Sherlock Holmes (Essanay Film Manufacturing Corporation, 1916; Comptoir L. Sutto Films, 1920)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

For the “feature” film my husband Charles and I watched last night, I picked out a real rarity: a restored version of the 1916 film Sherlock Holmes, which had been thought lost for decades until 2014, when the Cinemathéque Française discovered in their collection a complete print of the film, released in France in 1920, whose French distributor, Comptoir L. Sutto Films (referred to in the credits as “Maison Sutto”) had cut it up into four parts and put it out as a serial. Just how an institution like the Cinemathéque Française, one of the leading forces in discovering and restoring lost films, could have been sitting on this one for decades and literally not known they had it is a mystery (paging Sherlock Holmes!), but at least this gives hope for the rediscovery of such tantalizingly lost silents as Tod Browning’s London After Midnight, Paul Leni’s The Chinese Parrot and F. W. Murnau’s The Four Devils. The 1916 Sherlock Holmes stars American actor William Gillette, whom I had thought was the first actor to play Holmes on stage – though Gillette’s Wikipedia page said there were two earlier attempts to put Holmes on the stage – and is based on the play Gillette is credited with writing. Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had done a rough draft of a play about Holmes and had first shopped it to Sir Henry Irving, who insisted that Conan Doyle completely rewrite it. Conan Doyle decided that would be too much work and took it back, then offered it to Gillette, who agreed to do it if he could rewrite the script – which he did so extensively that the final play credited Gillette as author and added, “Based on characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” At one point Gillette wrote Conan Doyle and asked if, for the purposes of his play, he could have Holmes get married – and Conan Doyle replied, “You can marry him, murder him, or do anything you like with him.”

Sherlock Holmes premiered in Boston in 1899 (after one so-called “copyright performance” in London), which means Gillette had been performing the role for 17 years before he got to put it on film – and it was he who established the curved pipe as Holmes’ trademark because he couldn’t speak his lines effectively with a straight pipe in his mouth. (In the stories Holmes is described as a pipe smoker but Conan Doyle remained silent as to just what sort of pipe.) The imdb.com “Trivia” page on the 1916 Sherlock Holmes says of Gillette, “This film is the only preserved record of him doing Sherlock Holmes” – which is true only with the caveat that it’s the only visual record of him in the part. It’s possible, though not certain, that recordings of radio broadcasts Gillette did in the part during the last decade of his life (he died in 1937) exist, and if so it creates the tantalizing possibility that they could be “married” to the footage of this film to create at least a part-talking version of him in the role (just as it would be theoretically possible to create Rudolph Valentino part-talkies by dubbing in his recordings of the “Kashmiri Song” from The Sheik and “El Relicario” from Blood and Sand into these films). Indeed, since writing the above I’ve discovered an attempt (not too convincing but still well worth watching) on YouTube to match footage from this film with a 10-minute private recording of Gillette doing two scenes from the play (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AklHzlu0KCc). One odd thing about William Gillette’s play is that, while he held the stage with it almost until the end of his life (portraying the young Sherlock Holmes into his 70’s!), it’s really not a particularly interesting story. Sherlock Holmes is hired by Baron von Stalburg (Ludwig Kreiss) to retrieve a packet of incriminating letters the Crown Prince of his country (which is never named, though we presume it’s somewhere in the German-speaking world) and a young woman, Rose Faulkner, wrote to each other. The Crown Prince had an affair with Rose, then abandoned her, and she died but her sister Alice (Marjorie Kay, looking surprisingly good in the role and in considerably more flattering dresses than were the norm for movie wear in 1916 – or in real-life wear if the photos I’ve seen from the era are representative) kept the Count’s letters to Rose as a remembrance and apparently so she could fight back if the Count ever tried to trash her late sister’s reputation. (The titles claim Rose Faulkner “died of a broken heart,” though in the only other film adaptation I’ve seen of the Gillette play – the 1922 silent Sherlock Holmes with John Barrymore – it’s specified she committed suicide, and the implication was she did so because the Crown Prince had got her pregnant.)

Alice Faulkner is tricked by a criminal couple, James and Madge Larrabee (Mario Majeroni and Grace Reals), into staying with them as a house guest, only she soon learns they’re really holding her prisoner against her will so they can extract the letters and use them themselves for blackmail purposes. Holmes plants an agent posing as a servant in the Larrabee household, Benjamin Forman (Stewart Robbins), to keep an eye on the Larrabees and also to see if he can find out where Alice has hidden the letters. (In the 1922 Barrymore film he was called “Forman Wells” and was played, in his film debut, by William Powell; in that movie he was portrayed as a crook whom Holmes persuaded to turn on the Larrabees, but in this film he’s a good guy from the get-go.) Realizing that their own criminal skills aren’t sufficient to extract the information from Alice or find the letters themselves, the Larrabees recruit the services of Professor Moriarty (Ernest Maupain, billed in this French print – though the titles in our version are in English, filled in largely from the script of the Gillette play – as a member of the company of the Thèátre Sarah Bernhardt, which probably impressed French audiences and also got her magic name on the credits even though she herself was signed with another studio, the French Film D’Art company, whose American distributor was Paramount), whom they figure will help them extract the letters from Alice just because he hates Sherlock Holmes so much he’ll be willing to do anything to discomfit him. Before Moriarty enters the action Holmes is able to trick Alice into revealing where she’s hidden the letters by starting a fire in the Larrabees’ kitchen – a plot gimmick Gillette borrowed from the Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” (also about a German-speaking prince who had an affair with a British woman).

When Moriarty comes into the action he stages an assassination attempt by sending a gunman to shoot Holmes through an open window in Holmes’ home á la “The Adventure of the Empty House” (though that was the story Conan Doyle wrote to return Holmes to life after he and Moriarty supposedly killed each other at the end of “The Final Problem” and the assailant was not Moriarty but his second-in-command, Col. Sebastian Moran), and later Gillette and the makers of this movie – screenwriter H. S. Sheldon and director Arthur Berthelet (who had a run of 22 directorial credits from 1915 to 1925, then made a comeback as a dialogue director and worked as such from 1937 to 1948, the year before he died) – stage a Holmes-Moriarty confrontation similar to the one in “The Final Problem” that’s quite frankly the best thing in the movie. There’s a long scene in something called the “Stepney Gas Chamber” in which Moriarty’s men try to trap Holmes by setting up a meeting for Holmes to buy the letters from James Larrabee for 5,000 pounds – though the “letters” they intend to sell him are fake – with the idea that they will either asphyxiate Holmes by locking him in a room and filling it with toxic gas, or just blowing up the building with him inside it. In a major plot hole, as they’re setting up the scene Moriarty’s men are warned not to smoke because any fire or flame might cause an explosion – but later Holmes and James Larrabee sit across from each other in a room in the building, both are smoking (Larrabee a cigarette, Holmes the curved pipe Gillette made his trademark) and there’s a burning lantern on the table between them. (One interesting thing about this movie is they mostly took care to be historically accurate to the 1890’s setting of the original stories instead of having it take place in the present: all the vehicles are horse-drawn and there are no electric lights, though I think Charles caught at least one reference to telephones. So the common assumption that the 1939 20th Century-Fox version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first Holmes film set in period is not accurate.)

Ultimately Holmes foils the Larrabees’ plots, Moriarty is arrested (somewhat unusually, since in his only canonical appearance as well as most of the movies, plays and fan fictions involving him he either dies or escapes in a way that enables him to be presumed dead.) There’s a fascinating scene at the end in which Holmes carefully leaves the door in Watson’s doctor’s office ajar (a title at the start of part four tells us that Holmes’ famous apartment at 221B Baker Street was burned out so he is operating out of Watson’s office – until then Watson is barely in the movie at all and Billy, Holmes’ house boy and a character Gillette invented for the play, is a more important assistant to Holmes than Watson is – and to make it weirder the nameplate on Watson’s office reads either “C. WATSON, M.D.” or “G. WATSON, M.D.” – in the stories Watson’s first name was John) so Alice Faulkner can hear as Holmes presents the fake letters to Baron von Stalburg and his assistant, they denounce him as a swindler (as he predicted they would), and then Alice decides of her own free will to give the Baron the real letters and she and Holmes get together and move in for an embrace (though director Berthelet carefully cuts the scene off before they actually kiss) and the film ends. One problem with Sherlock Holmes is that the story isn’t particularly interesting – I’ve never read Gillette’s play, seen it produced on stage or watched a sound film of it (and I suspect there’s never been one) and I suspect it’s because the plot is rather dreary and predictable. The Larrabees are singularly uninteresting villains and it’s only when Moriarty and Holmes finally confront each other that the film starts to look like a Sherlock Holmes story. Part of that is due to the fact that William Gillette and Ernest Maupain are the only really interesting actors (unless you count the young Edward Arnold, who reportedly has a brief appearance as one of Moriarty’s thugs in the Stepney Gas Chamber sequence); Marjorie Kay acts Alice’s dilemma effectively (especially in the opening scenes, in which she’s not sure whether Sherlock Holmes is a hero come to rescue her from the Larrabees or a villain out after the letters for his own nefarious purposes) and she avoids the simpering coyness and winsomeness that plagued a lot of silent-screen female leads, but she’s not exactly the most arresting screen presence either.

The rest of the cast is O.K. but unspectacular; Essanay’s titles claim these were the same actors as in the stage production, but I doubt that (remember the play had premiered 17 years before the film was made!), and in one preposterous scene James Larrabee decides to have his wife impersonate Alice and hopes that will fool Holmes. “Won’t he notice that she’s 50 pounds heavier?” I said to Charles – and he said, “Or that she’s at least 10 years older?” For two big-time Sherlock Holmes devotées like Charles and I this film was irresistible for its historical importance alone, and as limited as it is both by the absence of sound (let’s face it, the Holmes stories are so dialogue-driven making a silent movie about Holmes was almost a contradiction in terms) and the relative uncreativeness of the direction – Berthelet and his cinematographer pretty much plant their camera front and center and show us what we would have seen from a good seat in a theatre; it’s not as dull as some movies of its vintage but one can’t really expect creative direction from a 1916 film unless its director was Griffith, De Mille or Chaplin – one does get a sense of how electrifying William Gillette must have been as Sherlock Holmes on stage. He looks like he just stepped out of one of the illustrations Sidney Paget provided for the original Strand Magazine publications of Conan Doyle’s stories – the only subsequent actor who has so strongly resembled Paget’s visualization of Holmes is Basil Rathbone – and even within the limits of a silent movie he grips the screen every time he’s on it. Gillette toured with this play weil into the 1930’s, performing as Holmes in his 70’s, and in the British premiere shortly after the turn of the (last) century he cast as Billy the houseboy a then-unknown child actor named Charlie Chaplin – who, ironically, had just left the Essanay company for greener pastures at another early studio, Mutual, when Sherlock Holmes was made. It’s nice to see this movie at long last – especially since it was long thought utterly lost – and aided by a restoration funded by the Cinemathéque Française and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (an organization I can’t recall existing when I still lived in the San Francisco Bay Area), it’s in excellent visual shape with only a little fading on the edges in a few scenes. Bravo, William Gillette, even though it’s a pity that at least in this case you weren’t anywhere near as good a writer as you were an actor!