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The Thread Of Sherlock Holmes

I've got a huge tome of collected Sherlock Holmes tales, complete with loads of original - and evocative - Sidney Paget illustrations.

Apparently, the artist's brother - Walter - was not the model for Sherlock Holmes, rather in the same way that Bob Holness was not the saxophone player on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street.

David Bowie invented 'Connect Four', though. I'm sure of it. :?
 
Earlier this year, I bought a box-set of all the Penguin editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories but, tantalisingly, the prefaces of some of the books refer to The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes, which isn't included - does anyone reading this have the book and if so, is it worth my while getting a copy?
 
Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes

Here's the trailer:

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/sherlock-holmes/trailer

In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous characters, "Sherlock Holmes" sends Holmes and his stalwart partner Watson on their latest challenge. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.
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James_H2 said:
Wow! Contender for worst film ever?
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Certainly a contender for most fan-depressing trailer of 2009 ... :twisted:
 
EnolaGaia said:
James_H2 said:
Wow! Contender for worst film ever?
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Certainly a contender for most fan-depressing trailer of 2009 ... :twisted:
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I don't know. It made me laugh. :lol:

I'll probably go see it.

There have been far, far, worse Sherlock Homes movies, I can assure you.
 
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Calabashes

'Oi, Watson!'

'Whaaaaatchoowant, you fiddle playin' ponce?'

'Where's me charlie, you thievin' pikey twat?

'You huffed the last of it last night, just befower you fell out of that 'ansom, remember?'

'Bollocks. Ow, me 'ead. Christ I've got a wobble on this morning. Heard anything from that Mororart...Moriarart...heard anything from that...Shit, can't we just call him Lenny the Greek?
 
That's all we need, Sherlock Holmes reimagined as Lethal Weapon 5.
 
You have no idea how much this appalls me - even in the concept! Almost as bad as Charlton Heston mutilating the character of Sherlock Holmes, this is giving me real gyp!

Pass both the bicarb and the sick-bucket!
 
Narrated in a silly, hoarse, American accent: Sherlock Holmes Part 10 - this time its personal

Pissing on the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle :evil:
 
Stormkhan said:
You have no idea how much this appalls me - even in the concept! Almost as bad as Charlton Heston mutilating the character of Sherlock Holmes, this is giving me real gyp!

Pass both the bicarb and the sick-bucket!
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That was one. :cross eye
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
Conan Doyle used to be a dab hand at turning out stirring tales of bare knuckle prizefighting.
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Also, I had no idea until I read a biography of the man recently that Conan Doyle did so much to popularise the sport of skiing. In fact I've read one claim elsewhere since (can't remember exactly where, and can't remember if the biography made the same claim) that he more or less introduced the sport to Switzerland - it being virtually unknown there at the time - after become an enthusiast in Scandinavia.

So possibly a parachute ski-jump à la The Spy Who Loved Me, in full deer-stalker, caped tweed and smoking pipe regalia, might be appropriate. (Although given Holmes monkishly misogynist nature replicating all the inferred shagging might be a bit of a challlenge).
 
That's not Sherlock Holmes, that's arse!

Maybe if it was some generic Victorian/Edwardian adventurer - a la Adam Adamant - it might be a bit more respectable. But it's not Holmes.

And though it is true that Holmes was adept at a martial art - In one story (I forget which, sorry) he overcomes a ruffian by recourse to Baritsu (By which I think ACD means the Victorian self-defence art of Bartitsu), he is far too much the drug-addled ascetic to get involved in so many unseemly brawls.

Whatever it is, it ain't Holmes.

Oh, some info on Bartitsu here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartitsu
 
Having watched the trailer again I'm going to go against the current consensus here and have to admit that actually I really quite like the look of it. I like Steampunk, and I like the Holmes genre - how long was it really going to be before the two collided in the mainstream? I also really like Downey, and if you're going to portray Holmes in this manner, I can't think of anyone better to do it.

Okay, not for the purists, but come on, a little sense of humour might not hurt. Besides many purists rate Jeremy Brett as the best Holmes, whereas to my mind Brett was an atrocious ham whose performance is so painfully camp and theatrical that it makes my gums bleed - so maybe I'm just not cut out to be a purist.

For what it's worth I always thought the perfect combination was the pairing of Clive Merrison and Michael Williams in Bert Coules dramatisations for the radio. Merrison's Holmes is neither as perfect or humourless as he is normally portrayed and William's Watson is not as dense as he was never intended to be by Doyle, but which every subsequent portrayal of him seems to wish to imply.

Great stuff, possibly the best - but I'm not going to let that put me off enjoying a good romp with pyros, brawling and ladies.
 
That has given me the grump now.

Holmes is nothing if not a gentleman... a sometimes singualr, exotic and slightly sinister gentleman but a gentleman non the less.

Not some sex-crazed back-street brawler.

This is horrific.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Okay, not for the purists, but come on, a little sense of humour might not hurt.
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I'm not a Sherlock Holmes fan - I'm just less of a Guy Ritchie fan. Lock, Stock, and two Smoking Barrels was my idea of personal hell.
 
Apparently Disney demanded a lot of this film be reshot as they found it too unbelievable.

Yes! Disney found it too unbelievable!!
 
Well it looks like I'm the only one looking forward to this. I don't care if it's totally out of character for everyone in the books, I'm not passing up this golden opportunity to see Robert Downey Jr in very little clothing. 8)

Plus I never actually liked Holmes anyway. He's a jerk :roll:
 
You've hit the nail on the head LaurenChurchill - inadvertley but squarely. Holmes is a jerk... he is an uncomforable character, we are not meant to like him.

Watson is the figure we identify with, Holmes maintains an almost etherial quality, he is sinister, manipulitive and egoistic, he has no regard for any opinion but his own because and no real need for company other than his own.

We get the impression that Holmes keeps Watson around out of pure friendship rather than any essential need - as evidenced by the long absenses from Holmes Watson had.

What Ritchie has done here is a complete travesty of everything Sherlock Holmes is. If you wanted to reimagine Holmes then the only way I could see it being successful is to imagine him in full gothic eccentricity letting Holmes bohemian/romantic nature assert itself as a darker side of the clinical 'jerk' that you see.
 
LaurenChurchill said:
Well it looks like I'm the only one looking forward to this...
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No, no - me too (see previous post), although possibly not for the same reasons, being a chap and all.

Plus I never actually liked Holmes anyway. He's a jerk :roll:
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I've always been a bit ambivalent about him. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call him a jerk - the fact that he's a misogynist, racist, snobbish know-all might simply be that he's a man of his time, but, given that, I think I might just find it more entertaining, and a lot less irritating, to spend an evening in the pub with rjmrjmrjm's 'sex-crazed back-street brawler'.
 
rjmrjmrjm said:
What Ritchie has done here is a complete travesty of everything Sherlock Holmes is. If you wanted to reimagine Holmes then the only way I could see it being successful is to imagine him in full gothic eccentricity letting Holmes bohemian/romantic nature assert itself as a darker side of the clinical 'jerk' that you see.
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I confess being a fan of the old-school Dracula and Frankenstein movies - but they have little to do with Stoker or Shelley. I love the stories of MR James to an almost obsessive extent - but I also quite like the old Christmas TV adaptations, some of which were a little loose in their adherence to the original plot.

Maybe we just need to be a teensy weensy little less serious about the whole thing. The original stories are not going to change and the genre as a whole isn't going to suffer simply because of a couple of fast and loose adaptations.
 
Are we forgetting Young Sherlock Holmes back in the eighties? Or Indiana Holmes as he would have been better known? This kind of reimagining thing isn't new. Mind you, that was a flop at the time.

There's always Without a Clue as well.
 
I'm going to nail my colours to the mast here and state that I think Jeremy Brett's portrayal to be the best; I can accept some criticism of his performance, however. I'm a big, big afficionado of historical crime fiction (vide my website) so I think I can comment on this subject with a little authority.

Conan Doyle may have had several reasons for writing the stories in the way he did, but one of the agreed factors is that Holmes was to be the achitype for the scientist most beloved of the Victorians - mercurial, efficient, calculating, incisive and aloof from "us mortals". He was meant to be different from Mr Average, as Watson was meant to be - Watson also played the important part ... as the character the reader could relate to.

On the films; well, there've been many "adaptations" (such as Peter Cushing and - a favourite of mine - Christopher Lee) and "re-imaginings", such as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Hound ... (which I find hilarious), Gene Wilder's portrayal as the Younger Brother and The Young Sherlock Holmes - worthy of a kid's film, perhaps, but not inspiring.

What Guy Ritchie seems to be doing is re-writing the canon, the characters and the spirit of the original work. I've nothing against him trying to bring something new to the table but it seems he isn't re-positioning Holmes - he's changing the sleuth's character; a character which has plenty of "difference", quirks and subtle mysteries already. I'm not against Guy Ritchie trying to do a new Holmes story ... I'm just against him using the Holmes name - and ... er ... pedigree - to give his film some status. He could've called his protagonist any name and set it in a steampunk-style world. Why use a famous, and highly regarded character, unless it's to give his film some ready-made interest?

Oh, and Holmes was a practitioner of baritsu, the most famous occasion in which he used it was his destruction of Moriaty in The Final Problem. He was also seen to use great strength in bending an iron fire poker in The Speckled Band!
 
I suppose this is always really going to boil down to a simple case of de gustibus non est disputandum. I too love crime fiction, although I can't claim for one minute to be an afficianado - and though I'm familiar with a lot of older work my tastes are generally more modern. But I have to admit to a certain love of pastiche, at least if it's well done - or maybe homage is a better word. Mark Frost's List Of Seven is, to my mind, a good example. (The author hijacks the character of Conan Doyle, rather than his creation but I don't think there's much doubt that the character of Jack Sparks owes an awful lot to the latter.)

As far as I'm concerned some of the worst contributions to the whole genre are the literary products of those authors who try to copy the style and content of the original stories in order to create 'authentic' sounding tales. I remember browsing a couple of collections in the late lamented Murder One, on Charing Cross Road and wondering who the hell would actually pay for them.

I think the irony might be that given Conan-Doyle's well documented exasperation with Holmes and the cult he had inadvertantly created I'm not sure that he wouldn't find the new film a bit of a blast, even if only to relieve the boredom.
 
To be honest, the film looks fun. I just think he'd have done better to "create" a new Victorian adventure hero rather than hijack Holmes.
 
rjmrjmrjm said:
You've hit the nail on the head LaurenChurchill - inadvertley but squarely. Holmes is a jerk... he is an uncomforable character, we are not meant to like him.

Watson is the figure we identify with, Holmes maintains an almost etherial quality, he is sinister, manipulitive and egoistic, he has no regard for any opinion but his own because and no real need for company other than his own.

We get the impression that Holmes keeps Watson around out of pure friendship rather than any essential need
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Exactly. Holmes is an obsessive, possibly autistic personality. He and his brother Mycroft are essentially superhuman in the narrow field of their preferred affairs. When his mind is not occupied with the minutea of a case he is happy to fritter away his life by numbing his senses with opium.

Anyone who thinks the stories are just private tec nicks bad guys could do worse that read the earlier stuff at leisure again.

This stupid kiss kiss bang bang Holmes movie is just a lame attempt to parasite off the name / brand.
 
The best Holmes, I've seen, since Jeremy Brett pulled out all the stops for his portrayal of the famous, Victorian, consulting detective, in the grand manner, is probably Hugh Laurie's House MD. Admittedly, he takes the cantankerousness to new levels, but the essentials of the Great Detective are there.

I'm not too worried about whether Ritchie's movie will damage, or tarnish, the reputation of Sherlock Homes, it's more likely that if the film doesn't get the pitch just right, then the film will simply flop.

Look at the Muppet babies version of, 'Young Sherlock Holmes', that Spielberg managed to churn out.

Anyway, there's always been at least a touch of Professor Challenger about Holmes. You may find the thought of Robert Downey Jr's Holmes, roaring round the cobbled streets of a fog bound London, whilst indulging in bare knuckle boxing matches, a bit unlikely, but a Professor Challenger, played at full volume by Brian Blessed, wouldn't raise an eyebrow. After all where did Holmes learn to box and how convincing was he, when he disguised himself as a leery, cockney, ostler? ;)
 
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