Sherlock Holmes movies are like city buses; you may miss one, but another will be following shortly. Since making his screen debut in 1905, Holmes has been the central character in about 150 theatrical and TV movies, portrayed by some 70 different actors (including Jonathan Pryce, Rupert Everett, Patrick Macnee, Charlton Heston, Edward Woodward, Michael Caine, Ian Richardson, Peter O’Toole, Frank Langella, Christopher Plummer, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Raymond Massey, and John Barrymore). I’m a Basil Rathbone man myself, and others swear by Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes on the BBC from 1984 until shortly before he died in 1995. Holmes has outlived many actors and will probably outlive many more; according to Guinness World Records, he’s the most-portrayed fictional character in film history.
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What actor could pass him up? The strange experiments, the airy superiority, the dazzling deductions that leave everyone else struggling to catch up—Holmes is the superbrain we’d all like to be. Yet he became one of the great characters in genre fiction not because he was smart but because he was freakishly so. Cool and methodical, Holmes was the dark underbelly of Victorian rationalism, his intellect so overdeveloped that he could barely relate to anyone. “All emotions . . . were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind,” wrote his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the 1891 story “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. . . . Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.” When the Allies searched Hitler’s bunker in 1945, the two film prints they found were both Sherlock Holmes adventures.
I haven’t seen the last of these, but I’d recommend either of the first two over Guy Ritchie’s thudding blockbuster Sherlock Holmes. In one of those stunningly wrongheaded innovations that plague the movie business—colorizing Night of the Living Dead, remaking Psycho—the makers of Sherlock Holmes have decided to emphasize not the detective’s intellect but his fighting skills. The movie opens with Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) racing down a cobblestone street at night in pursuit of some miscreant. When he corners the bad guy, the action halts and, in a slow-motion flash-forward with voice-over from Downey, Holmes bookishly maps out the blows he’ll administer and the damage they’ll inflict on different parts of the body. Then the action resumes and Holmes delivers the crushing blows exactly as foretold. Holmes and Watson—kicking ass and taking names.
