Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

If you’re in possession of an Amazon Prime subscription, there’s a good chance that, in the last couple of weeks, you’ve streamed at least one episode of its new blockbuster series “Young Sherlock,” a fanciful tale that imagines what the young Sherlock Holmes and the young Moriarty got up to while they were Oxford University students, and beyond.While the publicity for the show has stressed the involvement of the British director Guy Ritchie, who famously directed two Holmes pictures with Robert Downey Jr. as the brooding sleuth and Jude Law as an unusually pugilistic Dr Watson, most of the appeal lies with its star-studded cast (including Oscar winner Colin Firth as the splendidly named Bucephalus Hodge) and its suitably tortuous plot which allows for the usual Mr. Ritchie mixture of fighting, running away from explosions in slow-motion and, when you can hear them, reasonably witty quips.Sherlock Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been dead for the best part of a century — and so, helpfully, his work is long out of copyright on both sides of the Atlantic — yet the reinventions and reimaginings of his characters just keep on coming. The Guinness Book of Records suggests that, with a staggering 25,000 different portrayals of Holmes across various forms of media, he is the most represented literary character in history, putting rivals like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster in the shade.The Ritchie films were both box office hits — a third was supposed to materialise, but never did. Yet TV cameras have also regularly been set up outside 221B Baker Street. In the past couple of decades alone, the BBC had their version, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a supercilious, very English, Holmes and Martin Freeman as an understandably frustrated Watson, just as Cumberbatch’s fellow Brit Jonny Lee Miller set another record for the actor playing Holmes the most times, when he appeared in a total of 154 episodes in the CBS series “Elementary.” Even the hugely popular Fox medical series “House,”with Hugh Laurie as a grouchy, brilliant medic was a loose adaptation of the character, if not necessarily of the books themselves.There have also been frequent comic spins on the stories. The depressingly unfunny Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly spoof “Holmes and Watson” (2018) should be avoided, despite a brilliant cast that includes Ralph Fiennes as Moriarty and Mr. Laurie as Holmes’s brother Mycroft. But far better was the Michael Caine-Ben Kingsley “Without A Clue” (1989), based around the witty idea that Mr. Kingsley’s Watson was the real genius behind the detective, and that, for reasons of propriety and to protect his medical reputation, had to hire a clueless actor, Reginald Kincaid, to play the fictitious Holmes. It is one of those rare films that succeeds as a spoof of the series but also celebrates its tropes, thanks to a fine cast that includes Paul Freeman — Belloq in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — as an appropriately dastardly Moriarty. In Caine’s carefully judged performance, Holmes ends up being a suitably avuncular and reassuring presence, despite everything around him.Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley in ‘Without a Clue.’ Wikimedia CommonsEven “Young Sherlock”is not especially original. Just over forty years ago, there was a Chris Columbus-scripted, Steven Spielberg-produced “Young Sherlock Holmes,” which (like the Mr. Ritchie series) used Oxford as a major filming location and imagined the youthful Holmes and Watson on a quest to uncover a secretive sect of pagan Egyptian worshippers. It was hardly a subtle picture, but had numerous enjoyable touches, not least Anthony Higgins’ suave mentor-turned-nemesis (predictably revealed to be Moriarty in an end credits scene) and some early use of CGI that saw the involvement of none other than John Lasseter, later of Pixar fame.Most of these films and series are highly watchable, in large part because Holmes himself is such a comfortingly familiar brand. Anyone watching his exploits will be aware of the character’s reputation, even down to catchphrases that he was reputed to utter but seldom, if ever, did, such as “The game’s afoot” or “Elementary, my dear Watson.” It is not hard to settle down to enjoy an entertaining romp along the likes of “Young Sherlock,” which makes relatively few demands on the brain cells and remains cheerfully disposable streaming material.Still, although I am no Conan Doyle purist, I cannot help but wonder if studios and streaming giants alike are — unlike the detective they depict — missing a trick. The reason for Holmes’s initial fame and reputation is that, over the course of the four novels and 56 short stories that the author wrote between 1887 and 1927, there are countless brilliant tales that have seldom, if ever, been adapted ‘straight’, in their period setting without contemporary intervention and postmodern trickery. Granted, something like “The Hound of the Baskervilles” has been filmed several times (although never particularly well), but there are stories such as “The Speckled Band” and “A Scandal in Bohemia” that would make magnificent period piece detective dramas.‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.’ Getty ImagesAdapt Conan Doyle straight, and you tap into a world of intrigue and mystique that has seldom, if ever, been exploited at a big-budget level. The alternative would be to take a lateral approach, somewhat akin to what Billy Wilder did in his magnificent and still overlooked “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (1970), and delve deeper into the psyche of this strange, tortured man and, some would argue, his equally strange and tortured sidekick, whose wartime service has left both physical and psychological scars.Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating character whose detective skills have been largely ignored by recent filmmakers in favor of bang-bang and bash-bash. Surely, it is time to slow things down a bit and let the master detective do his best? Only then can we truly savor him in his full complexity. Such a path might seem elementary, my dear studio head, but now is the time for this particular game to at be afoot, at last.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

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