Thoughts about Gillette's Sherlock Holmes
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 9:14 am
I got the Flicker Alley Blu-ray of William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes for Christmas and watched it over two nights. I know it is a film of the stage play. I have not seen the play except for little pieces of that HBO taped of a staging with Frank Langella, so I was not completely familiar with the plot.
The film makes a decent serial, but the play is divided into acts which correspond to the serial episodes, so this is hardly a radical invention of the French distributor. The "scene" breaks feel akin to modern commercial breaks.
Being a filmed version of the play, there were serious challenges in bringing the material to the silent format. Much of the plot is conveyed through narrative intertitles, telling the viewer what is transpiring in the scene they are about to watch, then acted out with a relative dearth of dialog intertitles. The play is rather talky from what I read of it. How much of it may have been lost in translation may never be known, but I felt a few more intertitles would have been welcome. Without it, we do not have the pleasures like the famous lines ("Elementary! The child’s play of deduction!") or Holmes' classic explanations for his deductions.
The most serious issue I have with the plotting is that the characters can act really dumb at times. In episode one, Holmes leaves Alice Faulkner at the Larrabee's house. He has tricked her into revealing the hiding place of the letters both he and those crooks have been seeking and Larrabee is aware of this. He also knows that Larrabee has used violence to try and force their location. After he leaves, why wouldn't Larrabee simply have picked up where he left off? Holmes should not have left her in the hands of such a brute.
In episode two, Moriarty's plan appears well-thought out, but not so much. He devises a scheme to get Holmes alone in his room so he can shoot him dead. He lures Dr. Watson away on a false medical call, but when Moriarty enters 221B, his associate immediately gets into a scuffle with Billy the Pageboy. This alerts Holmes' attention and he has his revolver ready for the Professor by the time the Professor has finished climbing up the stairs. Having a gun trained on him the entire time, the Professor has no opportunity to draw on Holmes, making the whole plan a waste of time. Sherlock Holmes has admirable sources of information, so why shouldn't the Professor have accounted for Billy's presence and arranged to have gotten him out of the way quietly?
Finally, in episode three Alice Faulkner suffers a serious lapse in judgment. She courageously takes a cab, follows Larrabee to the Stepney Gas Chamber and overhears his and Moriarty's plan to capture and kill Holmes. Having so resourcefully overheard the villain's plans without getting caught, and knowing Holmes is on his way, what does she do? Does she do the sensible thing and warn Holmes of the trap? No, instead she confronts Larrabee in the Chamber and demands that he not harm Holmes. Has she forgotten what a greedy and unscrupulous man Larrabee is? Larrabee and Moriarty's gang promptly tie her up and think to themselves how they have solved two problems with one solution.
The film makes a decent serial, but the play is divided into acts which correspond to the serial episodes, so this is hardly a radical invention of the French distributor. The "scene" breaks feel akin to modern commercial breaks.
Being a filmed version of the play, there were serious challenges in bringing the material to the silent format. Much of the plot is conveyed through narrative intertitles, telling the viewer what is transpiring in the scene they are about to watch, then acted out with a relative dearth of dialog intertitles. The play is rather talky from what I read of it. How much of it may have been lost in translation may never be known, but I felt a few more intertitles would have been welcome. Without it, we do not have the pleasures like the famous lines ("Elementary! The child’s play of deduction!") or Holmes' classic explanations for his deductions.
The most serious issue I have with the plotting is that the characters can act really dumb at times. In episode one, Holmes leaves Alice Faulkner at the Larrabee's house. He has tricked her into revealing the hiding place of the letters both he and those crooks have been seeking and Larrabee is aware of this. He also knows that Larrabee has used violence to try and force their location. After he leaves, why wouldn't Larrabee simply have picked up where he left off? Holmes should not have left her in the hands of such a brute.
In episode two, Moriarty's plan appears well-thought out, but not so much. He devises a scheme to get Holmes alone in his room so he can shoot him dead. He lures Dr. Watson away on a false medical call, but when Moriarty enters 221B, his associate immediately gets into a scuffle with Billy the Pageboy. This alerts Holmes' attention and he has his revolver ready for the Professor by the time the Professor has finished climbing up the stairs. Having a gun trained on him the entire time, the Professor has no opportunity to draw on Holmes, making the whole plan a waste of time. Sherlock Holmes has admirable sources of information, so why shouldn't the Professor have accounted for Billy's presence and arranged to have gotten him out of the way quietly?
Finally, in episode three Alice Faulkner suffers a serious lapse in judgment. She courageously takes a cab, follows Larrabee to the Stepney Gas Chamber and overhears his and Moriarty's plan to capture and kill Holmes. Having so resourcefully overheard the villain's plans without getting caught, and knowing Holmes is on his way, what does she do? Does she do the sensible thing and warn Holmes of the trap? No, instead she confronts Larrabee in the Chamber and demands that he not harm Holmes. Has she forgotten what a greedy and unscrupulous man Larrabee is? Larrabee and Moriarty's gang promptly tie her up and think to themselves how they have solved two problems with one solution.