England's Secret Weapon: The Wartime Films of Sherlock Holmes

INTRODUCTION

It is midnight. Clouds scud across the face of the Houses of Parliament as Big Ben begins its familiar chime. The chime continues while the scene fades out to reveal a Baker Street road-sign lit by a gas flare: as the camera pans along a brick wall, the flare makes dimly visible `221B’ elegantly sign-written on the entrance door below. The scene cuts to a close-up of an article in The Times, about the arrival from Canada of Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to the Baskerville estate. In a midshot, we see Dr Watson seated comfortably at a library-table, scissors in hand, preparing to clip the item out of the paper. He complains to a pacing, dressing gowned Holmes that he can’t understand why Holmes wants all the clippings about `this Baskerville fellow’. `My conjecture’, replies Holmes, as the camera cuts to his face in profile, `is that he’ll be murdered’. `Murdered?’ echoes a baffled Watson. `It will be very interesting to see if my deductions are accurate’, replies Holmes, sucking contemplatively on his calabash pipe. After some showy deductions about a walking stick, left behind earlier that evening (Watson confidently getting it all wrong, and Holmes affectionately putting him right), the door opens and Mrs Hudson ushers in the stick’s owner, Dr Mortimer. `Mr Holmes’, the man says in an urgent tone, `you’re the one man in all England who can help me’.

This scene, from The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Twentieth Century-Fox film released in 1939, contains the first glimpse of Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson in what would become a long-running series spanning the years of war in Europe. It introduced viewers to a new interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, a character with whom they probably already had considerable familiarity gained through the Doyle stories, previous film and stage `incarnations’, radio series, comic strips, parodies, or a combination of all these. Holmes had been a transmedia figure for more than 40 years when this film was released: in terms of cinema alone, this was his 100th appearance and Basil Rathbone was the 23rd actor to play the character. This meant that audiences would have certain preconceptions of how Holmes should look and behave, and would judge this new interpretation as to whether it represented the `real’ Holmes. Which particular point of origin they would use as a yardstick is, however, debatable: Christopher Frayling has pointed out just how far from the literary `original’ these perceived constructs can stray:

Frankenstein has become confused with his own creation… Dracula has become an attractive lounge lizard in evening dress; Mr Hyde has become a simian creature who haunts the rookeries of Whitechapel in East London; and Sherlock Holmes, dressed in his obligatory deerstalker and smoking a meerschaum pipe, says `elementary my dear Watson’ whenever he exercises his powers of deduction. Not one of these re-creations came directly from the original stories on which they were based: successive publics have re-written them – filling in the gaps, re-directing their purposes, making them easier to remember and more obviously dramatic – to `fit’ the modern experience.

Although Frayling’s comments were written from the perspective of the 1990s, they are equally applicable to the representation of these characters in 1939. Holmes’ evolution had been gradual, involving layers of accretions that had built onto the original Doyle creation, such as the deerstalker hat, drawn on the character by Sidney Paget in his illustration of `The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ for The Strand Magazine in 1891 (and subequently taken up by American illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele for Collier’s – see Fig. 1); and the curved-stem calabash pipe, added by William Gillette in his stageplay Sherlock Holmes in 1899 because it did not obscure his mouth from the audience as the `Doyle’ straight pipe would have done. David Stuart Davies claims that Eille Norwood, who starred in more than 50 British silent Holmes films in the 1920s, consciously adopted the look and style of Sidney Paget’s illustrations; and every subsequent actor was likely to bring along what Robert Stam calls `a kind of baggage’ formed from all the previous interpretations of the role. In each new interpretation Holmes was therefore both the Victorian creation of Doyle and the `man of the moment’. This was arguably an essential commercial balancing-act if Holmes was to remain believable as the decades passed. Twentieth Century-Fox steered a steady course: though the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles was streamlined to fit `the modern experience’, the film has been acknowledged as preserving something that is, perhaps, even more important than literary fidelity: a representation that accords with the Holmes of the imagination. Many of the qualities with which this iconic fictional detective is associated are present in this short scene. Firstly there is his milieu: London is portrayed through its key signifier, the Houses of Parliament, and the cut from this to the sitting room at 221B Baker Street positions Holmes as another metonym for London. The time on the clock is midnight, a time conventionally of mystery and danger, yet the domestic scene, with both men in their dressing gowns, and the homely figure of Mrs Hudson vetting visitors, shows the house to be a safe refuge. Secondly there is the visual appearance of Holmes, with his lean form, sharp features and curved-stem pipe. Thirdly, there are the manifestations of his character – his friendship with Watson, indicated by his playful teasing when Watson wrongly interprets the clues on the walking stick; his intellectual superiority, as he voices a conjecture that Watson finds baffling; his love of puzzles, exhibited in the pleasant diversion of making deductions about the stick; and his coldness, when he remarks that it will be `interesting’, rather than `horrifying’, to see whether Sir Henry will indeed be murdered. His reputation is also conveyed in this scene: when Dr Mortimer arrives, it is because Holmes is quite simply `the one man in all England’ who can help.