More Man than Philosopher

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Eligible Bachelor (Peter Hammond, 1994)

2012-01-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

You might think that "The Noble Bachelor" would be an odd choice for expansion to feature-length. It's a solid enough story--coming, as it does, from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--and it's twisty for its size, but there doesn't seem to be enough there to keep a story going for much longer than an hour. And you would be right. Unlike The Master Blackmailer, The Eligible Bachelor doesn't quite manage to successfully expand upon its source-material. Which isn't quite to say it's a total failure; it is certainly a better adaptation than The Last Vampyre, though (as we shall see) it suffers from some of the previous episode's failures. No, what we have here is a very successful adaptation with a very unsuccessful opening act--one that, unfortunately, drags the whole thing down from the heights it almost achieves through most of its run-time.

First, then, the bad. It seems that, in setting up the story, the screenwriter didn't quite know what to do with Holmes. He had to get the detective in there, obviously, but introducing him to the main story too soon would run the risk of ending it too quickly. What to do? Well--have Holmes wander around the darker areas of London and attend the rehearsal of an Ibsen play, of course! And, coincidentally, have him run into characters who will be important later on, all while suffering from bizarre nightmares that may or may not be premonitions. For forty minutes.

The result is this: that nothing--not the story of Robert St. Simon and his bride, nor yet of Holmes' near break-down, nor even of Mrs. Hudson's near-breakdown at Holmes' near-ditto--really gels for the first half-hour or so. I do not fault Brett in this; indeed, for all his ill health, his performance as Holmes is as good as ever--better, even, in some ways; it is more intimate, more the portrait of a man on the edge, a man haunted by demons that he cannot quite exorcize. Hardwicke and Rosalie Williams keep their end up, too--worrying over Holmes as he drives himself deeper and deeper into what looks an awful lot like depression. But the result is a disjointed narrative, a loose and rambling first act.

When the story finally starts to come together, it's another matter entirely. For--while keeping the basic set-up of the original story--the screenwriter has darkened the themes here, has turned in (once more!) a portrait of a social vampire. Lord Robert St. Simon begins the film much as he does the short story--a well-meaning, but essentially snobbish upper-class twit. There is no indication, at first, that he could be anything else. And then--slowly at first--we come to see that he is a man who will do anything. He uses women much like Baron Gruner did; he destroys lives as surely as Charles Augustus Milverton. He is--in short--a vampire.

As these revelations emerge, the story takes a turn for the darker. Elements from stories like "The Veiled Lady" are worked in, as well as intimations that Lord St. Simon is responsible for the death of at least one previous wife and the wrongful imprisonment of another. And Holmes is at last shaken from his lethargy and goes in pursuit of the real villain of the piece. This section of the episode is its strongest element. I realize that some viewers dislike the later, darker Granada episodes, but there is a tonal consistency to them that very much appeals to me. Even the dreams--which are out of step with nearly everything we've come to expect of the series--hold together well; as filmed by (again--Avengers veteran) Peter Hammond, they take on a surreal sort of horror. They do not quite cohere with the rest of the film, but they manage to be interesting in themselves.

In the end, The Eligible Bachelor doesn't quite succeed in expanding the original story into a feature-length production. It's a noble effort, though, and it recapitulates many of the themes we've come to expect of the series--themes of class, of predation--and even manages to incorporate that hoary old Gothic standby--the madwoman in the attic. It's better than The Last Vampyre, at least--and that's a small mercy in itself.

From Hell (The Hughes Brothers, 2001)

2012-01-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

I was warned about From Hell. I was told that it took tremendous liberties with the original graphic novel (unread-by-me) and that--beyond that--it was simply a bad movie. Of course, with a recommendation like that I could hardly help but watch it, particularly since I just wrote a post at Filmwell about its near-cousin Murder by Decree. And so I went in expecting little--expecting, at best, an interesting romp through Ripper lore with healthy heapings of Victorian degeneracy and drug use. From that perspective--surely, I thought--the movie couldn't be a total wash-out.

Hoo, boy, was I wrong. From Hell is a pretty, placid, dull mix of meticulously-recreated crime scenes, underused clairvoyants, and startlingly clean prostitutes. It has virtually nothing to recommend it--no performances that stand out, no sequences that elicit more than a yawn, no mystery (and this in spite of the fact that the movie apparently transforms the novel into what Wikipedia calls a "whodunit"). If you haven't figured out within the first ten minutes who Annie Crook's secret lover is, you must be a very inattentive viewer indeed; if by the midway point you've not deduced who Jack the Ripper is--well, you're asleep. Heck, I was asleep through the middle of the movie--I had to go back and re-watch four chapters to make sure I was being absolutely fair--and it was obvious even to me who Saucey Jackey was.

Of course, that wouldn't matter if the movie was any good. Murder by Decree is hardly subtle--and borrows its solution from exactly the same book that From Hell does--but it manages to convey a real sense of horror when the killer is unmasked. It feels, at least, like the solution matters. Annie Crook and Mary Kelly and all the other women who are victims of the Masonic-Royalist conspiracy matter, and we are meant to feel for them. In From Hell--well, somehow the movie manages to closely duplicate scenes from Murder by Decree (i.e. the visit to Annie Crook's prison cell) without evoking a single emotion. Not one. Except, perhaps, boredom.

This lack of tension goes all the way to the climax. Or to the end--"climax" is too enthusiastic a word for what is actually the long drawn-out sigh of an exhausted movie. We "unmask" Jack the Ripper with twenty minutes to go; we run with Johnny Depp through London as he attempts to prevent the final murder; he fails; he discovers that his failure isn't as bad as all that (what the heck, SPOILERS, Mary Kelly escapes. Big deal). Jack is dealt with by the Masons and that is that. It's exactly as flat as it sounds laid out here. No tension, no suspense--no interest. It's like the movie is laced with laudanum.

Now here's the really tragic thing: by all accounts, the novel is fantastic. Here's what Moore says about it:

"[T]he Ripper murders — happening when they did and where they did — were almost like an apocalyptic summary of... that entire Victorian age. Also, they prefigure a lot of the horrors of the 20th century."

David Peace has expressed similar ideas about the Yorkshire Ripper. These murders did not arise as the result of blind chance. No murder does, but this observation seems to be particularly true of serial killers like Jack the Ripper. And to investigate these crimes, both Moore and Peace seem to suggest, is to investigate the society in which they occurred. Over at Filmwell, I called this a prophetic perspective. It is the process of speaking the society to itself.

From Hell--the movie--can't be bothered with that. It can't even be bothered to care about the fact that it's not bothered. This fact makes it a deeply unserious movie. Indeed, I might be tempted to say that its perspective is precisely the perspective of hell: lackluster, uncaring, unfathomably bland. It makes it worse than a bad movie--it makes it a dull movie. Badness can be forgiven; dullness is unforgivable.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Last Vampyre (Tim Sullivan, 1994)

2012-01-15T17:17:00.000-08:00

The Last Vampyre is a loose adaptation of "The Sussex Vampire" in exactly the way that The Master Blackmailer wasn't a "loose adaptation" if its source material. That is to say, where the previous adaptation managed to include and expand upon the original story, The Last Vampyre does neither. Bits and pieces of "Sussex" are there, but everything is so radically altered--right down to the setting--that there's as much point in saying the episode is "based" on "The Sussex Vampire" as there is in saying that Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon is based on "The Dancing Men."

That doesn't make The Last Vampyre a bad Sherlock Holmes adventure, though. What does make it bad is its bagginess of construction and its utter lack of anything approaching pace. Holmes and Watson are given precious little to do for most of the adventure's runtime, and the people who are given something to do (including Richard Dempsey, who will always be Peter Pevensie to me) aren't given anything particularly interesting to do. In fact--in spite of the vampire angle and some sort-of-kinky-but-really-creepy power struggles involving Dempsey's Jack and his step-mother's maid (Juliet Aubrey)--there's not much going on in the episode at all.

It's a pity, too, because the story they've got here isn't terribly bad. The idea of vampirism--which I alluded to in my last Holmes post--is, naturally, front and center. It is suggested that Stockton (Roy Marsden) is some sort of psychic vampire--that he feeds off the energies of other people, and that he has settled on the Ferguson family as his targets. His motives, however, remain vague--and the scene in which Holmes reads his journal entries does nothing to illuminate the murk. Indeed, Stockton is an inconsistent character, and not in the way that makes one think that he has interesting neuroses.

And then there's the solution to the mystery (spoiler alert): Jack, a lonely and crippled young man, has decided that he is a vampire (though he has the good sense to poison people instead of drinking their blood) and he culminates his life of not-quite-undead-crime by trying to fly and hanging himself instead. Again--if Jack were more developed as a character, or if we were made to feel his isolation, it would be one thing. The idea itself isn't a bad one--but it's badly executed.

The episode is not a total loss, however; Brett is fantastic as ever, even if he is given precious little to do. Hardwicke, too, is solid and gets to show off Watson's medical training a bit. And the ideas behind the episode are worth considering. Unfortunately, the series has already done them better--and that only one episode ago.

L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson. 1997)

2012-01-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

Once in a while--not too often--you come across a movie and want to demand of it "where have you been all my life?" I can name only two such instances for me--The Third Man and The Red Riding Trilogy. Well--two in addition to this movie. I shouldn't be surprised; David Peace, author of Red Riding owes a lot (they say) to James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential. I wouldn't know; I've not read Ellroy, though The Black Dahlia is sitting within eyeshot of me right now. I have seen the movie version of that book and was less than impressed (we'll see if it improves when I get around to watching it again). But if the connection between the two authors is as strong as rumor holds it to be, it makes sense that a well-made adaptation of one should tickle fans of the other.

And L.A. Confidential is well-made. It's a complex, plotty, heart-of-darkness noir boasting Russell Crowe, Keven Spacey, Danny Devito, James Cromwell, and a host of other actors who get inside their characters and just live there. Unlike The Black Dahlia (at least, unlike my memory of it), L.A. Confidential doesn't just put on the clothes and attitudes of the period. As far as I can tell, it embodies the period. Not to bring up David Peace again, but what emerges is the same sort of de-mythologizing of history that Peace does in his novels. We are permitted for a moment--only for a moment--to feel nostalgia for the world of L.A. Confidential, but after that we are plunged into a world of racism and misogyny, a world of corruption where anyone that can go wrong probably will.

The movie presents us with three protagonists: Jack Vincennes (Keven Spacey), Bud White (Russell Crowe), and Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce). On the surface--and even under the surface--these are pretty stock characters. You could label them, respectively, as "The Charisma," "The Brawn," and "The Brains." Heck, even their driving wounds are stock: White saw his mother beaten to death and now he hates men who abuse women; Exley wants to live up to his dead father's legacy; Vincennes is a mildly crooked cop with a heart of gold. Nothing these characters do will surprise the viewer.

That's not really a problem, though. What this movie has--and has in spades--is an endlessly moving puzzle-box of a plot. Each of the protagonists independently investigates the same conspiracy--each is unaware until late in the movie of the others' actions. And so each holds crucial evidence whose significance only becomes clear when the characters come into conflict with each other. It's very well done, and though a good guesser can no doubt see the central villain a mile away, that doesn't make the revelation of guilt any less surprising.

Thematically, this is a very rich movie. It's not a film "about" race in the same way that, for instance, Intruder in the Dust is a detective story about race, but the problem of racial prejudice is never far from the surface. Exley's rise in status at the beginning of the movie is directly tied to racially-tinged assaults on some Hispanic prisoners who are suspected of beating a couple of police officers. Similarly, it seems clear that the eagerness to pin the Nite Owl shootings on three young African American men is in no small part motivated by the race of the accused; the fact that the men are black makes them easy fall-guys for the real conspirators.

Other themes crop up, too--without dominating the movie, they inform its action in interesting ways. The misogyny that White rails against is all-pervading. Women are nearly absent from the world of L.A. Confidential, and when they show up they're prostitutes or victims. Or prostitute-victims; for the women of the night seen here have been victimized--their faces cut, their hair dyed, their bodies reduced to commodities to feed the desires of men who want to sleep with movie stars. I wonder, actually, if there isn't a commentary here on the nature of stardom itself. What separates Kim Basinger's Veronica Lake-alike from the real Veronica Lake except job title? Both women are commodities in the Hollywood of the era, both have their image massaged to make them more desirable to men. The fact that Basinger's Lynn Bracken actually sleeps with her clients seems like a technicality in the world of the movie. Here I feel keenly the fact that I've not read any Ellroy; I suspect that this is a common theme in his work, based on the interviews I've heard and my solitary viewing of The Black Dahlia. Certainly the movie star/prostitute linkage occurs in the latter film, in an even more explicit way, if that were possible.

L.A. Confidential is a masterful film: a neo-noir that doesn't try too hard to be noir, a de-mystification of the past that isn't satisfied with just de-mystifying, and a plotty thriller that turns on real (if stereotyped) human emotion. I've been curious about Ellroy for a long time; I'm beginning to think it's time I dug out my copy of The Black Dahlia and read it before I re-watch the film version.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Blackmailer (Peter Hammond, 1993)

2012-01-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

One of the things I try to do in these little write-ups is sense what sorts of themes each series or cluster of episodes have in common. Most of the time these themes derive from Doyle, but in the case of adaptation--and particularly in circumstances where clusters of stories are adapted seemingly at random--it is interesting to see what the adapters retain and what they discard. For instance, many of Doyle's stories deal with women wronged, but there seems to have been a conscious effort in the Granada Adventures to focus on these tales. Similarly, the focus on death in The Return strikes me as a deliberate thematic choice, climaxing with Holmes' full-face confrontation with his own mortality in "The Devil's Foot." These clusters of themes make the Sherlock Holmes television series even more rewarding than it would be otherwise, since one instance inevitably calls up the others.

And so we come to The Master Blackmailer. One would be tempted to call it a loose adaptation of "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," but that would be misleading. For nearly the entirety of the story is faithfully adapted here. What we have, instead, is a case of expansion--further illuminating Milverton's blackmail schemes and Holmes' ersatz romance with Milverton's maid. This episode also represents the second appearance in this series of a theme that will, it seems, be important for several adventures: vampirism.

By "vampirism" I do not mean that of the Dracula variety (although The Last Vampyre will push that direction); rather, I mean a kind of bloodsucking far more insidious. I mentioned in the write-up of "The Illustrious Client" that the villain there, Baron Gruner, represents a sort of sick darkness that corrupts everything around him. What I did not say, but should have, is that he also represents the lure of the forbidden. Like Dracula, Gruner is a seductive foreigner who preys on young women. His sickness is sexual in nature, to be sure, but it is also psychologically manipulative in the way he attaches women to himself and sucks them dry before moving on to greener pastures. His notebook of conquests speaks of a controlling streak; he likes to have power over women. He is a vampire.

Milverton, too, is a vampire. The connection of blackmail with vampirism is well-known, and the episode underlines it by keeping Milverton (Robert Hardy) in the shadows for most if its runtime. Indeed, in one scene when Holmes and Watson confront Milverton, the vampire-blackmailer connection is made even more clearly. The three men meet in a darkened room; Watson throws open a curtain, causing the sunlight to fall full upon Milverton's face--and he (Milverton) quickly moves out of the light. It is as if he cannot bear to be seen, as if he loves darkness rather than light because his deeds are evil.

But it is not simply the money that draws Milverton to his work; if it were, he might be willing to negotiate. It becomes clear over the course of the episode (and Robert Hardy conveys it in every nuance of his excellent performance) that what Milverton really loves is power--the power to bend people to his will, the power to crush their lives in a moment. In this, he is not so far removed from the Baron Gruner. For each of these men, the ostensible motivation (sex or money) masks an identical addiction--the addiction to control through manipulation.

Manipulation is not confined to Milverton, however. In The Master Blackmailer Holmes, in order to infiltrate Milverton's household, disguises himself as a plumber and romances a housemaid. The short story passes over the romance with hardly a comment; Watson does suggest that Holmes has gone too far, but when Holmes patiently explains that it had to be done, and anyway he had a rival, the matter is dropped. The adaptation goes further, both by using the interaction to underline Holmes' own emotional issues and by suggesting implicitly that, by manipulating the maid to serve his own ends, Holmes is not so far removed from Milverton as he would like to believe.

At the end of The Door Between, Ellery Queen--having successfully exposed the murderer through a bold bluff--reflects on this very thing:

[H]e thought that bluff was man's defense against the impalpable, and conscience his only guide. And he though how easy it was, and how terrible it was [...] for a man to accomplish the one and stir up the other.

He shivered a little before the dark fireplace. It was too much like playing God to feel entirely comfortable

The idea of the playing God is one that occurs regularly in the Queen canon--indeed, it is a central idea in Cat of Many Tails and The Player on the Other Side--but what I would like to suggest is that it is an important theme here as well. Holmes and Milverton are in some ways twins: Milverton's background, as described by Watson (a cold, lonely childhood) is nearly identical to the one Brett ascribed to Holmes. More than that, both men are master manipulators; that their ends are different matters, but not much.

I think this is the meaning of what is otherwise an incomprehensible final scene. Once Milverton has been destroyed (as the result of his own machinations--"The wages of sin, Watson! The wages of sin!" as Holmes exclaims in another adventure) Holmes manages to outbid an old colleague of the blackmailer's and so acquires a bust of Athena--shadows of Holmes' ancestor Dupin through Poe's Raven?--in which the detective thinks something else might be hidden. In a scene straight from "The Six Napoleons," Holmes smashes the bust to find--nothing. Holmes is relieved and sends the beleaguered Mrs. Hudson away with the ruins of the Goddess of Wisdom.

And then--just as Watson is readying himself to write the case up, Holmes begs him to stop. There are aspects, he says, of which he is not proud. Watson puts away his notes; Holmes stares down at the broken brow of Athena and sees something glinting in her eye. It's not treasure, though--he does not immediately leap up and produce the thing. Instead, the episode ends there, leaving us wondering what that glint in Athena's eye could mean.

I think it means this: that Holmes has seen how very close he can come to being a Charles Augustus Milverton. Perhaps the spark in Athena's eye is wisdom--a wisdom acquired through folly. Holmes might have gone too far this time.

Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe, 2010)

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

I have been waiting for this movie for a year. Indeed, it was in anticipation of the film's US release that I watched the original version from 1947. There are a couple of reasons for this: first, I am a minor fan of Graham Greene--not enough of one to have read all of his novels, but enough to consistently return to them over a long period of time. Second, the trailer captured my interest; I am nothing if not a sucker for period-set thrillers. and that's exactly what the remake of Brighton Rock promised to be. As time went by and the reviews piled on, I grew a little more moderate in my expectations--but not so much so that I didn't pre-order the DVD the moment it became available. Like I say--sucker for a period-set thriller, particularly one based on a novel by Graham Greene.

And was it worth it? Yes--although there are quite a few caveats that go with the recommendation. The remake doesn't hold a candle to the original; it is not nearly as stylish, nor so intriguing. An early event in the movie will serve as a handy example: Frank's murder. In the 1947 version, the murder is filmed as a descent into Hell--a surreal, terrifying experience with pasteboard faces looming out of the darkness to torment the unfortunate soul. The sequence is well-done in its own right, but it also underlines the movie's themes of damnation pretty handily:

The remake's version of the murder is nowhere near so compelling. Rather than giving us a surreal nightmare, Joffe chooses to cut between the murder and shots of people having fun at Brighton. It's a handy enough way to say "beneath the veneer of happiness there is murder," but it is also pretty conventional--less daring, certainly than what the 1947 version offered. The rest of Brighton Rock 2010 follows a similar path: it's a beautiful film, no doubts, with interesting performances (which we'll get to in a minute) but it lacks a certain spark that set the original version apart.

Which is not to say that the remake doesn't have its virtues. It does; beyond being beautifully filmed, it lacks the severe sense of compression that I complained about in my write-up on the 1947 version. And the performances, too, are very good indeed. Helen Mirren is not the first actor one connects with Ida, and if the character had remained as written in the novel we might accuse the remake of poor casting. But Ida is refashioned here: she is a business woman, not the gullible good-time-loving character from the novel and the original film. And Mirren fills the role perfectly. The same can be said of Andrea Riseborough,who manages to make Rose both admirable and pitiable.

But of course the big question here is Sam Riley as Pinkie, and regarding his performance I'm less certain than anyone else in the movie. Attenborough's Pinkie was recognizably sociopathic, and it was a treat to watch his eyes dart about in each scene as he calculated the angles and made his plans. He was calm--cold, even--but he was never frigid. With Riley, there are times when he seems frozen in one setting: either dully responding to his angry colleagues after murdering Hale, or else putting the moves on Rose with such intensity that one is surprised she doesn't knife him the moment she sees him.

But then--and often in the middle of these very scenes--Riley will make a face or suddenly move his hand, and these actions make his Pinkie suddenly lifelike. He still remains opaque (as opaque as the character in the novel, at least) but he also becomes very human in those moments, as if he is just a boy uncertain of himself and of his next move. These moments make one almost (almost) feel sorry for Pinkie, since they remind us that he is, after all, doubly an orphan (he sees his mentor killed in the opening moments of the movie). They suggest that the moments of dullness or over-intensity are examples of him attempting to compensate, to make up for his own youth and inexperience. But they don't overexplain; in fact, even as I type this I'm not sure that they explain at all. Riley's performance is a very slippery one, and I'm certain that it will reward future viewings.

Thematically, the remake is far less interesting than the 1947 version. That movie, like the book, is as much a meditation on damnation as it is a thriller. Pinkie believes that he is damned, accepts himself to be damned, and so damns himself; his courtship of Rose is as much an attempt to consummate his own damnation as it is an attempt to keep her quiet about what she knows. Set against him is Ida, a woman who is silly and superstitious, but who has about her something redemptive. But redemption in the novel is not easy; when it comes to Rose it comes as a blow more cruel than Pinkie's knife. The 1947 version softened the ending a bit, though it would be unwise to take the resolution offered there at face value.

Brighton Rock 2010 makes a few stabs at these themes. It keeps Pinkie's speech on Hell and it places Rose in a church at a key moment, but for the most part it ignores them, focusing instead on style. Don't get me wrong, it's a heck of a style and I loved every minute of it, but it feels oddly as if there is an injustice done the characters. Perhaps the slipperiness of Riley's performance owes something to the fact that his Pinkie is not a boy obsessed with Hell and damnation; without that anchor he comes across as simply petulant at times. And since Pinkie is robbed of his central obsession, the other characters suffer as well; Ida becomes a much more pale creation, and Rose's actions are less comprehensible.

All of that said, Brighton Rock is an enjoyable little thriller. It's a much less impressive film than its predecessor, but it is shot with style and acted well--and sometimes that's enough. It is in this case, even if only just.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Creeping Man (Tim Sullivan 1991)

2012-01-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

It is a rare thing to say that a Sherlock Holmes story is silly. The tales might be strained, incredible, unbelievable--but they are seldom silly. "The Creeping Man" is an exception. In spite of novelist Jonathan Barnes' kind words, it is a deeply silly story, a kind of Holmesian attempt at Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, whose solution depends on an animal fallacy far more damning than mythical swamp adders. And yet it is not, as Holmes would say, without its interesting points, and the adaptation--though far from the best--is serviceable enough. Brett and Hardwicke both turn in solid performances, and there are numerous bits of business that somehow brand the story as uniquely Holmesian, no matter how atrocious the actual plot-line is.

One of those bits of business is Holmes' note to Watson, a note that has shown up in both contemporary adaptations of the Canon: "Come at once if convenient--if inconvenient, come all the same." It's a marvelously Holmesian touch. In the short story, Watson suggests that Holmes adopts this tone because he thinks of Watson as an accessory:

He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind.

Of course, anyone who remembers "The Three Garridebs" (a story that appears in The Case-Book alongside "The Creeping Man") would immediately protest that Watson does Holmes an injustice. But perhaps there is a certain amount of affection in the description; there certainly seems to be little enough resentment. For the detective's part, Holmes' message (terse as it is) is not without humor, and Brett plays the moment very well; a brief smile flickers across his face just before penning the second half of the message.

The adaptation here, by the way, is less direct than at other points in the series. In the short story, there is no doubt from the first who the mysterious creeping man might be; in the episode, on the other hand, we are left in doubt (well, not really--but theoretically) until the moment we see the professor's face grimacing down at us from the trees. It certainly makes for a better hour of television, but either instance is hampered by the silliness--there's that word again--of the central idea: that taking extracts of monkey serum can turn a man's behavior simian.

At the same time, there's a couple of interesting things going on here. One is pointed out by Holmes himself at the end of both story and adaptation:

When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.

In the story, Holmes goes on to suggest that only the unworthy would seek earthly mortality, leading to "the survival of the least fit"--a reversal of Darwin, in which humanity figuratively descends back to apishness. This is (as the episode points out) Holmes the moral philosopher, Holmes the detective of the metaphysical. And if the point is made with the subtlety of...well, of an ape banging rocks together...it is, anyway, an interesting glimpse into the kind of tensions Doyle must have felt at the turn of the (last) century.

The other interesting element--and this ties, actually, into the previous one--is the fact that, by uniting the ape and the scientist in the same character, Doyle is actually reversing Poe. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the scientist (well, the cultured dilettante detective) uses reason to capture a murderous ape; the action is significant, since it is, in some ways, expressive of the very core of detective fiction: the unreasoning is brought to heel by the rational. Disorder is vanquished and order is restored.

In "The Creeping Man," we see the same use of reason vs. irrationality, but with a twist: the irrational is bound up in the rational. They are, as it were, inseparable; at least, the professor brings his degradation onto himself by misusing science--science gives birth to a monster. Again, this is hardly new to Doyle. And, as we have said, the way the story is handled is deeply, deeply silly. Still, it is interesting to see Doyle, who owed so much to Poe, craft a story that is in some ways a refinement of Poe's first Dupin tale.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Illustrious Client (Tim Sullivan 1991)

2011-12-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

The Illustrious Client, together with The Problem of Thor Bridge and The Creeping Man, formed my introduction to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes. I've already written at length about the impression Brett made on me, but one aspect of the series I seemed to have missed those years ago was how very dark they are. Thor Bridge concerns a suicide disguised as a murder; Creeping Man--easily the least impressive of the lot--is in some ways a meditation on the irrecoverable nature of youth. And The Illustrious Client is about a villain so perverted (I do not use the term lightly) that Watson is obliged, in the original story, to cover up the narrative for ten years after the events occur.

In some ways, The Illustrious Client recapitulates many of the themes Doyle dealt with in his earlier stories--though, since it was published in 1924, Doyle was able to be more explicit. The villain of the piece, Baron Gruner (Anthony Valentine) is a collector both of Chinese pottery and (more sinisterly) of women. This is the testimony of Kitty (Kim Thompson in the adaptation):

“I tell you, Mr. Holmes, this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything about them. It was a beastly book–a book no man, even if he had come from the gutter, could have put together. But it was Adelbert Gruner’s book all the same. ‘Souls I have ruined.’ He could have put that on the outside if he had been so minded. However, that’s neither here nor there, for the book would not serve you, and, if it would, you can’t get it.”

The position of women in Victorian (and Edwardian) society was a constant theme in Doyle's stories, from A Scandal in Bohemia through The Speckled Band and The Copper Beeches. In part, this is no doubt owing to the detective story's debt to the Gothic form--but it also has to do with the demand that the genre look at the darker side of society. This demand is not a matter of fads or trends; it is part of its nature, and short of retreating entirely from the world it cannot avoid glancing, even in passing, at the rottenness that creeps into the world.

In The Illustrious Client, there are two women: the aforementioned Kitty (a little stereotyped as a "fallen woman" with all the mixed things that entails) and Violet Merville (Abigail Cruttenden). The latter is the Baron's latest target, and has been wholly taken in by his wiles. She is described as so blinded by love that she will even ignore the strong probability that the Baron murdered his previous wife. When undeniable evidence of the Baron's evil is presented to her, in the form of Kitty's vitriol-scarred neck and chest, Violet briefly panics and then quickly recovers, her faith in the Baron unshaken.

That faith is part of what makes The Illustrious Client so much darker than earlier women-in-distress stories. Like the governess in The Problem of Thor Bridge, there is a strong suspicion that Violet will not be saved because she does not want to be saved, because she believes in the face of all evidence that the Baron is a good man, a martyr beset on all sides by vultures. Now, there are several directions we could go with this: Doyle could be expressing deep anxieties about women's liberation (a paternalist kind of antifeminism that would suggest that liberated women are a danger to themselves). This is not an unlikely supposition; certainly Doyle's relationship with the Suffragette movement was...troubled. The problem Violet Merville poses is this: how do you rescue a woman who will not be rescued?

This isn't the only possible reading, of course; Baron Gruner himself is a fascinating villain quite apart from his relationship with Violet Merville. He is described as the most dangerous man in Europe, and though Holmes sneers at the suggestion, there is something far more insidious about Gruner's evil than Moriarty or Colonel Sebastian Moran. For those men work by concealment or outright villainy; neither of them acts in such a way as to both conceal and reveal--and this is precisely how Gruner works. He does not hide his sordid past from Violet; he tells all (with the proper amount of regret) and allows her to forgive and so elide his responsibility in matters such as the death of his previous wife.Of course, this is the old Poe trick of hiding a thing in plain sight--only here the hidden thing is an evil character.

This is pretty dark stuff, even in the original story, and the adaptation takes full advantage of it--particularly after Holmes is attacked by the Baron's henchmen. Before that, the episode is lit pretty evenly--lit like any other episode of the series. Once the attack occurs, however, we are confronted with shadows and darkness. Holmes lies bruised in his rooms at Baker Street; Watson discusses Chinese pottery with the Baron; Kitty appears to enact her revenge--all, all in shadow. It is as if the darkness in the Baron's heart slowly creeps out to poison everyone he touches.

The Illustrious Client is an excellent episode. Brett is in top form here, and his performance crackles in contrast to the softness visible in the previous episode. Which is not to say that he is without tenderness; his scene with Kitty in the coach after she reveals the extent of her vitriol burns is marvelous. Hardwicke, too, is very good and gets to display both Watson's excellent bedside manner and his knack for bluffing his way around suspects. I doubted that anything post-Return could match that series, but so far I'm finding The Case-Book to be nearly equal to it in every respect.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Boscombe Valley Mystery (June Howson, 1991)

2011-12-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

First things first: I have been remiss, of late, in my duties as a blogger. Deepest apologies for that. I have not, however, been entirely idle; if you venture over to Filmwell, you will find a review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Short version: I liked it quite a bit, but found its failure to live up to its potential troubling.

This week we're on "The Boscombe Valley Mystery." The episode is based on a story from The Adventures--one of the better ones, as a matter of fact, and one that hews more closely to the modern idea of the detective story than most narratives in the Holmesian Canon. That is, it features a mysterious murder with a closed circle of suspects, and a fairly-clued solution. That is more than can be said for many stories in the Canon, and it gives the story a certain well-worn feeling that is absent from even the most well-known Holmes stories.

"Boscombe" also features an interesting variation on the Doylean theme of past sins resurfacing. In this story, John Turner (formerly known as Black Jack of Ballarat), having made himself rich by his thieving, moves to England in the hopes of setting himself up as a respectable gentleman. He marries, has a daughter, and seems to have escaped his past sins. And then McCarthy shows up, putting everything for which Turner has worked at risk.

At this distance, the set-up is one familiar from countless detective novels. It is so familiar that we miss the real subtlety of what Doyle does here. For though Turner is an ex-criminal, he is not an evil man; that is, rather than give us a picture of two bad men confronting each other, Doyle presents a reformed bad man unable to escape his past. As such, John Turner becomes unexpectedly sympathetic, while his victim gradually assumes the visage of a monster. It is not that Doyle condones the murder; as an upright citizen, he could hardly go that far. But he understands--and that understanding is a moment of grace that is often absent in detective fiction, with its focus on apprehending the socially deviant murder and bringing hir to justice.

Holmes cannot stop with simply identifying the murderer, for the detective is more than a bloodhound (a parallel evoked in both the story and the adaptation); he is a moral philosopher. As such, when Turner has gone, Holmes recognizes the shared humanity of killer and detective:

“God help us!” said Holmes after a long silence. “Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter’s words, and say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.’”

This empathy is a key factor in many of the Holmes stories; though he claims to be a reasoning machine, Holmes is deeply in tune with the suffering of those with whom he comes in contact.

The above-quoted passage, beyond "God help us," does not appear in the adaptation,* but it is implicit in Brett's performance. Following Return, Brett suffered a number of health-related issues, and these struggles show up in various ways in episodes following The Sign of Four. No doubt his affliction impacted his performance here, but I think there is more going on. Brett is solemn, almost subdued throughout the episode--growing more so as he hears the story from the points of view of Alice Turner (Joanna Roth) and James McCarthy (James Purefoy). By the time he hears the story from John McCarthy himself (Peter Vaughan), Brett is almost underplaying Holmes.

This underplaying is very effective. I'm afraid to say I like it, exactly--especially since his slower style seems to have been the result of medication. But a subdued Holmes does fit in with the empathic model I suggest above. The Holmes we see in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" is a far cry from the brittle, merciless Holmes of earlier episodes--a far cry, even, from the warmer post-Reichenbach Holmes of The Return. As in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes here is a melancholy presence--the detective-as-prophet becomes detective-as-scapegoat, taking into himself the sadness and brokenness of those around him in order to restore them to wholeness.

____________________
*One wonders to what extent the placement of the episode--long after Holmes offed his own rival in "The Final Problem"--influenced the subtraction.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: Shoscombe Old Place (Patrick Lau 1991)

2011-11-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

After a fantastic episode like "Thor Bridge," I suppose it's inevitable that the next adventure should prove disappointing. It's not that "Shoscombe Old Place" is bad, exactly. The plot has a neat twist on the old dog-in-the-nighttime gambit (well, sort of--what a dog does and doesn't do proves central to the resolution, though it's not as neatly spelled out as in "Silver Blaze"). The Holmes-Watson dynamic is as brisk and sharp as ever it was. But something's lacking: a certain tauntness or bite. Which shouldn't be the case. Particularly in an adventure that sports a very-young Jude Law in drag.

Ok, let me back up. Before I say anything else, go read the story. The twist isn't a bad one (and here be spoilers): a man, for financial reasons, wishes people to think his sister is alive when she has, in fact, died. What should he do but hire an actor to impersonate her? This is where the dog comes in--since it would recognize the fact that its "mistress" wasn't really its mistress, the dog has to be gotten rid of. Neat enough. But here's where the change comes in. Where in the story the actor is described as "a small rat-faced man with a disagreeably furtive manner"--the husband of Lady Beatrice's maid--in this episode, the impersonator is a stable boy and he looks like this:

Right. It's Jude Law, twenty years before starring--for the second time!--as Watson in this year's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Because of the way the plot operates, Law only gets a few minutes of screentime--and about thirty seconds in actual drag--so we couldn't say this is a high point in his early career. Still, my point is this: the filmmakers changed the original story very deliberately--which is fine--to incorporate a young, fresh-faced Jude Law in drag...and the adaptation still feels flat. I don't know how they did that.

There's some interesting stuff going on here in terms of society, though. Most of the time in the Holmes stories, when women are connected with money they wind up victims. That is, they get locked in rooms or poisoned by mythical adders. This is that same sort of story--in fact, it bears a striking resemblance to "The Copper Beeches"--but differs in two important ways. First, in that the woman in question is dead, and second in that the man who depends on her isn't a drunk or an evil person at all. It is, if you will, the reverse side of all those Gothic stories where the evil stepfather tries to control his stepdaughter's fortune. Here, the brother simply wants to stay afloat long enough to pay off his debts.

Beyond that, there's not really much to say. This episode really is that underwhelming, with little or no tension, little or no pizazz, and an abrupt ending that does the whole thing no favors. Double points for referencing Watson's gambling habit, though. I wonder if Law thought of it when he filmed his gambling-related scenes. I doubt it; he barely shares a scene with Hardwicke. More's the pity.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Problem of Thor Bridge (Michael A. Simpson, 1991)

2011-11-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that "Thor Bridge" was my introduction to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes. I had been exposed much earlier to Basil Rathbone's film-and-radio work--and to John Gielgud's phenomenal turn in the radio adaptation of "The Final Problem" (when I read the story, even today, it is Gielgud I hear when I get to the "Napoleon of Crime" speech). Brett's Holmes was a revelation: not cool and collected, but riotously eccentric; witness the way he tears around looking for Gibson's letter before finding it in his coat pocket and--this was the kicker--turning and handing it back over his shoulder. I'm not sure why, but that one gesture, which put into black-and-white looks pretty mundane, charged my young imagination.

And then there was Brett's line delivery. Not just the rising and falling of his voice; the way he pushes and pulls his words, the running starts and sudden stops, the ironic archness--well. I can't describe it. Just watch (starting at about 4:49).

As I say, all of this was an absolute revelation. I had no idea then who Jeremy Brett was, but I instantly knew that he was the most striking and interesting Holmes I had ever seen. And still, after seeing many more adaptations of the Holmesian canon--after seeing Cushing and Cumberbatch and Stephens--I'm liable to say that Brett's Holmes is still the most striking and interesting. He's certainly the most deeply layered--I think only Plummer came close to matching Brett's depth, although Stephens makes a worthy third. Seriously--watch that clip again. Note the sly touches of humor, the way that each line seems to carry with it a whole backstory. (It's worth noting that Brett's birthday was on November 3; he would have been 78).

Right. When I started this series, I promised myself I wouldn't spend every single post praising Brett to the skies, but coming again to this episode brings it all back. It's tempting--oh! it's tempting--to recount my youthful experiments in Holmesian lore, to describe the mock-up 221B Baker Street that my brother and I built in our barn. I can still smell the dust of that little room and see the makeshift mantle onto which we stuck "correspondence" with a bit of plastic made to work as a pen-knife. There was a period of time--directly inspired by seeing Brett in "Thor Bridge"--that The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was like a second Bible to me. I still have it somewhere--vigorously underlined and falling apart.

Enough of that, though. I'm not here to reminisce, but to review. So does "Thor Bridge" live up to my youthful memories? In a word--yes. Unlike a certain episode of Ellery Queen I could name, "Thor Bridge" holds up well across the years--comes out looking better, even, since Brett's performance is so layered that one viewing simply isn't enough to catch everything going on. The story is a rare one for Holmes--a straight-ahead murder mystery, a regular whodunit. Holmes--in case you didn't know or haven't noticed--doesn't really do whodunits. He solves mysteries, sure; but they're as likely to be theft or blackmail as they are murder, and when murder occurs it's generally in the service of something a bit stranger. Here, though, the case is straightforward: the wife of an American gold magnate is murdered. Suspicion falls on the governess, and Holmes intervenes to help her.

So far, so good. But there's a couple of elements here I want to tease out. First, the dead wife: Maria Gibson. She is Brazilian, and is multiple times described as "a creature of the tropics." The implication is, of course, that her hot Latin blood (as the characters here would put it) will drive her to insane ends to fulfill her desires. She is, in short, a stereotype--although she gains a bit of nobility due to the way her husband treats her.

That husband's the second point. He's played by Daniel Massey (whose father had played Sherlock in an apparently terrible version of "The Speckled Band") with scene-chewing relish. And he's a cad. After marrying Maria, he falls out of love with her and attempts to carry on a dalliance with the governess. That lady, of course, will have no part of it--but she stays on and proceeds to use her power over him to make him gentler. Or something.

The truth is, it's a messed-up dynamic, and one is left with the impression that none of the characters are especially likable. This fact is underlined in the final moments of the adaptation, when Gibson sweeps into prison to liberate the governess. He wears a long coat with upturned collar, and the way it's shot makes him look for all the world like a vampire; he claims earlier in the episode that he loves Grace Dunbar--but he once loved Maria as well, and we know how that turned out. As for Grace Dunbar.... Well, I want to be sensitive to the position of a governess in that era, when women had to put up with unwanted advances from employers all the time without legal recourse. But her decision to stay on and tame Gibson is questionable, at best. Perhaps this is the thinking behind the closing exchange between Holmes and Watson:

Dr. Watson: You have helped a remarkable woman, Holmes. And a formidable man.
Sherlock Holmes: And if, as seems not unlikely, they should join forces?
Dr. Watson: Naturally I would wish them well.
Sherlock Holmes: Hmph. Magnanimous of you, Watson.

Holmes sympathies, it would seem, remain with the dead woman on Thor Bridge.

More Ellery Queen

2011-10-31T13:38:00.000-07:00

I seem to be dividing my time here between posting Sherlock Holmes reviews and linking to Ellery Queen-related stuff. Trust me, this was not the intention; hopefully sometime soon I'll be able to post on some more Chabrol movies. In the meantime, let me direct you to Kurt Sercu's newly-posted interview with Iiki Yusan, chairman of the Ellery Queen fanclub in Japan. Yup, Ellery's still popular out there, even if his home country has largely forgotten him. Here's an excerpt:

In Japan, “whodunits” are immensely popular and hence there are a lot of detective writers who specialize in "whodunits." Most of them have been influenced by Ellery Queen. Some of them even follow an EQ style of titling their books, e.g. "country-name and item-name and Mystery" and "The Tragedy of __ “. "The Challenge to the Reader" is a frequently used in books. And, of course, as with most writers of the Golden Era, "fair play", "logic" and "deduction" are paramount in these stories.
Many of these authors have stated that Ellery Queen is their favorite author. In 1951, Anthony Boucher said that "Ellery Queen is the detective-story-writer's writer", in Japan this is incontestably so.

Hit the link for more. It's a fascinating interview. I knew that Ellery Queen was referenced in Detective Conan, but it's interesting to see how popular and influential the books are in Japan.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles (Brian Mills, 1988)

2011-10-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned last week, my DVD set does not present the episodes of Sherlock Holmes in production order, so that we suddenly find ourselves backtracking; given the season, however, I think this is hardly an unfortunate occurrence. For of all the Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles is, perhaps, the best suited for Halloween. It fuses all the Gothic elements that we see elsewhere in the Canon ("The Speckled Band," for instance, or "The Copper Beeches,") with an element of supernatural horror that is rarely to be found in the annals of the Great Detective. And it underlines a recurring theme in the stories: that the greatest evil to be found is not without--in the murky realm of the supernatural--but within the human heart itself. It's a theme that shows up often in subsequent detective fiction--particularly in the writings of John Dickson Carr.

Now, it has been argued that the approach to supernatural elements in the detective story underlines a bourgeois rationalism; that is, when the author sets up ghosts or evil spirits and then debunks them, what is at work is a desire to reassure the comfortable middle classes that the world is really comprehensible (and therefore controllable). There's merit to this argument, but I think there is something deeper at play here. Doyle is not so much attempting to discredit the possibility of irrational evil; rather, he is suggesting that evil is something that exists among us. Sherlock Holmes asks, "The devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?" And the answer, when it is revealed, is a resounding yes.

This is, of course, a key insight buried at the heart of detective fiction as a genre. The convention of "the least likely suspect" does turn the hunt for the murderer into a game (as Mandel asserts) and it does sometimes center on locating and eradicating a foreign body in the orderly world of the novel. But it also underlines the fact that murderers and thieves and con-men do not wear badges announcing their sins. The killer could be anyone--narrator, detective, victim--or everyone. And finding him/her is a moral quest as much as a sociological one. This idea, if properly regarded, is laced with horror--and it's no accident that detective fiction runs so close to the Gothic or horror genres. It isn't material horror; that is, it isn't the horror of distorted faces and broken bones. Rather, it is a particular sort of moral horror.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is primed to look into that horror. It presents us with the outward appearance of a Gothic tale, with its spectral ghosts and family curses (this adaptation very wisely chooses not to dramatize the circumstances surrounding the family curse), and then patiently destroys them. In the book, as well as in some adaptations, this destruction is accomplished without dismantling the horror; we are no less terrified of the moors when we know that a human agent unleashed the hound than when we thought that the legend might (but only might) be true.

Unfortunately, the Granada adaptation is not quite successful in this regard. The middle section is appropriately creepy, but once Holmes arrives all of that tension dissolves and we're back in the middle of a handsomely-mounted but decidedly not-edgy adventure. The final action sequence, with Sir Henry stalked by the glowing hound of hell, is almost an after-thought--followed by a somewhat chilling sequence where the murderer is sucked down to his death. I say "somewhat"; if the scenes leading up to it had been less pedestrian and the scene itself paced a tad more efficiently, it would have been truly chilling--horrifying, even. And then...well, it ends. With a charming scene, true--Holmes and Watson riding into the sunset like Steed and Mrs. Peel--but a scene so out of step with the story preceding it that the viewer is left with a warmed but dissatisfied heart.

Brett's good, though. Here at the end of Return we can see the toll his personal tragedies are taking on him; Holmes is quieter here, and there is a deep sadness in his eyes that one suspects is not entirely acting. As a result, any scene with Holmes in it is fascinating to watch; I might suggest that this is one of the most layered performances we've seen from Brett so far--but they are also among the more gently paced, with almost-whispered line deliveries and many slow secret glances. It's out of step, in other words, with the story this adaptation is purportedly telling; we need tenseness, not melancholy. This is not to disparage Brett, however; Lord knows, he suffered enough.

As an adaptation, Hound is far from perfect, though Brett's performance is very good indeed. As a real-ization of horror, though, it's effective enough. I know that there is at least one scene--the one in which the murderer sinks to his doom--that will stay with me for some time. Hound demonstrates again Doyle's talent in bringing the fantastic and the mundane into collision, and the insights that emerge when such a collision takes place.

Update on Ellery Queen for Kindle

2011-10-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

I mentioned previously that Otto Penzler's "Mysterious Press" has gotten the rights to issue Calamity Town and The Roman Hat Mystery in e-book format. Well, they're available for pre-order now on Amazon:

The Roman Hat Mystery

A murder in a crowded theater leaves a pack of suspects, but only one clue
Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it’s packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen.

With the help of his son Ellery, a bibliophile and novelist whose imagination can solve any crime, the Inspector attacks this seemingly impenetrable mystery. Anyone in the theater could have killed the unscrupulous lawyer, and several had the motive. Only Ellery Queen, in his debut novel, can decipher the clue of the dead man’s missing top hat.

Calamity Town

Looking for trouble, Ellery Queen descends on a small town
At the tail end of the long summer of 1940, there is nowhere in the country more charming than Wrightsville. The Depression has abated, and for the first time in years the city is booming. There is hope in Wrightsville, but Ellery Queen has come looking for death.

The mystery author is hoping for fodder for a novel, and he senses the corruption that lurks beneath the apple pie façade. He rents a house owned by the town’s first family, whose three daughters star in most of the local gossip. One is fragile, left at the altar three years ago and never recovered. Another is engaged to the city’s rising political star, an upright man who’s already boring her. And then there’s Lola, the divorced, bohemian black sheep. Together, they make a volatile combination. Once he sees the ugliness in Wrightsville, Queen sits back—waiting for the crime to come to him.

Both will be available October 25. Roman Hat was the first Ellery Queen novel, and good enough in its own right, but if you're looking to get into Queen, I would really recommend Calamity Town. It marks the beginning of what Francis Nevins calls Ellery Queen's third period: a stretch of novels that successfully united intricate plotting with well-rounded character work. I just re-read it myself, and it's heartbreaking; there's no other word for it. Highly, highly recommended.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of Four (Peter Hammond, 1987)

2011-10-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

Hrm. It seems that the episodes on my DVDs are out of production order, which is a minor annoyance--not fatal to my enjoyment of the series, certainly, but it makes it difficult to gauge exactly where to plug each episode into my meager knowledge of Brett's offscreen life. Still, this week brings us to the first feature-length adaptation--The Sign of Four. In some ways, the novel is one of my favorite Holmes stories; after the somewhat rocky start of A Study in Scarlet, Sign works to establish what would later be the standard pattern not only of the Holmes stories but of private-detective fiction generally: the client (often female) arrives and gives the sleuth what seems to be a simple problem; he investigates and is drawn into a far more complex web of events. It's almost a stereotype now, but Holmes did it first.

There's not much else in the story that Holmes did first, however; if Study shows the marks of Poe's influence, Sign goes further--not only taking the locked-room scenario from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (with the slight alteration of making the killer a racist stereotype instead of an orangutang), but cribbing the Indian Treasure plotline wholesale from Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. It's all enlivened by Holmes, but the family tree is definitely showing in the plot itself.

This is the second adaptation of Sign that we've looked at here. The first (with Peter Cushing) was--in my own uncharitable evaluation--"an inert mess." This adaptation fares better; the pacing and doling-out of information is handled far more effectively, even if we do get a long expositiony scene right at the end. Again, Watson's romance is reduced to a few mildly-flirtatious glances. As far as Holmes goes, though he starts the adventure in an inexplicably testy mood (due, no doubt, to a lack of casework), Brett quickly resumes the warmth that we've come to expect of him.

In short, I liked this adaptation to almost exactly the extent that I didn't like the Cushing version. But there's a problem--and it's a problem buried right in the novel itself: Tonga. In the book, Tonga is an Adaman Islander--a small, savage creature on whom even Jonathan Small looks with contempt. Plotwise, he exists to serve exactly the same function as the murderous primate does in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--to provide a subhuman, terrible thing to crawl up into a locked room and kill someone. Doyle doesn't make as much of the reason-brutishness duality that Poe might, but the subtext is there. And it's a problematic one. The Cushing version compounded the problem by giving us a blackface Tonga. Granada did better than that, but I'm not sure by how much:

Right. In this scenario, Tonga is a Klingon. In case you're wondering, these are the Adamanese people:

See the difference?

This is actually a problem that must inevitably confront someone who wants to adapt classic texts. Should you play the racism (or ignorance or ignorant racism) straight, or should you try to subvert it or modify it? Most of the time, Granada plays it straight. Which is fair enough, I guess, but really. Really. Tonga's a tragic figure.

For you see, while, it's true that the Adamanese people had a habit of killing shipwreck survivors, this was a culture under siege:

There is evidence that some sections of the British Indian administration were deliberately working to annihilate the tribes.^[5] After the mid-19th century, British also established penal colonies on the islands, and an increasing numbers of mainland Indian and Karen settlers arrived, encroaching on former territories of the Andamanese. This accelerated the decline of the tribes. At the time of first contact with the British there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese. By 1901, 600 were left.^[6]

This is Tonga's background. Doyle couldn't be bothered or couldn't see the need to establish it, but by 1987 one would think that it would be interesting to try. They didn't, and it's a pity. I think the story would be a far better one if Tonga were better developed.

That said, The Sign of Four is a fantastic adaptation. Brett is in top form, Hardwicke is predictably dependable, and the supporting cast is excellent. Heck, I even liked the slow-motion boat chase. I just wish poor Tonga could get a better shake some day.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Clocks (Charles Palmer, 2010)

2011-10-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

The Clocks was written in 1963, and attempts (with debatable success) to synthesize two types of thriller: the John Dickson Carr-style extravaganza and the spy story. For the first element, we look to the murder itself: appearing in the home of a blind woman, the body brings with it (so to speak) four stopped clocks. There's no clue as to who the dead man is or what the clocks might signify. It's a fantastic, somewhat surreal setup, and I think it has a distinct flavor of Carr about it. Even the narrative style (alternating first- and third-person chapters with the former headed "Colin Lamb's Narrative") is Carr-esque.

On the other hand, Colin Lamb isn't just your average young man-about-town; he's an agent for the British Government, looking to root out Communist sympathizers, and he has reason to believe that the spies in question live on the selfsame street where the murder is committed. The murder might even be connected to his investigation. And so (being the son of Col. Race, old friend of Poirot's) he enlists the help of the Belgian detective.

I've spent more time on the summary than I usually do (if you want a full summary, go to Wikipedia) because I think it illustrates what an awkward--though not unlovely--duck this novel is. It's classic-mode Christie, but it's sixties to the core. And the adaptation, as is customary, transplants the plot--both strands--backwards in time to the thirties, at the onset of World War II. Surprisingly, it works very well; the clocks become more than a bizarre non-clue. Instead, at key moments, we can hear them ticking away. From our vantage point, we know that the war is coming--steadily, without mercy. All the attempts on the part of conspirators and government agents are doomed to failure. The clocks become, then, a symbolic element in the narrative.

The other thematic element here is the conflation of fiction and reality. This is an old theme in detective fiction (again and again I say it--genre fiction was meta before meta was cool) and is, of course, a primary element of the eventual resolution of the novel's plot. The adaptation heightens the effect by introducing Poirot at a stage performance of a mystery by the (unfortunately non-appearing) famous author Ariadne Oliver. This scene is interesting to me because it suggests (far more than the Christie novels ever did) that Oliver bases her detective on Poirot--witness the confusing nationality and random insertion of native-language terms in place of easy English ones. And so from the beginning we are prepared to expect the fictional exploits of detectives and criminals to become confused with the real thing.

There's a couple of things that could be said about this. The first is that the story underlines (as Three Act Tragedy and Third Girl did) the basic artificiality of what we're watching. Moreover, by having the characters consciously situate themselves within the framework of a murder-mystery plot, we're led to reflect on the ways social roles in "reality" are based on or mediated by expectations conferred by the roles in which we find ourselves. There's a sense in which all we ever do is playact--adopting roles and discarding them, molding lives to fit plots and changing plots to fit lives. This is all fairly obvious, but it's a key feature of the genre and of The Clocks in particular.

Interestingly, the adaptation jettisons a feature that underlines all of this: in the novel, Colin Lamb is the son of Colonel Race (an old friend of Poirot's) and has changed his name--like a prince in a romantic novel--in order to make his way on his own. Perhaps because the point would be too confusing, Tom Burke here is simply Colin Race. Burke is, perhaps, the weakest element of the adaptation: a good-looking but bland leading man, he never establishes the kind of kinship with Poirot enjoyed by Ariadne Oliver, Sir Charles Cartwright, or even his own father. Nevertheless, Lamb/Race's connection to the world of spies does bring in another element of playacting, as well as tying the themes of identity and role-playing to the other theme represented by the continuously ticking clocks.

The connection is, unfortunately, a bit tenuous. We might suggest that identity/social roles are ways we constitute ourselves in time (to be alive, after all, is to be in time; a longing for timelessness is a longing for that death which is stasis--also the lesson of the most recent series of Doctor Who). The villains' plot here is marked by an attempt to control perceptions of them (their social roles) by effectively freezing time (that is, by re-setting perceptions to an earlier point). Read this way, the adaptation does seem remarkably coherent, but it has to be admitted that it's a bit of a stretch.

On the whole, this is a satisfying adaptation--substantially less satisfying than Murder on the Orient Express (which remains for me the gold standard, not only of this series, but of television mysteries in general) or Three Act Tragedy, but more interesting and coherent than Hallowe'en Party or Appointment with Death. The shadow of the oncoming War lends the proceedings an extra level of seriousness; we feel as if the existential issues faced by the actors in the murder find their mirror in world events--as if the whole world is heading toward a breakdown of social roles in light of the savagery that is to come.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax (John Madden, 1991)

2011-09-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

"The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax" takes a number of liberties with the original story, but I think only the most hardened Sherlockian would begrudge that. It's not one of the better stories, for one thing; for another, Watson is so poorly used there that a strict adaptation would not quite fit the tone established in the Brett-Hardwicke series. It is true that Holmes once coldly shot down David Burke's "Did I really do remarkably badly?" with a simple "Yes," but Hardwicke's Watson is too jaded--and too self-confident--to allow Holmes a chance to say something like this:

“And a singularly consistent investigation you have made, my dear Watson,” said he. “I cannot at the moment recall any possible blunder which you have omitted. The total effect of your proceeding has been to give the alarm everywhere and yet to discover nothing.”

What's more, it is difficult to imagine Brett's Holmes--at this stage of his career, with Reichenbach and the cocaine behind him--indulging in that sort of cruel sarcasm.*

But that's not the only change to Watson's role. In the story, Holmes sends Watson to investigate the titular disappearance (making his later mockery all the more jarring); in the episode, Watson is on holiday, meets the Lady Francis, and notices that she seems afraid of something. He then requests Holmes' opinion. Holmes advises him to keep a close watch on her, but Watson narrowly misses and the Lady Francis vanishes. This theme of close calls and poor judgement comes up often in the episode.

Indeed, this is a case where very little goes right for Holmes and Watson. At first they suspect the wrong man (and Watson's interference prevents the stranger from potentially rescuing Lady Francis himself), and then they find themselves utterly baffled by a creaky Gothic contraption of a plot that involves live burial and chloroform.

These moments of failure, of course, dot the Canon and they give Holmes a particular quality of life-likeness. Hercule Poirot never failed on a case. Ellery Queen never failed. Gideon Fell never blinked his tiny eyes but they showed him directly what course to take. It's true that all these detectives have setbacks, and often they berate their own stupidity, but seldom** does this stupidity do any damage. But with Holmes--and especially in Granada's re-visioning of "Lady Francis"--there are often dire consequences for failure. In this case (spoiler alert) the headstrong suffragette is reduced to a husk of her former self, with little hope (or, at least, a very small hope) for recovery. Holmes has failed, and we can see by Brett's performance that he feels it to his core.

But that's not to say that the episode is without its small joys. Brett and Hardwicke are always delightful together, and the scene where they accost the villain of the piece (an false preacher, wolf-in-sheeps-clothing) and present their "warrant" in the form of Watson's old Service Revolver is priceless. Brett looks well here--sharp, alert--and, what's more, a Holmes who is characterized less by his flamboyance and more by reflection, something I never thought I would say back when I started this series back in January.

Following "Lady Francis" the series makes a shift: the regular hour-long episodes are now interspersed with longer adaptations: The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Master Blackmailer, The Last Vampire, and The Eligible Bachelor. My understanding is that this shift had something to do with the state of Brett's health at the time, but it certainly marks a formal change that we will have to examine when we get to those longer adaptations.
_____________
*In the story, of course, Holmes' words are undercut by the fact that he himself bungles the case, showing that he is as fallible as Watson, but his words here jar a bit nonetheless.

**I can think of two cases of Ellery Queen's that profoundly shake him to his core by the way things turn out. None of Poirot's, of which I'm aware, have this effect (which is what makes the Suchet Murder on the Orient Express so remarkable). I'm fairly confident Gideon Fell wouldn't notice if something did go wrong in one of his investigations.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Hallowe'en Party (Charles Palmer, 2010)

2011-09-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

As is no doubt apparent, I am making my staggering way backwards through Agatha Christie's Poirot; I have seen (and enjoyed) several of the earlier episodes, but was under the impression that the more recent outings were disappointing. I've been repeatedly surprised to discover that this is far from the case--that in many ways the adaptations now being produced are equal to the older series, and even in some cases improve on their source material. Actually, surprised isn't the right word; at this point, I almost expect an episode to be somewhere between "very good" and "brilliant." Hallowe'en Party, which is part of the 2010 series, isn't brilliant, but it is very good, with an appropriately creepy script by Mark Gatiss and all the gloss and polish I've come to expect of the series.

The movie (and its source material) is also a good example of what differentiates Agatha Christie from her "cozy" followers. We're used to thinking of murder mysteries (at least, of the type Christie wrote) as staid, comfortable affairs with the body neatly tucked away soon after it emerges. The interest isn't in moral horror; it's in the intellectual puzzle. As such, victims in this sort of story tend to be either enigmas (as with the mother in The Mysterious Affair at Styles) or monsters (Rachett in the book version of Murder on the Orient Express--though not, entirely, in the Suchet adaptation). What Christie does in Hallowe'en Party is a pretty brutal rejection of that formula: here the victim is a child, a girl who blurts out in a party that she once witnessed a murder. And she isn't neatly offed with an untraceable poison. She is drowned (appropriately for the season) in an apple-ducking barrel. Though the full horror of this murder is never conveyed as it is in, say, the Red Riding trilogy, the fact that the central murder is that of a child does provide the ultimate revelation of the killer with a shock of recognized evil that doesn't normally crop up in your standard drawing-room mystery.

Assisting Poirot (indeed, drawing him in as she did in Third Girl) is Ariadne Oliver, played by Zoe Wanamaker. I must confess here that, though I know that fans of the series love Hastings, Ariadne Oliver is my favorite of Poirot's confidants--especially as played by Wanamaker. Where Hastings always seemed too dull to be of much use, Oliver is a smart investigator in her own right; being an author of mystery stories herself (and an obvious stand-in for Agatha Christie) she is able to keep track of the plot and even tease out elements herself, though the final revelation always comes from Poirot. Indeed, she reminds me a lot of Watson as he appears in the Granada series: Always a step behind the Great Detective, but holding over him a certain amount of control. How else could she rope Poirot into so many murder investigations?

It is, as I say, through Oliver that Poirot comes to the mystery. She is at the fateful party (unwillingly) and is privy to the murdered girl's claim to have seen a previous murder. Through the first third or so of the movie, Ariadne is our guide through the labyrinth of plot; unfortunately, once Poirot comes on the case, Gatiss sees fit to lock the poor author away in a room with a cold. That's a shame, since--as I say--Ariadne Oliver is my favorite of Poirot's companions, and Wanamaker's chemistry with Suchet is undeniable.

The chief flaw in this adaptation is the middle section. The set-up is marvelous. Gatiss has shown himself time and again to be a master of macabre or spooky effects (see: "The Unquiet Dead" or "Night Terrors"--both from Doctor Who) and a dab hand, too, at juggling genre elements in such a way as to keep them seeming fresh (Sherlock's "The Great Game"). Through the first fifteen or twenty minutes, we are treated to a spooky evocation of what might be called the "Halloween spirit"--witches and brandied raisins and jack-o-lanterns--but once Poirot is brought in, everything settles back into a fairly standard, if beautifully filmed, murder-mystery pattern. Only at the climax, when the dark elements of satanism and witchcraft re-emerge, does the adaptation return to the striking tones of its beginning.

This is, undeniably, a problem--particularly in a year which saw Three Act Tragedy (with its consistent theatrical imagery) and Murder on the Orient Express--and one could wish that director Charles Palmer had found ways to unite the movie more tightly than is now the case. However, even the bits that lag and those moments when the viewer anxiously wonders where all the pleasant spookiness of the opening went--even these, I say, have some merit, if only because they are shot and acted beautifully. Hallowe'en Party may not be brilliant, but it's still a very good piece of work.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: The Bruce-Partington Plans (John Gorrie, 1988)

2011-09-18T14:09:00.000-07:00

I must admit, I have a soft spot for "The Bruce-Partington Plans." Not because of the original story, which I didn't read for many years even after I became a Holmes fan, but because of the 1939 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce radio version. It's a beautifully done production, and one that in many ways sets the standard for how I judge portrayals of the Holmes character (heck, it sets the standard for how I judge other Rathbone performances). Because of this pre-determined interest, I was anxious to get to the Brett version of the story.

Fortunately, this is Brett at his best (in spite of that awful haircut he's saddled with). From the opening moments in Baker Street, where Holmes hums and hems and haws, trying to get Watson's attention (while Watson ignores his friend in favor of the newspaper) before finally launching into the most characteristic speech from the entire Holmesian canon:

The London criminal is certainly a *dull* fellow. The thief or the murderer could roam London on a day like this as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.

Watson, of course, is perfectly content with the dullness of the London criminal, but Holmes--wild, active, easily bored Holmes--longs for some sort of mental exaltation (and since he has, apparently, given up cocaine, he is at his wit's end).

Holmes does not stay bored for long; into this domestic scene comes Mycroft, unseen since "The Greek Interpreter", offering Holmes a chance to at once stimulate his brain and serve his country.

In my discussion of "The Greek Interpreter," I confessed some misgivings about Charles Gray's Mycroft. "The Bruce-Partington Plans" does little to move my opinion either way. Certainly, Mycroft here is nowhere near so entertaining as in the radio version of the same play. As before, he and Holmes might as well be unrelated. Of course, this could be the point: The age gap between the two men is apparent. And yet, Gray's Mycroft regards Holmes with a certain amount of distant fondness that was lacking in his previous appearance--and Brett, with his more comfortable Holmes, allows himself a little warmth in speaking to the older man. It's not so interesting a relationship as shows up in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or Sherlock, but it's watchable.

For the rest, "The Bruce-Partington Plans" is a serviceable adaptation, and Brett shines as ever. I would encourage you to keep a special look-out for his expression when Watson agrees to accompany him in a burglary. That looks speaks more affection than whole scenes could.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Wisteria Lodge (Peter Hammond, 1988)

2011-09-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

It is a mistake to believe--as some people, including the many imitators of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, apparently do--that the Sherlock Holmes stories are, first and foremost, tales of detection. To be sure, they are detective stories (that is, they take as their central character a detective, and this detective detects); however, they are not--whatever Holmes himself seems to believe--chiefly concerned with the rational process. No, the charm of the Holmes tales rests precisely in those points where they are least rational: in the spectral hound on the moors or the murderous pygmy climbing the gutters of decrepit British homes. Holmes unravels these mysteries by a species of rational deduction, but make no mistake: the deduction is a pretense to introduce the mystery.

Such is certainly the case with Wisteria Lodge (original story here). At the very beginning, Holmes and Watson are discussing the nature of the "grostesque":

“I suppose, Watson, we must look upon you as a man of letters,” said he. “How do you define the word ‘grotesque’?”
“Strange–remarkable,” I suggested.
He shook his head at my definition.
“There is surely something more than that,” said he; “some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible. If you cast your mind back to some of those narratives with which you have afflicted a long-suffering public, you will recognize how often the grotesque has deepened into the criminal. Think of that little affair of the red-headed men. That was grotesque enough in the outset, and yet it ended in a desperate attempt at robbery. Or, again, there was that most grotesque affair of the five orange pips, which led straight to a murderous conspiracy. The word puts me on the alert.”

And well it should. In this case, the grotesque adventures of Scott Eccles lead the two investigators to a plot to assassinate a deposed South American dictator. Let that sink in for a moment, and it will become apparent what Doyle is doing in the story: he is self-consciously contrasting the romance of wicked kings and bloodthirsty vengeance with the docile English countryside. This is nothing new, of course; he's done it before many times and will do it again. But I think it serves as a useful reminder that the Holmes stories are, finally, romances first and foremost--not logically-constructed detective stories of the fair play variety (in this, they have more in common with G.K. Chesterton than might at first appear, and quite a bit less in common with Ellery Queen, Holmes' "logical successor").

As might be expected, the adaptation here plays up the romantic element even as it eliminates some of the more troubling aspects of Doyle's story. The voodoo subplot is gone; the revenge sought here is this-worldly all the way around. But the surreal image of the fallen dictator holding court in a nearly-empty room conveys all the exotic quality one could require.* This is as much re-enchantment as The Red-Headed League (a story which earns a name-drop in the opening Baker Street scene), but rather than taking place in a world of thieves and underground tunnels, "Wisteria Lodge" stakes its claim among devils and madmen. It is re-enchantment all the same.

On another note, it is a special joy in this episode to see Freddie Jones as Inspector Baynes. Baynes is an altogether different sort of policeman from what Holmes is used to; alternately comically pompous and remarkably perceptive, he is notable for being one of the few policemen who keeps up with Holmes. Though his claims to have known the whole story all along may be merest bluster, it is hard to deny that, even if he is spinning facts a little, he still spins them with an acuteness not commonly seen in Holmes' official counterparts. Jones plays Baynes as simultaneously eager to prove himself and willing to appear a fool if his ends are served; Brett, for his part, allows Holmes to relish every minute he spends with Baynes. This dynamic makes the episode more fun than it has any right to be.

Just a quick note on 'blogging regularity: I am getting into a new swing of things, which means that nothing is yet stone-stuck-sure. But it's looking like I may be able to squeeze in a couple of posts on weekends--for now, at least. We'll see how things develop.

___________________________
*It's worth noting that the director here is again Peter Hammond of The Avengers--and this is certainly a world in which John Steed and Emma Peel would feel at home.

Agatha Christie's Porot: Three Act Tragedy (Ashley Pierce, 2010)

2011-09-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

A substantial portion of this post depends on discussing spoilers. I will give a brief notice when that moment comes and you can skip the section--but be warned.

The detective story is (as has been observed often) a basically artificial form. That is to say, it's stylized, ritualized--theatrical, in fact. The characters may have different names and different personalities of varying depths, but in the end their entire existence is bound up in the artificial movement of murder--investigation--resolution. There is nothing (or, at least, very little) realistic about the detective story; it is a morality play that climaxes in a ritualistic summoning of the dead and expelling of the evildoer (why else to seances figure so heavily in the genre?).

Now the author--or the filmmaker--when confronted with this artificial form has two choices: she can either ignore it or disguise it as a novel of manners (as P.D. James does) or she can deliberately call attention to its artificiality. Agatha Christie was partial to the second choice (as we saw in Third Girl), so it's nice to see the filmmakers behind Agatha Christie's Poirot taking a similar tack.* The novel, after all, is called Three Act Tragedy and concerns murders taking place among theater-folk and other socialites; it is an artificial tale set in an artificial world. And the adaptation reflects this juxtaposition by repeatedly making use of theatrical effects: dimming lights when a character is speaking, focusing a spotlight on the victim(s), and so on. In fact, the movie begins (see the screen cap above) and ends in a theater--bookending the mystery with a tacit acknowledgement of its artifice.

To what purpose? Why all the dimming lights and the repeated references to the stage? Is it simply because of the fact that Sir Charles Cartwright is an actor and a central figure in the story? No doubt. But there is, I think, more going on here. For not only is Sir Charles an actor, he is acting through the whole story. That is, it is he (not Poirot) who decides that the first death must be murder, and it is he (not Poirot) who decides to initiate investigations. Before our eyes we see Sir Charles take on the role of detective, now darting ahead of Poirot and now scrambling to catch up--always in the process of re-inventing himself.

SPOILERS

Here's where the spoilers come in. For the true murderer is in the end revealed to have been Sir Charles himself. Thus, he's been playing a detective whose quarry is himself; he has in a very real sense been "trying to find himself." But one gets the uneasy feeling that there is no "there" there--for not only is Sir Charles Cartwright not really a detective (being instead a murderer) but his name is not really Cartwright. It gets more layered than that: at two separate points in the plot, Cartwright takes on additional identities (the butler at the second murder and a beggar sending a telegram to Poirot), both of whom are in fact phantoms; the butler is dead because he never existed, as Poirot points out. "Sir Charles Cartwright," then, is himself an illusion--as his speech upon Poirot's unmasking of him makes clear.

You don't know what it's like. People think we're so happy, so glamorous. Girls run after you, beautiful girls. You kiss them, and then they go home. Take off their pretty costumes, and they go home, and you're alone.

This business of being alone is the core of the issue for Sir Charles; he murders so that he can be with someone. And this isn't just about marrying Egg Lytton-Gore; in taking on the role of detective, Sir Charles is able to take on a sense of meaning (even if the meaning is based on a lack he created himself--that is, he murders to create). The retired actor must act, just as Poirot (the perennially retired detective) must detect. We must ask ourselves why Sir Charles allows Poirot to tag along if he is investigating to no purpose; on the one hand, the obvious answer is that Sir Charles is egocentric enough to believe that Poirot will never see through his deception. This is true. On the other hand, I think there's more going on here: Sir Charles needs Poirot as an object of study (the false detective learning from the real one) and--shockingly--as a friend.

Here's a point where the screenwriters did something that I think is really genius in the way it re-contextualizes the closing lines of the novel. In the book, Mr. Satterthwaite (who does not appear in the movie) remarks that, if the first murder was truly random, there was a chance that he himself could have been murdered. To which Poirot replies that a more terrible possibility presents itself: Poirot himself could have drank it! Now, in the book this is a joke, a way to send the reader away chuckling happy to himself. But in the movie the emphasis is different. For Sir Charles is an old friend of Poirot's, and he has shown himself willing to kill off old friends in order to continue his charade of a single life. Poirot's words become a recognition of the lengths to which Sir Charles would go--not only did he kill his old friend in cold blood, but he would willingly have caused another old friend to die as the result of a random poisoning.

END SPOILERS

And now, a word on the production itself. I'm actually a bit embarrassed to love this movie as much as I do; it would be far more comfortable to hate it or to merely like it. In that case, I could claim some sort of critical distance. But it's a beautifully mounted production--as are all the most recent crop of Agatha Christie's Poirot, and it features a marvelous performance from Martin Shaw (who has played Adam Dalgliesh and George Gently, and so is no stranger to playing detective). As Sir Charles, Shaw is alternately elegant and humorous. His attempts at detection--which could easily have played as farce--come across as the actions of a genuinely intelligent man attempting to broaden his horizons. Make no mistake: Shaw is the best non-Suchet thing about this production.

Which is not to say that the rest of the cast is at all bad. Kimberly Nixon (also of Cherrybomb) is Egg, and though the character has very little to do for most of the run time, Nixon handles her few emotional scenes with aplomb. She is also, if I may say so, a very attractive young actress, and is able to generate a small but significant amount of chemistry with Shaw.

All of which brings me to a recommendation. Watch it. As with Murder on the Orient Express and Third Girl, Three Act Tragedy is a Golden Age Mystery shot through with a keen artistic sense; rather than simply pointing and shooting (and having Poirot look grim at all he overhears), this adaptation runs away with itself. It's an absolutely first-class adaptation.

____________________
*Full confession: it has been years since I read the novel on which this movie is an adaptation, so I can't be sure how much of the interplay between theater and detective fiction is present in the book.

Just a Quick Note

2011-07-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

'Blogging has been spotty of late, I know--no new Sherlock Holmes posts in over two weeks, no follow-up to the Ellery Queen series--and I'm sorry. Truly, deeply, sorry. If I have an excuse, it's that I'm in the process of moving to Tuscaloosa, and it's somewhat taken my attention from serious watching/analysis/blogging/whateveryoucallwhatI'mdoinghere. And, unfortunately, that's going to continue to be the case for at least a week and a half more; just until I get settled and figure out what I'm doing in my new environs. But after that--if everything goes well--I should be back with regular (if less-frequent--possibly one a week) 'blog posts.

See you then.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Evil Under the Sun (Brian Farnham, 2001)

2011-07-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I really didn't like this version of Evil Under the Sun that much, and I'm not entirely sure why (well, that's not quite true; I have a laundry list I'll go through in a second). It should be a surefire success: with Suchet in the lead--and this before the series had jettisoned Hugh Fraser, Philip Jackson, or Pauline Moran--and with a screenplay by the well-regarded Anthony Horowitz, there's really no way this should go wrong. And yet, somehow, the movie doesn't gel for me. Perhaps it's the shooting style; this adaptation certainly lacks the slick polish that makes Murder on the Orient Express or Third Girl feel like candy for the eyes. Perhaps it's the direction; the performances are universally anonymous, which is unfortunate given the fact that at least one of the characters is supposed to be an effortlessly charming playboy.

Perhaps it's that I can't help but compare this adaptation to the 1982 movie, an adaptation which (beyond the Cole Porter soundtrack) has no less a figure than Diana Rigg as the ill-fated Arlena Marshall. Thinking over it, that movie--for all that it retains the faults of the big-screen Christie adaptations of yore--gets right exactly what I think the Suchet adaptation gets wrong. The dialogue sparkles and the characters, if they are over the top, at least feel like they exist for some reason beyond dropping clues for the all-seeing Hercule Poirot. In the 2001 adaptation, on the other hand, characters are always bursting into speech just within Poirot's hearing, or stopping to say what amounts to "I say, here's an important plot point for later in the story!" It might be true to Christie's style* but when the performances and production are as thin as they are here, the joints just stick out too much.

Then again, that might be bearable if the murder occurred relatively early in the episode. Instead, we get a ten-or-more-minute sequence establishing a prior murder (the 1982 movie did that in three minutes) and a number of scenes maneuvering Poirot toward the island that will be the scene of the murder. Sure, it's lovely to see Poirot and Hastings and Miss Lemon acting like a little family, but the whole thing eats into the runtime to very little purpose. As a result, when we get to the island we see little of the suspects; they get, perhaps, a scene each (establishing each time that "this is a very suspicious person") and Poirot wanders about and looks concerned until finally, about halfway through the movie (!) Arlena gets herself murdered. Not that it matters, since we hardly saw her anyway.

Poirot then investigates, and Inspector Japp (who, for some reason, has jurisdiction) and Hastings (whose role is primarily to point out obvious facts) tag along. We get to meet a youngish Russell Tovey, and Poirot looks very concerned and dispatches Miss Lemon to investigate that murder we saw earlier in the movie. And then, finally, Poirot assembles the suspects and delivers the solution (I won't waste time praising David Suchet; the man is a master at this sort of thing, even if he's saddled with dialogue more mangled than even Agatha Christie would have dreamed up). And yet even here, the adaptation pales next to the earlier version--primarily because the 1982 version makes more sense, even if (as might be the case) this version hews closer to the Christie original.

And all, all of that would be forgivable if it felt like it mattered in the end. I was willing to forgive Appointment with Death equally great sins because the conclusion pulled itself together so well. In that case, there was an emotional payoff both to the murder mystery (even if the revised solution was ripped directly from another Agatha Christie novel entirely) and to the story of Jinny. But Evil Under the Sun doesn't care enough about the characters or the plot to attempt to give any sort of closure to either; instead, Poirot names the killer and is whisked back to London where he delivers a punchline about Hastings' ill-advised restaurant venture. And that, as they say, is that.

Perhaps I'm too harsh. It is true that, if the production is not as slick as more recent episodes have been, there's still some beautiful scenery and costumes. Suchet kills it, yet again, and the supporting triumvirate of Hastings, Japp, and Miss Lemon might be shoehorned in, but they're very good at what they do and there's a healthy sense of companionship among them. But the adaptation seems tired, especially if you compare this movie to, for instance, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe from almost a decade earlier, or to Third Girl nearly a decade later. It's barely passable, but not much more than that.
_______________________
*I've not read the book, so I can't speak to this specific instance, but the story's a blood-sister to Death on the Nile, where such things do sometimes happen. However, Christie always makes them seem natural, somehow, in a way that this adaptation doesn't.

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Third Girl (Dan Reed, 2008)

2011-07-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

After seeing Appointment with Death, I was tempted to believe that Murder on the Orient Express was a fluke. Though the former was hardly a stinker (and certainly not as unremarkable as the mid-00 episodes of Poirot I've seen), it didn't really manage to do anything interesting with the storyline, even with the changes (some good, some bad) and thematic reinvention. But Third Girl--based on a 1966 novel by Agatha Christie--suggests that Appointment was the fluke. As with that movie, Third Girl radically revises the plot of the book, but its changes on the whole work to improve, rather than simply change, the storyline.

Part of the issue here is that Third Girl isn't a remarkably good novel to begin with. It represents Christie's attempt to introduce Poirot to the younger generation of the sixties, with its drugs and bohemian lifestyle; tellingly, one of the first lines of dialogue is the titular Third Girl insisting that Poirot can't help her because he's "too old." Too old indeed! At this point, Poirot has been in his sixties since the twenties. Moreover, he represents a style of thought (and a style of literature) that was becoming increasingly dated by the time the novel was published. The "whodunit"--always a strain on credibility--was at this point the squarest of the square, and it's possible to read Third Girl as Christie's meditation on that fact (as the Wikipedia page points out, Christie goes out of her way to underline the basic artificiality of the detective-story plot). But for all of that, Third Girl never really rises above the passable, and Christie's hand for social mores--so assured in her own inter-war period--falters a bit when it comes to the bright young things of the sixties.

The television version, wisely, jettisons the sixties in order to relocate the story to the thirties. And it's gorgeous; the production values here are far higher than some of the episodes made early in the series' run, with deep warm colors and fluid camera work. In truth, I would rather see Poirot in this environment than the gaudy world of the sixties (as much as I love the sixties). As I mentioned above, the screenplay revises the novel heavily, but where Appointment with Death didn't really accomplish anything with the changes it made, Third Girl improves on the source material.

Again, part of that is because the novel's plot isn't very good to begin with; it's basically a warmed-over version of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe crossed with Christie's wartime creation Curtain (or The ABC Murders). In adapting the novel, the screenwriter has removed the bits that strain credulity and bolstered the thriller aspects, creating a tightly plotted and emotionally satisfying mystery story that stands up well next to the novel that serves as its origin.

Joining Poirot is Ariadne Oliver, played by Zoe Wanamaker. She's not quite as I remember her from the novels, but she's solid and entertaining, and an excellent foil for Poirot. In fact, it is through her intervention that Poirot becomes involved in the case, and she discovers many key pieces of evidence, though it takes Poirot to assemble them into their final form. If there's a weakness here, it's actually in the revelation scene; Suchet has done dozens of these by now, and he always handles them well, but it feels particularly arbitrary here.*

That said, this is a phenomenal adaptation. I've not seen the latest season on Masterpiece Theater, but if it keeps at this level I'll be tempted to say that the Poirot series has made a serious jump--after a mid-series slump of mediocre adaptations--from the "good" level of the early years to something approaching brilliance.

___________________________
*Oddly, these types of scenes--so seemingly stereotypical of the genre--don't really occur much in my reading of Christie. She tends to assemble two or three characters and go from there--certainly not all the suspects, and generally not in the drawing room.

Not Ellery Queen: The Grand Old Lady (Vincent McEveety, 1989)

2011-07-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

"The Grand Old Lady" was a script for Ellery Queen that was never produced and only found itself onscreen over a decade later--and exactly a decade after Jim Hutton passed away. While watching it, I couldn't help wishing that the script had been produced for the original series run, since in many ways it's the best episode of the lot. I don't mean that in terms of the final reveal--which is half-hearted, at best--but in terms of complexity; nowhere else do we find a variation on the dying clue this sophisticated. And, beyond that, we're treated to not simply one, but two false solutions. It's a lovely piece of work.

The episode opens on the Queen Mary--one of the Grand Old Ladies of the title--as radio personality Edwin Chancellor (Robert Vaughn as the Simon Brimmer stand-in) attempts to ingratiate himself with the mistress of mystery herself, Lady Abigail Austin (June Havoc). Lady Abigail is, of course, the other Grand Old Lady in question, since the entire episode is constructed as a salute to her memory (the framing device involves Jessica Fletcher breaking the fourth wall to tell us of Lady Abigail's passing).* Suddenly, right before the horrified eyes of these two personalities, a man stumbles into the Queen Mary's dining hall, utters a cry in German, and collapses--dead.

In short order the other would-be detectives are assembled: Christie McGinn (Gary Kroeger), a young author of crossword puzzles, and his father Lt. Martin McGinn (John Karlen). These two characters aren't quite Ellery and the Inspector; for one thing, the Lieutenant is far less supportive of his son's investigatory endeavors than Inspector Queen ever was. For another, Christie is a bit of a loser--a lousy writer and low man on the totem pole, to whom Chancellor is able to condescend without seeming like too much of a jerk. And yet, for all that, there's enough of the Queen sparkle coming through to make the episode recognizably part of the earlier series--and recognizably distinct from every episode of Murder, She Wrote I've ever seen.

Where this episode really shines is in its conclusion. As usual, the Brimmer surrogate has a false solution to propose, but "The Grand Old Lady" takes matters a step further and allows Lady Abigail to also propose a killer--one more in line with the facts and one which gives an ingenious reading of the central clue. And then Christie gets his say, offering a still more imaginative understanding of the clue. True, the killer he eventually identifies is nowhere near as interesting as he could have been, but that clue! It redeems all sorrows. It's really a lovely bit of work, and I wish we could have seen Jim Hutton give out the solution.

That's not to say that Kroeger is bad in his role of not-really-Ellery. His performance is close enough to Hutton, but it lacks the lanky charm Hutton gave the role (a charm which it's easy to overlook, but which is blindingly obvious in its absence). The same goes for John Karlen as not-Inspector-Queen. The real gem here is Robert Vaughn as not-Simon-Brimmer; he manages to be insufferable and inscrutable at the same time, and somehow (perhaps because Kroeger is so young compared to him) he manages to come across as more authoritative than Brimmer does in the regular Queen series. Now, Vaughn is one of those actors I find compulsively watchable no matter what he's in, so there may be personal bias at play here, but he was my favorite part of the whole episode.

In the end, Christie decides to keep his solution secret and allow Lady Abigail the glory of "discovering" the solution to the mystery. Now, that's an interesting decision and might lend weight to my theory that the episode was originally intended as a salute to Agatha Christie. Imagine: in Ellery Queen we would have seen Ellery, the mystery author, paying tribute to the Grand Dame of Detection by allowing her to solve--or think she solved--a particular case. It would have been a nice nod, and it's a shame they didn't produce it that way; as it is, the introduction of Lady Abigail seems a bit out-of-the-blue, and since we know she's going to live until the late eighties, there seems no reason to allow her this last moment of triumph.

This is a fun episode, and a glimpse of an episode of Ellery Queen that was, alas, never produced. It's also better than any other episode of Murder, She Wrote that I've seen; its plotting is more complex, and the dead man's clue gives it interesting levels of interpretation (the dying clue, more than any other clue, is an exercise in hermeneutics). The episode's on Netflix streaming, so be sure to check it out.

________________
*I can't know this for certain, but I suspect that Lady Abigail is an expy of Agatha Christie. Christie died early in 1976--while Ellery Queen was still running--and I don't think it's unimaginable that this script was written shortly after that.