson
(I joked, “Johnny Carson? This
could have been called ‘When TV Late-Night Hosts Go Bad’”), who’s using the
book section of this shop to pick up notes slipped to him by his girlfriend
Helene (Judith Haviland). Needless to say, the arrival of Watson and Lestrade
screws up Holmes’ plan completely, though they eventually figure out that
Carson means to kill Judge Westlake (Colin Drake), who sentenced him to life
imprisonment and has since retired to an inane existence doing private puppet
shows with his wife (June Peterson). A messenger ostensibly from Carson arrives
and Holmes — acting as stupidly as Watson and Lestrade in this episode —
doesn’t recognize the supposed “messenger” as Carson the way we do immediately; instead the three more-or-less good
guys leave and only midway through their ride in a horse-drawn cab does Holmes
realize what’s happened and tell the cabbie to swing back to the judge’s place,
where they find Mrs. Westlake locked in a closet and Holmes shoots down Carson
just in the nick of time to save the judge’s life. The script by Charles and
Joseph Early is one of the dumbest ever concocted for this show — the
puppeteering scene seems to go on forever and, as I’ve said of some 19th century operas, it’s the
kind of story that only works if you can believe that all the protagonists are behaving like total idiots: a
real disappointment for a show that generally overdid the comic relief more
than I would have liked (H.
Marion Crawford’s Watson was definitely in the Nigel Bruce tradition, for good and ill) but mostly managed to create serious and
appealingly sinister drama from the Holmes mythos. — 9/30/12
••••••••••
Charles and I screened an episode of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, made in France by
producer Sheldon Reynolds with Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son and a quite
capable actor in his own right, as Holmes. The episode, our next in sequence as
we plow through the Mill Creek Entertainment boxed set of all 39 (this is
number 20 so we’ve just passed the mid-point) was called “The Case of the
Careless Suffragette” and begins with suffragette Doreen Meredith (Dawn Addams,
whose presence puts this whole cast one degree of separation from Charlie
Chaplin — she was the leading lady in Chaplin’s last starring film, A
King in New York) chaining herself to the
front gate at 221B Baker Street to protest the recent defeat of a women’s
suffrage bill in Parliament. Though the vote was so lopsided only one M.P. supported it, the suffragists have blamed the
whole thing on a parliamentary leader named Pimpleton, who lives two blocks
away from Holmes’ legendary abode, and Meredith has decided that what they need
to do is a major gesture: they’ll make a bomb and blow up one of the stone
lions in Trafalgar Square in order to get people to pay attention to the cause
of women’s suffrage. There’s only one problem: neither Doreen nor anyone else
in her suffrage group, led by Agatha Axton (Héléna Manson), actually knows how
to make a bomb. So they seek out the services of stereotypical Russian
anarchist Boris Turgoff (Frédéric O’Brady, whose presence puts this whole cast
one degree of separation from Orson Welles — he had a small supporting role in Confidential
Report, a.k.a. Mr. Arkadin), whose shaved head and gnome-like demeanor puts him
midway between Erich von Stroheim and Elmer Fudd. He gives them a list of
ingredients and says he’ll assemble the bomb for them once they’ve procured the
supplies they need for it. This duly happens — though the chemist’s shop from
which they get the materials (actually in the U.K. a “chemist,” at least as far
as a retail business is concerned, usually means a pharmacist) has a rather
befuddled clerk who looks over their shopping list and tells them, “You could
make a bomb from all this!,” then when they’ve left furrows his brow and says
(to himself, and us), “In fact, a bomb is all you could make from it!” Turgoff then presents Doreen, Agatha
and Doreen’s boyfriend Henry Travers (David Gideon Thomson) with his finished
bomb, disguised as a croquet ball — only Travers throws it out the window and
it blows up. Turgoff then makes the suffragists a second bomb and gives it to
Doreen — only Holmes informs her that it’s just a croquet ball, while the real bomb gets delivered to Pimpleton’s croquet field,
where it blows up and kills him as soon as he starts to play. So the
investigation becomes centered around the question: who substituted the real
bomb for Pimpleton’s croquet ball, and thereby killed him, and why? Travers is
briefly suspected because as a distant cousin of Pimpleton’s he would have been
in line to inherit the estate — but Holmes discovers a clause in the grant of
nobility to Pimpleton’s family that allows the estate and title to be inherited
one time only by a woman, and it
turns out Agatha Axton was the next in line and she was the one who planted the bomb and murdered
Pimpleton so she could inherit. This show was by far one of the campiest in the
series — though the best joke was when Doreen and a male rival are earnestly
debating the cause of women’s suffrage in Hyde Park, before only one listener, who impartially applauds them both and
then explains, “I don’t understand much English.” (Since the series was filmed
in France and most of the supporting actors were French, that could have been
true of the actor playing him as well!) Still, it was fun and a worthy piece of
half-hour entertainment even though it didn’t sink its teeth into the canon as
well as some of the other episodes (especially the few actually based on Conan
Doyle stories) did. — 10/19/12
••••••••••
After Elementary
Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence from the “real” Sherlock
Holmes TV show from 1954-55: “The Case of
the Reluctant Carpenter,” which deals with a fire (represented by stock footage
visibly taking place more recently than the 1890’s setting specified in the new
footage) deliberately set by an arsonist with an incendiary bomb, who ordered
four satchels and made a bomb in each one, and said he will continue setting
fires until the city of London agrees to pay him 50,000 pounds to stop. It’s
basically a race against time with Holmes (Ronald Howard), Watson (H. Marion
Crawford), Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) and his sidekick, Sgt. Wilkins
(Kenneth Richards) needing to find the final bomb (the other three have already
gone off) after Bricker (Pierre Gay, an actor I remember seeing in previous
episodes of this show) has explained the plot and presented the demand to them
but then has got himself killed (we actually never learn by whom). The good
guys eventually trace the last bomb to two carpenters working on remodeling a
ramshackle structure (just who’s going to be hurt by this even if it does go off — aside from the two people there — is a
mystery, especially since in their previous actions the terrorists have set out
to maximize the death toll) and one of the carpenters (Roland Barthrop), the
only one identified in the imdb.com cast list, is “reluctant” to tell Holmes,
Watson, Lestrade and Wilkins where the bomb is. At the last minute he does,
however, and Holmes is able to grab it and hurl it away from the building into
an open field, where it goes off harmlessly. It’s one of the least campy
episodes in this series but it’s also one of the least interesting plot-wise
(Sheldon Reynolds wrote the script himself from a story by Sidney Morse, and it
was directed by Steve Previn), and if the latest episode of Elementary had too many reversals (a common failing of crime
shows today), this one had the opposite problem: it just plodded along towards
an all too predictable resolution (though when you only have 25 minutes one
thing you can’t really do is plot
complexity). I think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had the right idea: a number of the
original Holmes stories build up to one reversal but don’t keep throwing them at the reader, making the suspension
of disbelief harder as we’re wrenched from one understanding of the events of
the story to another. — 11/16/12
••••••••••
I decided to bring out the boxed set of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes series starring British actors
Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son — who incidentally pronounced the “t” in
“often,” though Charles would probably say some B.S. like, “He only made that
mistake because he was so traumatized about losing his dad in the war”) as
Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson. I was surprised we hadn’t watched any
of it since last November — we’d been concentrating on Man with a
Camera instead — though we picked it up
where we had left off and the episode we watched last night, “The Case of the
Deadly Prophecy,” was quite good. It began with a long, almost wordless opening
scene which set up the basic plot premise; at a boarding school in a small
village in Belgium, an eight-year-old student named Antoine (alas, unidentified
on imdb.com) walks from the school grounds at 4 a.m. to scrawl a name on the
steps of the local church nearby. Then the person whose name he has written
suddenly dies, apparently of natural causes. Holmes gets involved in the case
when Marie Grand (Nicole Courcel), the assistant to the headmaster Carolan
(Yves Brainville), wants to write him when Carolan’s name is the next to appear
on the church steps. Carolan talks her out of it but then dies, and later Grand
does write Holmes, who takes the
boat-train across the Channel and arrives in the Belgian village to investigate.
He realizes that there’s a connection between the murders and Madame Soulé
(Helena Manson), who’s offering to sell well-heeled locals — including the
richest man in town, Comte de Passevant (Maurice Teynac), a “philter” (a word I
certainly didn’t expect to hear in a TV show written in 1955!) for 100,000
francs that will “protect” them from danger. Holmes immediately deduces that
there’s a connection between Madame Soulé and the killer, and the whole thing
is an extortion plot by someone with access to Antoine who can hypnotize him
into going to the church and chalking the name of the latest person who’s
refused Soulé’s extortion demand on the steps — but who’s the accomplice?
Holmes realizes it’s the school’s doctor, Dimanche (Jacques François), because he’s
there once a month to examine the students and he previously studied with Dr.
Charcot at the Salpêtrière
mental hospital in Parks and there learned hypnotism, which he used to hypnotize
Antoine into chalking the warnings. It doesn’t sound like much in synopsis but
the show was quite well done, with long silent scenes creating an effective
atmosphere — even though the church looks like an exterior set in some scenes
and a glass painting in others — and was one of the better episodes of this
show, maybe not owing much to the letter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation
but being quite faithful to its spirit. — 5/3/13
••••••••••
I showed the next episode in sequence of the very
interesting 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes
half-hour TV series, “The Case of the Christmas Pudding,” which begins with
serial killer John Norton (Eugene Deckers, a quite interesting character actor
we’ve seen in several episodes of this show as well as feature films like So
Long at the Fair, The Iron Petticoat and The
Longest Day), a Landru-based murderer who’s
offed five women — three widows and two spinsters: does he get credit for a
full house for this? — for their money, being sentenced to death for his
crimes, and as he’s led out of the courtroom he turns to Sherlock Holmes
(Ronald Howard) and threatens to kill him for revenge. Norton has a
surprisingly faithful wife named Bess (June Rodney) who takes him a Christmas
pudding and gives it to him in prison. The warden (Richard Watson) inspects the
package personally and doesn’t find anything in it that would help John Norton
escape — but Norton breaks out anyway, sawing through the bars of his cell and
bending them out. Then he hunts down Holmes and seemingly shoots him inside the
Baker Street apartment — only Holmes, in a gimmick writers George and Gertrude
Fass borrowed from the real
Holmes (the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories “The Empty House” and “The Mazarin
Stone”), has substituted a wax statue of himself and it’s the statue, not the
real Holmes, that Norton shoots up (a bit of a surprise since in his courtroom
revenge speech he had specifically promised to kill Holmes by strangling, not shooting). This was directed by Steve Previn
and it was one of their better episodes — fast-moving, atmospheric, relatively
believable — even though the Fasses’ script was oddly structured in that it’s
not until after Norton is
recaptured that we get an explanation for how he broke out of jail in the first
place (through diamond dust impregnated in the ribbon in which his Christmas-pudding package was
wrapped) and overall, instead of a whodunit, it was really a
how’s-he-gonna-do-it. — 5/28/13
••••••••••
Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence of the
1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, made
in France even though the stars, Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes
and H. Marion Crawford as Watson, were British — and the main challenge of the
casting director seems to have been to find French actors who could speak
English well enough to be comprehensible by TV audiences in Britain and the
U.S. This episode was called “The Night Train Riddle” and while it wasn’t as
good as its immediate predecessor, “The Case of the Christmas Pudding” (at
least because “Christmas Pudding” had had a genuinely interesting and powerful
villain), it was fun and refreshingly free of the campy treatment of Dr. Watson
that had afflicted earlier shows in this series (as it did with Nigel Bruce’s
portrayal in the Basil Rathbone film series). Lydia Kendall (Roberta Haynes) is
governess to young Paul Winmaster (James Doran), and she’s taking him to his
first day away at boarding school when he suddenly literally disappears from the train. Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
Watson happen to be on the train because Watson has got the bright idea that
Holmes needs a vacation, and what on earth could happen to him on a train going
to Scotland? Of course Lydia seeks him out and asks him to help find the boy,
and Holmes does so. Lydia narrates the obligatory flashback (virtually all the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes stories began with
Holmes’ client narrating the backstory as he or she explained what they wanted
Holmes to do), through which we learn that Paul is the son of self-made
Canadian lumber tycoon Lance Winmaster (Richard Watson), and Paul has an
independent streak that Lance used to indulge until he suddenly did an
about-face and started behaving like a martinet towards his son, ordering him
not only to go to school (though Lance himself made it without a formal education)
but to abandon his pet white mice (a pity it didn’t occur to Paul to tell his
dad he would need them for his school’s science classes!). While his dad has
suddenly become beastly towards him, Paul has been spending a lot of time at
the local circus, where he’s been taken by his uncle Cecil (Duncan Elliott).
He’s become friends with Coco the Clown (Billy Beck, who according to the
imdb.com page on this episode doubles as the station manager), and the two have
hatched a plan for Paul to run away: at a point in the railroad where the train
has to slow down to five miles an hour to negotiate a bend and a local train on a parallel track just happens to be
passing the same way at the same time, Coco and Paul escaped from one to the
other and Paul fulfilled his ambition of running away to join the circus
(effectively represented by carefully edited stock footage with appropriate
insert shots). Only Holmes soon realizes that Paul’s life is in danger — though
the script (uncredited on imdb.com but probably the work of Steve Previn, who
also directed) doesn’t make it all that clear how he figured it out — and eventually we learn that
Paul was the victim of his uncle Cecil, who will inherit the entire Winmaster
fortune if he can get his brother’s inconvenient kid out of the way (we never
hear of Paul’s mother and we’re no doubt supposed to believe she’s dead), and
who hired Coco to befriend Paul and lure him away to the circus, then bump him
off and make it look like an accident. Needless to say, Holmes arrives just in
the nick of time to keep Coco from pushing Paul into the ring where he would
have been trampled by the elephants — or, if that failed, eaten by a tiger. The
show’s debt to Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps — another story in which the ending revolves around the contrast
between a place of innocent merriment and a dire plot — is pretty obvious, but
it’s a good, workmanlike piece of entertainment that manages, in just half an
hour less commercials, to be faithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle’s Holmes and
a capable thriller which more or less plays fair with the audience and doesn’t
subject us to the ridiculous plot twists, reversals and splices between
different story lines that afflict all too much crime TV today! — 6/6/13
••••••••••
I ran Charles the next episode in
sequence from the Sherlock Holmes TV
series from 1954-55: “The Case of the Violent Suitor.” It opened with a
sequence that could well have occurred today: Alex Doogle (Brookes Kyle) shows
up at Holmes’ flat at 221B Baker Street to see him professionally. Holmes tries
to get Watson’s attention but nothing
seems to disturb him — until Holmes realizes what’s going on and pulls the
plugs out of his ears. Today they’d be earbuds and Watson would have been
plugged into an iPod, but the principle would be about the same. Aside from
this regrettable reversion to treating Watson as a campy comic-relief character
(a temptation for Holmes adapters since he was played that way by Nigel Bruce
and the writers of his films with Basil Rathbone) by writer Lou Morheim (he
isn’t credited on screen but he is
listed on imdb.com), it kicked off an episode in which the hapless Doogle —
like the title character of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and quite a few movies, some based directly on the West
novel as well as a story Warner Bros. remade four times but appropriated
nothing from West but the central situation — writes an advice-to-the-lovelorn
column for a local paper under the pen name “Aunt Lottie.” “Aunt Lottie”
received a letter from a young woman named Susan Dearing (Marie Sinclair)
asking whether she should marry her fiancé, Jack Murdock (Eric Micklewood),
despite his penchant for outbursts of temper and beating people he thinks have
crossed him. Not surprisingly, “Aunt Lottie” replies that she should break off
the engagement immediately — it’s bad enough today when a woman marries a violent man who’s likely to turn
his wrath on her in an era in which we know something about domestic violence
and women subjected to it have at least some legal options; it was even worse in London in the 1890’s,
in which the law was that a woman essentially became the property of her
husband on their marriage and he could do as he pleased both with her body and
her possessions. Only Jack Murdock turns up at the newspaper office demanding
to see Aunt Lottie, and when poor, hapless Alex confesses that he is the advice columnist with a female pseudonym, Jack
says, “I’m glad you’re a man, because I’d never do what I’m about to do to you
to a woman.” Then he belts him one in the eye. (We knew that was coming because
Alex is narrating a flashback in Holmes’ sitting room and we’ve already seen
his black eye.) Jack threatens Alex with further bodily harm if he doesn’t
re-contact Susan and convince her to go ahead with the marriage after all — which
he does, though he feels badly enough about it (especially since, as you’ve
probably guessed by now if you’ve seen more than two movies in your lifetime,
he’s fallen in love with Susan himself) that he goes to see Sherlock Holmes and
ask him for advice. Holmes and Watson hatch a plan to be on the grounds of the
Dearing estate — they’ve visited it and realized that Dearing is the heiress to
a great fortune since her father died in a bicycling accident six months
earlier — while the wedding to Murdock is going on. They bring Inspector
Lestrade (Archie Duncan) with them because they want an official police officer
there to arrest Jack Murdock, who Holmes is convinced actually murdered Susan
Dearing’s father with a female accomplice. Holmes was convinced of this when he
saw a newspaper photo of Dearing père
with his coat buttoned on the left side
— as if a woman had buttoned it and mistakenly did it the way she was used to doing it instead of the way a man would. (The
idea that men’s and women’s clothes are made to button in reverse ways is one
of those quirky little aspects of life that’s always baffled me.) Holmes
disrupts the wedding by firing his gun outside, and though Lestrade can’t
understand what he’s up to, it works the way he intended it to: it flushes out
Murdock’s accomplice — Susan’s housekeeper, Tilda (Rolly Bester), who
idiotically thought Murdock would marry her if she helped him knock off Dearing père and then, once he married Dearing fille, kill her as well
— and she gives up Murdock, though Murdock flees up a flight of stairs in the
Dearing home until Alex Doogle, who in the meantime had been practicing his
boxing skills so he could better defend himself if Murdock attacked him again,
punches out Murdock and sends him crashing down the stairs. So all is well and
Holmes and Watson have not only brought a couple of murderers to book but got
together two nice young people. Brookes Kyle overdoes the nerdiness a bit but
is otherwise personable, with a resemblance to Montgomery Clift that stands him
in good stead in a story that rips off at least two of Clift’s movies, The
Heiress and Lonelyhearts. And Eric Micklewood is a quite good villain, concealing
his psychopathology under an air of affected prissiness that works for the role
— we hate him immediately even before
he strikes the protagonist — even though we also can’t help but wonder whatever
possessed a seemingly decent, innocent young woman like Susan Dearing even to consider marrying him in the first place. True, he fed him a
cock-and-bull story about owning a mine in South Africa, thereby assuring her
that he wasn’t a gold-digger (of course, if she’d married him him grabbing her
money would have been the least of her
problems!), but still … — 6/7/13
••••••••••
I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Baker
Street Nursemaids.” Co-written (with Joseph Victor) and directed by the series’
producer, Sheldon Reynolds, it was one of the campier shows in the series. It
begins with Holmes temporarily stepping out of the Baker Street flat — there’s
an annoying buzzing sound throughout the opening sequence that at first we
think is just a fly but turns out to be a queen bee, which astonishes Holmes
because his knowledge of bees tells him that the queen almost never flies out of the hive — and while he’s gone Watson
takes delivery of a wicker basket. Just what’s in the basket we don’t find out
for several minutes until it starts emitting human-like cries that Holmes and
Watson each think is the other making noise — until they realize that there’s a
third person, however small, in the room. They finally open the basket and find
a baby, along with a note from its mother, Madame Henri Durand (Dominique
Chautemps), explaining that she’s shipping her child to Sherlock Holmes because
her husband has been kidnapped by baddies who are after him for a military
secret. It turns out that Monsieur Durand was in Britain as part of a secret
naval treaty between Britain and France by which his new invention, the
submarine, would be built in Britain and would bolster the U.S.’s worldwide
naval superiority. Unfortunately, Madame Durand is subsequently kidnapped
herself — and soon after that, while Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Inspector
Lestrade (Archie Duncan) are investigating the kidnapping of the adult Durands,
some thugs break into 221B Baker Street and club Watson (H. Marion Crawford)
over the head so they can take Durand fils — who turns out, in a gag ending, to be Durand fille instead — and complete the abduction of the entire
family. Holmes deduces that the kidnapping, and the attempt to extort the
secret of the submarine out of Durand père, can only be the work of one of three foreign powers, so he has
Lestrade stake out the embassies — until he receives word from the actual
kidnapper, Count Tennow (Roger Tréville), that the Durands will be killed
immediately if there’s any sign of a police presence around his house. Holmes
announces that Count Tennow’s name narrows the country behind the affair to
just one — though the script rather coyly refuses to tell us what it is (we
assume Germany if only because the Holmes stories took place in the 1890’s, two
decades before Britain fought World War I with France as an ally and Germany as
an enemy) — and he and Watson manage to get into Tennow’s house and foil the
plot by the simple expedients of disabling Tennow’s servant’s bell-pull (by
which he was supposed to signal his gang to knock off the Durands if and when
he needed to) and beating up the thugs — even when the thugs had guns Our
Heroes were able to take them on unarmed by the simple expedient of sneaking up
behind them. This was an O.K. story but a disappointment after the last two
shows in the series, “The Christmas Pudding” and “The Violent Suitor,” which
were genuinely thrilling vest-pocket crime stories with much more interesting
villains; generally this show was better when it was taking the Holmes mythos seriously than when it was kidding it (which was
true of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, too!). — 6/13/13
••••••••••
Last night Charles and I squeezed in the next episode in
sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes
TV series, with Ronald Howard as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Dr. Watson
(both of whom, much to my delight, pronounced the “t” in “often”!), which turned out to be one of their better ones:
“The Case of the Perfect Husband,” a chilling tale with, for once, an excellent
villain: Russel Partridge (Michael Gough, one of the few actors in this series
I’d actually heard of elsewhere), the well-known and well-respected art
collector, who shocks the hell out of his wife Janet (Mary Sinclair) after
their first-anniversary party by announcing that he’s going to murder her next
morning at 9. At first, of course, she thinks he’s joking — until he puts his
hands around her neck, starts to strangle her, then lets up but reminds her
that at next 9 a.m. he’s going to finish the job. She first goes to the police,
but Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) tells her what a wonderful person he
thinks Russel Partridge is — as does Dr. Watson when she then shows up at 221B
Baker Street — and she’s ready to leave when Sherlock Holmes shows up, takes
her seriously and gets involved in the case. With only half an hour’s worth of
running time (25 minutes less the commercials) this story can’t get too
complicated or unpredictable, but it’s marvelously done (it probably helps that
series creator Sheldon Reynolds had no hand in the writing or direction this
time around; the script is by Hamilton Keener and the direction by Steve
Previn) and benefits from Gough’s marvelously restrained and matter-of-fact
performance as the villain. Though one wonders just how he was able to restrain his murderous impulses
towards his wife for an entire year after their marriage, then come out with
them and boast that he’s knocked off seven of her predecessors in his
affections, Gough makes the character convincing and considerably scarier than
he’d be if he’d chewed the scenery. It’s also got a nice shock ending: Russel
tells his wife that not only are all her seven predecessors dead (a good
offtake on the Bluebeard myth) but they’re all somewhere on his own premises,
and Holmes deduces where: up the Tara-like stairs in the Partridge home. “The
Perfect Husband” is one of this series’ best shows, eschewing some of the campy
humor this show sometimes indulged in as an imitation of the Rathbone-Bruce
films (H. Marion Crawford’s performances range all over the map from the good,
if rather square, intelligence he shows here to Nigel Bruce-ish foofiness) and
giving us a really frightening villain, even though the brevity of the show’s
format makes sure that he gets his comeuppance all too easily and swiftly! —
6/26/13
••••••••••
I ran the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Jolly
Hangman,” which after the marvelous “Perfect Husband” was a bit of a let-down
even though it had the same director, Steve Previn — though different writers,
Charles and Joseph Early, who steered it towards the campiness that proved
annoying in all too many shows in this series. Jessie Hooper (a haunting
actress named Alvys Maben) — the last name is spelled “Hoper” on imdb.com but
“Hooper” is clearly what the actors are saying — is complaining that her late
husband William was found hanging in a room in Glasgow and the death has been
ruled a suicide. She’s put out by this not only because William’s loss is
affecting her — he was killed on his last run for a sales company that was
about to let him go — but also because her life insurance policy will be
invalidated and she won’t be able to collect if her husband killed himself.
She’s convinced that he was murdered, and Sherlock Holmes not only deduces he
was right but convinces Glasgow police inspector MacDougal — who’s depicted as
the second cousin of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard and is played by the
same actor, Archie Duncan, albeit wearing some of the worst, most obvious false
hair I’ve ever seen an actor saddled with — only he still has trouble finding
out who the murderer was even though Mrs. Hooper is convinced it was a man who
was sitting near her on the train laughing his head off — and Holmes fails to
make the connection even though he
sits near a laughing man on his
train back from Glasgow to London. Eventually, of course, the killer — Henry
Baxter (Philip Leaver) — is caught, though his motive proves to be
preposterous: he knocked off William Hooper because he’d killed another man decades earlier and Hooper, then still a boy,
had witnessed it. This show could be an excellent Holmes pastiche when it either drew on an authentic Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle plot line or had a writer (like “Perfect Husband” scribe Hamilton Keener)
who could come up with a sufficiently “Doylean” story to work, but when it fell
back on producer Sheldon Reynolds’ weakness for camp it was considerably less
interesting and that, along with its obviously cheap production, is probably
the main reason it didn’t last longer than one season. — 7/3/13
••••••••••
Charles and I did squeeze in the next episode in sequence
from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV
series, which turned out to be quite campy but also delightfully entertaining.
It was called “The Case of the Imposter Mystery” and was written by Lou Morheim
(though the credits gave his first name as Joe) and directed by Steve Previn.
Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford) return from
a trip to Brighton to find an angry man named Sir Arthur Tredley (Basil Dignam)
claiming that he had been to see Holmes, who had told him to put all his
valuables in an obvious hiding place because the crooks only look for non-obvious hiding places — so he’d put his jewelry and
bonds in a biscuit jar and within a day a thief had broken in, gone right to it
and stolen everything. Then Holmes gets a visit from Inspector Lestrade (Archie
Duncan), who claims that Holmes had told him to remove his stakeout from one
jewelry store and move it to another — and of course the jewel thieves had hit
the store from which he’d removed his protection. Holmes deduces that in his
absence someone broke into his home and impersonated him, and in order to trap
the impersonator he disguises both himself and Watson as East Indian maharajahs
visiting London and wearing small fortunes (or not-so-small fortunes) in jewels.
(The baubles from the producer’s prop department are so transparently fake they
don’t look like they would fool anybody, but that’s a common enough movie failing we can forgive it.) The
imposter shows up in the guise of a reporter, Bolingbroke — Holmes sees through
him immediately because the seat of his pants isn’t worn the way a real
reporter’s would be from sitting down and writing, and also because his glasses
are clearly fake, just plain glass panes without any correction (though quite
frankly he could also have figured it out from the transparently fake beard the
man was wearing!) — and he invites the maharajahs to come to 221B Baker Street
to talk to Sherlock Holmes about stopping one of their daughters from running
off with an Englishman. (Holmes has set this up by faking another out-of-town
trip, complete with getting into a cab carrying a large fish net and asking the
driver to take him and Watson to Charing Cross Station — “Quick! We have a
train to catch!”) The trap works but the imposter gets away and Lestrade and
the backup he’s called in, Constable Hennesie (Richard Watson), mistakenly
wrestle the real Holmes to the
ground. Eventually the good guys track down the imposter — only his sidekick shows up with a gun and holds it on them,
but the real Holmes pretends to be the imposter and gets the sidekick to give him the gun, and the crooks are caught. I had
half-expected that Ronald Howard would be playing the faux Holmes as well as the real one, but instead Bob
Cunningham plays the imposter (though the resemblance between the two men is surprisingly convincing), who turns out to be an
ex-actor named Tony Simmons who used facial putty to remodel his appearance as
each character. The whole show is quite charming and a welcome exception to the
usual rule of this show that it got less entertaining as it got more campy —
though Charles was still put out by how un-canonical the whole conception of
the story was! — 7/11/13
••••••••••
I ran the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series: “The Case of the Eiffel
Tower.” Written by Roger Emerson Garris and directed by Steve Previn, this was
almost an inevitability — the Eiffel Tower went up in the 1890’s, the decade in
which most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were set, and it would have been a
major novelty back then — and the first half of this episode was quite good but
it sloughed off badly after the original commercial break. Two uniformed police
officers in London find the dead body of international terrorist Frederick Martinez
— they and Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) I.D. him by a label
sewn into his suit jacket with his name (a plot point which bothered Charles
more than it did me — it could have been an alias he was using publicly, not
knowing that that was one identity the police had already “outed”) — and his
walking stick contains a message in rhyme which Holmes deduces is a meeting
place for further instructions. After being run around London by similarly
coded messages Holmes realizes that the final meeting is going to take place
atop the Eiffel Tower — and a series of ancient stock shots depicts the Tower
and the rest of the Paris tourist attractions. (Charles wondered why a series filmed in Paris would use old stock footage instead of
going out and shooting fresh film of the landmarks — but I thought producer
Sheldon Reynolds and director Previn figured that old footage would more
closely resemble the Paris of the 1890’s rather than that of the 1950’s.) Alas,
the terrorist gang — the MacGuffin is a French coin with a hollow inside that
contains an important government secret on microfilm, or whatever the 1890’s
equivalent was — has already heard of Martinez’s death, so two thugs, Gustav
(Sacha Pitoeff) and Bayard (Frederick O’Brady from Orson Welles’ Confidential
Report), try to ambush Holmes atop the
tower. He gets away in an unwittingly (or maybe wittingly) comical chase scene
reminiscent of the climax of The Naked City (though in The Naked City the thug was inexplicably trying to escape his
pursuers by climbing up the tower
of the Brooklyn Bridge, not down!) but in order to avoid it being seized by his
pursuers in case they catch up to him, Holmes throws the coin down from the top
of the tower. It’s retrieved, undamaged, by Lestrade, who promptly gets tricked
into giving it to a woman who’s part of the gang, entertainer Nana de Melimar
(a nice performance by Martine Alexis, who even gets to sing a song!). Holmes
deduces her profession and he, Watson and Lestrade look at all the posters
advertising stage and cabaret performers until Lestrade I.D.’s her, they show
up at her club and there’s a confrontation featuring a surprisingly open-ended
ending for a 1950’s TV show (were they planning this as the first half of a
two-part episode?). It was an O.K. show that blew the premise of an interesting
introduction, but then the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes series was surprisingly uneven despite Ronald
Howard’s authoritative presence as the title character. Sometimes you got
strong stories that either were from the Conan Doyle canon or well constructed
enough they could have been, sometimes you got camp-fests and sometimes, as
here, you got interesting premises that weren’t properly developed. — 7/30/13
••••••••••
I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Exhumed
Client,” which was considerably better than its immediate predecessor and was
directed by Steve Previn with real Gothic flair. The opening shows a funeral,
with extreme close-ups of the mourners’ faces that made me wonder if Previn had
seen any of Ingmar Bergman’s films and was ripping off his lighting and
angling. Later there’s a sequence in which the will of Charles Farnsworth is
being read — the imdb.com page on this episode doesn’t credit an actor playing
him, though there is one since he’s seen later in a flashback sequence — and
the four main heirs are Charles’ sister Elizabeth (Alvys Maben), his brother
George (Alan Adair), Sylvia Taylor (Judith Haviland) and Dr. Henry Reeves
(Michael Turner). When the will is read, it turns out to have an unusual
codicil: Charles Farnsworth was so convinced someone was going to kill him, he
insisted that his body be exhumed and autopsied no matter what the original
finding of his cause of death was, and that Sherlock Holmes be hired
(presumably paid for by the estate) to investigate his demise, however it
ostensibly happened. The initial cause of death ruling was a simple heart
attack, but the autopsy reveals Charles was actually killed by arsenic
poisoning. From this writers Charles and Joseph Early spin a fascinating little
Gothic web of intrigue, including a secret room at the Farnsworth estate — a
typically crumbling castle dating from medieval days — in which supposedly no
one can spend a night and still be alive in the morning. There’s also a
flashback sequence in which Charles threatens to disinherit virtually all his
potential heirs over something or other — the usual trope in whodunits: create
a lot of characters with a motive
for the victim’s murder so you have a nice pool of suspects and can keep the
audience guessing — and a scene in which Holmes himself volunteers to spend the
night in the presumably fatal room and ends up in convulsions on the floor,
seemingly about to expire any moment when the commercial break falls. Watson,
who was supposed to be at the ready to open the door to the room if Holmes got
into trouble, nodded off and was awakened only when the big clock in the
adjoining room struck midnight and woke him just in time for him to rescue Holmes.
Holmes eventually deduces, in a plot element the Earlys got from “The Devil’s
Foot” in the Conan Doyle canon, that the murderer figured out a way to
impregnate a candle with arsenic so the candle would release a deadly gas as it
burned (something Charles had a hard time believing was scientifically
possible), and he gets all four of the suspects into the room, closes the door
behind them, and lights the candles in hopes the murderer will give himself or
herself away — and it turns out to be Charles’ long-suffering sister Elizabeth.
(“The Devil’s Foot” also featured a dysfunctional family who used the
combustion-driven poison to knock each other off.) Her motive wasn’t all that
clear, but who cares? This was a quite good episode, atmospherically directed by
Previn (a far cry from his usual slovenly work on the series) and well acted,
even though the handlebar moustaches on the male Farnsworths got a bit much
after a while. — 8/1/13
••••••••••
I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, “The Case of the
Impromptu Performance.” It’s a quite good show even though its basic plot line
is one of the oldest tropes in the mystery business: the private detective is
called in by a condemned man facing execution literally in hours and challenged to do a race against time to
find the real killer. In this one the condemned man is Herbert Brighton
(Patrick Shelley), a milquetoast accountant who, like Holmes’s client in the
story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” meets, falls in love with and
impulsively marries a woman who agrees on condition that he never make her
speak about her past. Then she is found dead and he is found collapsed on the
stairs outside their home, accused of killing her. Brighton asks as his last
request that he see Holmes in prison on the night before his scheduled hanging,
and Holmes immediately takes his side and in a series of whirlwind deductions —
they have to be whirlwind not
only because Holmes takes the case with Brighton being only seven hours from
his hanging but because this is all happening in a half-hour (less commercials)
show — he figures out that the real killer of Phyllis Brighton was her previous
(and still) boyfriend, actor Amos Carruthers (Colin Drake). The two hatched a
scheme by which she would marry their “mark,” he would take out life insurance,
then they would kill him, she would collect and they would split the proceeds.
Holmes traces Carruthers to a small theatre where he’s in the middle of a
production of Othello in which
he’s playing the lead and he’s about to kill Desdemona — originally the theatre
manager, Mr. Pettyfoot (the marvelous Eugene Deckers, who would have been
better used as the villain than as this comic-relief character!), doesn’t want
to stop the show to allow Holmes (Ronald Howard), Watson (H. Marion Crawford)
and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) to apprehend the murderer, so Holmes
disrupts the show himself by sticking his hand through various openings in the
set and making funny gestures, then manages to capture and subdue Carruthers
despite the actor’s attempt to stab him with the same prop dagger with which he
was supposed to kill himself at the end of the play. (There’s a nice gag scene
at the end in which Holmes stabs Watson with the dagger, then shows him the mechanism
by which its blade collapses on cue so it isn’t really dangerous, then throws the dagger and it lands, point first, on a
table and sticks to it like a
genuinely lethal weapon.) Though it might have been a better show if Eugene
Deckers and Colin Drake had switched roles, and the story’s debt to the George
Cukor-Ronald Colman movie A Double Life (also about an actor who plays Othello and murders a woman in real
life) is pretty obvious, it’s still one of the most inventive and exciting
scripts in this serles, written by Lou Morheim and once again directed by Steve
Previn, and with Ronald Howard as a quite respectable Sherlock Holmes who,
praise be, pronounces the “t” in “often” — “Well, that explains why he never became as big a star as his
dad!” Charles said rather snippily. — 8/2/13
••••••••••
Charles and I screened the next Sherlock Holmes episode in sequence, “The Case of the Baker Street
Bachelors,” which sounded promising but turned out to be one of their weaker
shows, a camp-fest which begins with aspiring Parliament candidate Jeffery
Bourne (Alan Adair) about to have his promising political career wrecked by
blackmail because his wife is accusing him of beating her in public (which
sounded a bit too much like the current sex scandal facing San Diego Mayor Bob
Filner to be comfortable watching these days, even as fiction) and demanding a
4,000-pound blackmail payment to keep quiet. Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard)
and Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford) learn that Bourne met the woman, Pamela
(Alvys Maben), through the “Cupid’s Bow” marriage bureau (today it would be
called a dating service) run by slimeball J. Oliver (Duncan Elliott), who’s
using his agency to identify rich or influential people and using his stable of
supposedly eligible women, Pamela and Edna (Penny Portrait), to extract
information that can then be used to blackmail them. Holmes and Watson pose as
eligible bachelors (students of the Holmes canon will recall that Watson did get married pretty early in the cycle, while Holmes
remained resolutely uninterested in women — which has led Queer authors like
Larry Townsend to argue he was Gay and cherry-pick the canon to make the point,
though it’s pretty obvious to me that Conan Doyle meant Holmes to be what would
now be called asexual) and Holmes invents a nonexistent fortune for himself and
his equally nonexistent “Aunt Agatha.” Oliver sends the four of them — Holmes,
Watson, Pamela and Edna — to a double date at a tea shop, but Bourne shows up,
accosts Holmes for trying to steal his wife (odd since it was Bourne who called
Holmes into the case in the first place), they have a fight and Holmes ends up
arrested and spending the entire second act behind bars while Watson and
Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) burgle the Cupid’s Bow agency to find the
letters Oliver is using for blackmail. Holmes deduces that they’re behind the
Toulouse-Lautrec paintings that hang in Oliver’s office — he figures that out
when Oliver has never heard of Toulouse-Lautrec (“I haven’t either!” Watson whines) and the blackmail
ring is busted while Lestrade and the arresting officer, Inspector Mason
(Seymour Green), have fun at Holmes’ expense while Holmes is still in jail.
This was one of those frustrating shows that took a basically interesting
premise and drowns it in sheer camp — like a lot of modern crime shows, come to think of it! — 8/8/13
••••••••••
I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Royal
Murder.” My immediate thought was that the script by Charles and Joseph Early
was going to be about Sherlock Holmes solving a murder involving a member of
the British royal family; instead it takes place in an unnamed Ruritanian state
ruled by King Conrad (Jacques Dacqmine), where Holmes and Watson are vacationing
as a reward for having previously solved a case involving a secret of Conrad’s
government they successfully protected. Instead, at the banquet given at
Conrad’s palace, a Gypsy woman fortuneteller sees an imminent sign of death
when she reads the palm of Prince Stephan (Maurice Teynac), the heir to the
throne of a neighboring kingdom ruled by King Johan (whom we never see). Prince
Stephan drinks a wine glass and suddenly croaks — Dr. Watson’s medical skills
are, of course, useless — and the suspects are Princess Antonia (Lise Bourdin),
who dated both King Conrad and
Prince Stephan; and Count Magor (Jacques François), Conrad’s principal advisor,
as well as the King himself. Holmes traces the Gypsy woman to her camp (where
she does an exciting dance sequence so dangerously close to the open-pit fires
I kept worrying her dress would catch in one of the fires and set her aflame),
where she says she witnessed a pre-dinner fencing duel between Conrad and
Stephan. Just how was the poison
administered to Stephan? In the wine, on the edge of his epée, or via the
napkin used to dress Stephan’s wound after Conrad scratched him? At one point
the King orders Holmes and Watson arrested because he thinks they’re going to
frame him for the crime, but in the end the killer turns out to be Count Magor
— Charles thought it would be the princess but I guess Magor as the killer but
got his motive wrong. The plot has King Johan threatening to invade Conrad’s
kingdom and conquer it out of revenge for Stephan’s death, and I thought Magor
had been bribed by Johan to turn traitor and had thought the surest way to
start the war would be to kill Johan’s son. Instead the motive the Earlys
supplied was jealousy: it seems Magor, too, had dated Antonia, and when she
dumped him for Stephan he decided to kill Stephan and frame his other rival for
her affections, Conrad, for the crime. It sounds a bit silly in synopsis but
this was actually one of the better episodes of this show, with Watson used
relatively seriously instead of turned into a Nigel Bruce-like camp figure (a
regrettable tendency in various Holmes adaptations since the Rathbone-Bruce
films shaped audience expectations of how Sherlock Holmes should be filmed),
and the story (effectively directed by Steve Previn — any relation to Charles
and André?) is genuinely thrilling and legitimately mysterious. — 8/19/13
••••••••••
I screened Charles the next episode in sequence from the
1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series. This
was called “The Case of the Haunted Gainsborough” and featured Archie Duncan,
the actor who usually played Inspector Lestrade (pronounced with a long “a”
instead of the short one used by Dennis Hoey in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce
films), in an alternate part as Malcolm MacGregan, laird of a Scottish castle
he’s about to lose in foreclosure to Archibald Ross (Zack Matalon as a nicely
nasty villain). His only hope of bailing himself out is to sell a Gainsborough
portrait of his ancestress, Heather MacGregan — only every time a buyer shows
up, Heather’s ghost appears and scares them off. The latest pigeon is Sam Scott
(Roger E. Garris), an American — portrayed as a clueless Texan with a bad
accent — and of course it turns out that the “ghost” is a phony, an actress
(Cleo Rose in a nice performance) hired by Ross to impersonate a ghost and use
the (inevitable) secret passages that honeycomb the castle to make herself
appear spectral by suddenly (apparently) disappearing. Needless to say, this
isn’t exactly the freshest story premise of all time, and it doesn’t help that
the secret-passage gimmick is hard to take seriously these days after it was
parodied so brilliantly in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein — but this was still a fun show in spite of, or
arguably because of, the
over-the-top acting (Archie Duncan is even schtickier as the Scottish laird than he was as Lestrade, if
such a thing is possible) and writing (one character, Malcolm’s butler MacLeish
— played by John Buckmaster — seems to exist only so he can play a bagpipe solo whenever anyone enters
the scene). It was another Charles and Joseph Early script, and once again
Steve Previn was the director — and Charles (my Charles) complained that the shows in general are
pretty monotonous, with Ronald Howard playing only one side of Sherlock Holmes
and ignoring many of the character’s fascinating quirks in the original stories
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This show also suffers from being only a half-hour
long — some 1950’s crime shows on TV benefited from the shorter length (the
rapid pace and matter-of-fact presentation of Dragnet made it superb in the half-hour format and would
have seemed oppressive in an hour slot) but this one didn’t: the Jeremy Brett
series from British commercial TV in the 1970’s (all of whose plots were
adapted directly from Conan Doyle) established an hour (actually 50 minutes) as
the right length for an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes for TV (long enough to do
justice to the complexities of character and plot, short enough to avoid
boredom). Still, this was a pretty good episode and Cleo Rose’s performance was
especially interesting even though while posing as the “ghost” she came off
more like Lady Macbeth than the presumably innocent young woman of the
“Gainsborough” portrait! — 8/23/13
••••••••••
I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes half-hour TV series with Ronald
Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson, with
Archie Duncan back as Inspector Lestrade instead of the titled but impoverished
Scotsman he hammed it up as in the immediately previous episode, “The Case of
the Haunted Gainsborough.” This one was called “The Case of the Neurotic
Detective” and it was one Charles remembered having seen before, though I
didn’t — I suspect it was a rerun off the UCSD channel, which Charles could get
over the air at the place on Centre Street where he was living when we first
got together even though it wasn’t on Cox Cable (indeed, he might have watched
it without me) — in which Holmes suddenly starts getting incredibly
short-tempered and snapping at Watson. What’s more, there’s a string of major
thefts of public property being committed by a gang led by a super-criminal —
including secret state papers as well as Queen Elizabeth’s crown jewels — and
Lestrade comes to Holmes’ apartment at 221B Baker Street to plead for his help.
He’s rudely rebuffed, and in order to see what’s going on Watson adopts a
series of singularly inept disguises to follow Holmes, including one hilarious
scene in which he’s pretending to be a cabdriver and, so he can keep an eye on Holmes,
he turns down a young couple who want to hire his cab to elope. Watson spots a
stolen necklace in Holmes’ tobacco pouch (after Holmes had told him that was a
“special blend” Watson wouldn’t like — which briefly made me wonder if writer
Lou Morheim was depicting Holmes using another recreational drug besides his
occasional injections of a 7% solution of cocaine) and traces Holmes to a
secret hideout where he and a few others, including a woman, are plotting
further crimes. It all turns out to be innocent, of course — Holmes had been
hired by the British government to test their security (though if that’s the
case I wonder why Morheim didn’t use Mycroft Holmes, who in one Conan Doyle
story Sherlock actually said practically was the British government, as the character giving
Sherlock his marching orders) — and the episode is enlivened by Ronald Howard’s
convincing playing as a Holmes (presumably) gone bad as well as a brief,
uncredited but easily recognizable appearance by the great character actor Eugene
Deckers as “Prof. A. Fishblade,” a member of Holmes’ “gang.” Still, this was
one of the campier episodes in the series, and thereby one of the less
effective ones. — 9/6/13
••••••••••
Charles and I ran the third-from-last episode in the
interesting 1954-55 TV series Sherlock Holmes, a half-hour series produced in France with a mixed cast of British and
French actors. This one was called “The Case of the Unlucky Gambler” and the
person who brings the case to Holmes is an 11-year-old boy called Andrew Fenwick
(Richard O’Sullivan) — he comes to report the disappearance of his father
Herbert (Rowland Bartrop), who’s been away from home for three weeks. Holmes
deduces that Herbert, originally an accountant, has become a gambler (he
figures this out by noticing that some of Andrew’s clothes are new and
expensive, while others are old, worn and ragged, indicating his dad has wildly
fluctuating financial fortunes), and he traces gangster Jack Driscol (Duncan
Elliott), to whom Herbert owes 1,000 pounds. At first we’re clearly being led
to believe Driscol killed Herbert when Herbert wouldn’t — or couldn’t — pay his
debt, but eventually Holmes realizes that Herbert is still alive, and that he
plans to rob one of the pubs he frequents to raise the money to flee to America.
There are also some subplots (it’s an indication of how good writer Lou Morheim
— better than most of the people who wrote these shows — is that he can cram
not only a main plot but subplots into a show that runs less than half an
hour), including one in which Holmes and Watson hang out at a gym training
prizefighters and drop Herbert’s name to attract Driscol’s attention (the word
from the bartender they’ve been talking to is that Driscol’s current sporting
interest is boxing). In the end Holmes and Watson catch Herbert, in a very bad disguise, robbing one of the pubs, but as he did
in several of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Holmes lets Herbert
get away on the ground that his actions, though technically illegal, were
morally justifiable. Directed by Steve Previn — as were most of the later shows
in this series — this episode is
about in the midrange, with its campy moments (like the preposterous outfit
Andrew Fenwick is dressed in when he goes to see Holmes, as if he just walked
off the stage of a Shakespeare production) and some silly acting but an
effective and truly Holmesian resolution. — 9/7/13
••••••••••
I ran Charles the next-to-last episode of the 1954-55 Sherlock
Holmes series, “The Case of the Diamond
Tooth.” This was an oddly confusingly plotted show in which Watson (H. Marion
Crawford) accidentally stumbles on a diamond cut in the shape of an eye tooth,
and there’s a lot of campery about (Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode
personally from a script not by
one of the usual suspects) as Watson tries to draft a lost-and-found ad for the
Times offering to return the
tooth to its rightful owner. Harry Harkins (Charles Brodie), a squirrelly
little nerd, shows up and grabs the tooth (though actually it’s a glass decoy
Holmes left in a bowl for him) even though he’s not the rightful owner — he describes it as a right eye
tooth when in fact it’s a left one — and the chase leads to the docks where
Watson found the tooth, and where it turns out Harkins is actually the captain
of a ship who had the tooth’s owner, a Brazilian, murdered for his money. The
middle section that occurs on the ship is actually genuinely suspenseful, but
all the laugh-getting around the rest gets pretty tiresome after a while and
the whole episode is not one of their better ones. The show was really running
out of gas by this time and it’s not surprising it didn’t last more than one
season. — 9/11/13
••••••••••
Charles and I ran the final episode in the 1950’s Sherlock
Holmes TV series, produced by Sheldon Reynolds
and starring British actors Ronald Howard (son of Leslie, and to my mind a more
butch and therefore better-looking man than his dad even though he hardly
reached anything near Leslie Howard’s career heights) as Holmes and H. Marion
Crawford (since the “H.” stood for “Howard” it’s likely he used his initial so
he wouldn’t be confused with his co-star) as a futzy, campy Nigel Bruce-ish
Watson. The show was actually a good one for the series to exit on: it was
called “The Case of the Tyrant’s Daughter.” The tyrant is Harringway (Basil
Dignam in a marvelously well-honed performance as the petty bad guy — he’s dead
when the episode opens but we see him in a flashback midway through), and the
daughter is June (the actress playing her is unidentified on imdb.com), who’s
displeased her tyrannical dad by getting herself engaged to Tom Vernon (Zack
Matalon), who has no money and therefore dad is convinced that he’s just after
the Harringway fortune (such as it is). Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan)
becomes convinced that Tom is the killer and arrests him because Harringway was
killed by poison introduced into his heart medicine — he had heart disease and
his doctor had told him he’d be dead in a year anyway — and Tom worked as a
chemist (which in Britain can either mean a chemical scientist or a pharmacist)
and was seen by Harringway’s maid, Mary Dugan (June Petersen), carrying a
little bottle of something in his inside jacket pocket and taking it out
briefly before he went to fetch Harringway his medicine to prevent an imminent
heart attack … only the stuff was spiked with something that killed him. The
mystery was genuinely perplexing because there was such a limited range of
suspects — frankly I thought writer Roger E. Garris was going to make Mary
Dugan the killer, even though she’d been the one who brought the case to Holmes
in the first place (there are
Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, including “The Retired
Colourman,” in which Holmes’ client turns out to be the murderer) and I
couldn’t figure out what motive she could possibly have had, but in the end
Harringway committed suicide in such a way as to frame Tom (another gimmick
Conan Doyle used in “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which the unhappy wife of
a fabulously wealthy man kills herself and frames the man’s governess, with
whom she suspects he’s having an affair). Though the show, directed by Steve
Previn (who helmed most of the later episodes), has a rather annoyingly campy
tag scene, for the most part this was a quite effective Sherlock Holmes pastiche and a good note on which to end this series, which
despite the lapses into campiness (especially in Crawford’s all too Nigel
Bruce-ish Watson and Archie Duncan’s clichéd accent both as Lestrade and other “Scottish”
characters he was cast as so he could still be in episodes in which Lestrade
did not appear) was generally a good account of the Holmes mythos and worthy of the radio broadcasts Rathbone (still …
well, as I’ve paraphrased the opening of “A Scandal in Bohemia” on the subject,
to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes) and Bruce did, especially in the early part of the
run (1939-1946) when they were quite often taking their plots straight from
Conan Doyle. — 10/1/13
