Screenwriter »

• Sherlock Holmes won’t go away.

  July 24, 2010 @ 5:27 pm | by Donald Clarke

  And why should he? Throughout the entire history of cinema, film-makers have enjoyed playing with the persona of Arthur Conan-Doyle’s cerebral, faintly demented private detective. The Internet Movie Database lists a truly impressive 231 film and TV projects featuring Holmes and Dr Watson. In Russia, the characters, apparently, appear in every second barroom joke. Quite a few snooty  philosophers have used his adventures as a vehicle for the propagation of complex, head-spinning ideas. Too many  people still think him a genuine historical character.

  

  All of which is a prelude to my saying that I am looking forward to the BBC’s new take on the stories. Sherlock, which begins tomorrow, updates the stories to the present day and in, respectively, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, offers us younger than usual versions of Holmes and Watson. I am sure that many Baker Street Irregulars will be concerned, but the instigators of the show seem like men you can trust. Mark Gattis, co-creator of The League of Gentlemen, is an expert on Victoriana and a man with a taste for English Gothic. Steven Moffat has done good work as the current director of operations at Dr Who House.

  The series comes, of course, just six months after Guy Ritchie offered a different re-imagining — steampunk meets Sax Rohmer — of Conan-Doyle’s imperishable universe. You might wonder why two such transformations have occurred at just this point. Coincidence, I guess. A more interesting question is why, over the previous 100 years, there have been so few attempts to radically tamper with the stories’ key elements. The later Basil Rathbone films were set contemporaneously, but, aside from introducing Nazis into the picture, the temporal shift did not radically alter the series’ character (not least because it was only 40 years since the last tales had been published).

  Sherlock Holmes adaptations vary in quality, but they rarely alter much in appearance or ambiance. It’s usually foggy. Holmes is always eagle-faced and eccentric. Watson is always some sort of duffer (though rarely as dumb as Nigel Bruce’s adorable imbecile in the Rathbone flicks). It’s taken a very long time for this re-invention craze to set in.

  Or has it? You might reasonably argue that the entire history of 20th-century detective fiction (and movies and TV) has been a series of experiments with the Holmes template. Holmes’s key feature is his superhuman intelligence. From the moment the story starts, the seeds of the solution appear to be germinating in some corner of his brain. Remind you of anyone? Philip Marlowe is a noir Holmes. Lieutenant Columbo is a scruffy Holmes. Miss Marple is an elderly female Holmes. All are eccentric. All have a peculiar intelligence. All — even Columbo, who baffles his superiors and can’t fire a gun — work outside the traditional framework of law enforcement. So we have, perhaps, been constantly re-inventing the great man without quite knowing it.

  Anyway, it’s time to consider…

  FIVE NOTEWORTHY TAKES ON SHERLOCK HOLMES

  JEREMY BRETT

  

  Got the borderline-insanity just right. It was also a very nicely produced TV series.

  VASILY LIVANOV

  

  Legendary as the detective on Russian TV. Holmes was madly popular in the USSR and remains so in the former republics.

  BASIL RATHBONE

  

  Unfortunately, the films got increasingly crummy (see this clip). But he did define the role for at least a generation.

  CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER

  

  That’s right. That’s Chris in the sadly overlooked, if utterly mad Murder by Decree (1979). He’s after Jack the Ripper, you know.

  NICOL WILLIAMSON

  

  Like Murder by Decree, Herbert Ross’s 1976 The Seven Percent Solution veered away from Doyle. As always, Williamson seemed nice and barmy.

• Elementary, my dear Trailerspotting.

  November 20, 2009 @ 11:49 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Insofar as anything so grand as “controversy” can attach attach itself to the trailer-junkie community, some sort of, well, controversy has gathered round the promo for Guy Ritchie‘s upcoming assault on Sherlock Holmes. Recalling the whole Shutter Island furore, the dispute hinges on whether you think the film looks like a steaming pile of turnips or the dog’s best pyjamas.

  

  We must, of course, face up to the problem of Mr Ritchie himself. There are, I guess, three takes on our Guy.

  1. The man’s an idiot and that’s all there is to it. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was Mockney garbage from a monocled-toff whose aunt is the Fourth Duchess of Bufton Tufton and who eats poor children for supper. Snatch was more of the same. And as for Revolver…

  2. The man’s a decent entertainer who went off the rails all too quickly. Lock Stock and Snatch are perfectly good fun. Sadly, Swept Away and Revolver are among the most hilariously wretched films ever made. RocknRolla was a partial return to modest form.

  3. The man’s a genius. Far from being pretentious drivel written, apparently, by a 19-year-old with a railway spike in his frontal lobe, Revolver is intellectual meat of the gamiest type. You just don’t get it.

  Now, I tend towards the second option. As a result, I am rather well disposed toward this apparently unpretentious Sherlock Holmes. I bow to nobody in my devotion to the original stories, but Ritchie is, it seems, making no gestures towards faithfulness. So there’s no real reason to get hoity-toity about the trailer’s lack of Doyleness. This is Holmes as action hero and the promo suggests that penny-dreadful larks will not be in short supply. Okay, Downey Jr — an actor I can overdose on very easily — doesn’t quite have the accent right. Sure, the film seems very reliant on CGI backgrounds.

  But Sherlock Holmes dives out of the Houses of Parliament into the Thames. He has a fight with a big man and his hammer — beside, I’m guessing, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s The Great Eastern — and various people appear to be rising untethered from the dead.  Come on. It’s bound to be a bit of a lark.

  As far as weekly housekeeping goes, the film of the week is, without question, the Coens’ astringent, penetratingly pessimistic, weirdly hilarious A Serious Man. I was much  keener on Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! than many critics. And I remain pretty much on board with the latest episode of the teen bloodsucker mopefest that goes by the name of Twilight. Decide for yourselves, folks.