SHAKEN, STIRRED AND ELEMENTARY
There is no shortage of intrigue and action from a classic Sherlock thriller and Bond adventure
Created by Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective Sherlock Holmes belongs to us all. As noted by the historian Michael Saler in As If, his account of literary imaginary worlds, the great detective was modern fiction’s “first virtual reality character” — given that part of his readership chose to believe he was an actual person. The 1916 movie Sherlock Holmes (newly restored and released by Flicker Alley in a dual Blu-ray/DVD edition) grounds that character’s virtual reality in a corporeal presence, namely that of the tall, craggy American actor William Gillette (1853-1937).
Gillette, the son of a US senator from Connecticut, was Holmes’ contemporary. It was during the hiatus between the fictional character’s apparent demise in a struggle with Professor Moriarty and his return to life by popular demand that Gillette had the opportunity to take the title role in a revision of Conan Doyle’s unproduced Holmes play.
First produced in 1899, Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes toured the English-speaking world and was repeatedly revived. Although he played Holmes as an American, Gillette was totally identified with his part. Only the illustrator Sidney Paget did more to create Holmes’ distinctive accessories, the deerstalker, the cape coat and the curved pipe. Gillette was even credited with improving the detective’s demeanour: An anonymous New York Times theatre critic noted in 1915 that “the skilful, gracious, gentle, winning Mr Gillette has added a charm that was beyond the author’s somewhat limited power to bestow”.
In 1916, Gillette played Holmes in a feature-length movie produced by the Essanay Co in Chicago. The film was long assumed to be lost, but, because it had been released in France in 1919 as a four-part serial, a nearly intact version, mislabelled for decades, was discovered in the French Cinémathèque in 2014. Perhaps no film could live up to the drama of this backstory, but the impeccable restoration — the sole record of Gillette’s characterisation — comes close.
Hewing closely to the play, Sherlock Holmes draws on several stories, mainly A Scandal in Bohemia. Dr Watson is minimised, but Holmes enjoys a romance with the Irene Adler figure, Alice Faulkner (a 17-year-old Marjorie Kay, later a World War I poster girl for the Red Cross). Holmes has been hired to recover some incriminating letters written to Alice’s late sister. A criminal couple also covet them; to further their cause, they recruit Holmes’ arch-enemy, Moriarty (Ernest Maupain). Drawing-room intrigue gives way to more gangsterly stuff, but Holmes is regularly shown in his study, hoisting a test tube.
Despite a few bleak Chicago locations, Sherlock Holmes is unavoidably theatrical. Still, the stage director Arthur Berthelet, making his first feature, keeps the acting restrained and the action fluid. No threat to DW Griffith, Berthelet nevertheless demonstrates better film chops than, for example, Frank Powell, who directed Theda Bara in the star-making sensation of 1915, A Fool There Was.
Sherlock Holmes was likely a good investment for Essanay, then absorbing the loss of its greatest attraction, Charlie Chaplin, to greener pastures. It’s a historical footnote that the teenage Chaplin once played opposite Gillette in a London revival of Sherlock Holmes. In another coincidence, Flicker Alley has recently released a boxed set, with Blu-ray and DVD, of the two-reel comedies Chaplin made for Essanay in 1915.
It was with these 15 remastered films that Chaplin conquered the world. Work is still notable in its anarchic assault on middle-class propriety, and The Bank is the movie in which Chaplin perfected his persona. If, as Saler writes, Holmes was “one of the first characters to become ubiquitous through the new mass media”, another, no less universal, was Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
‘THUNDERBALL’
Although not quite Holmes or Chaplin, James Bond is one more seemingly indestructible mass-media titan.
Thunderball (1965), based on Ian Fleming’s eighth Bond novel, starring Sean Connery (and reissued by 20th Century Fox in a 50th anniversary Steelbook Blu-ray), was the fourth Bond movie and, adjusted for inflation, most likely the series’ greatest international success. Released for Christmas, it marked the apex of Bondmania, with Agent 007’s license to kill more than equalled by United Artists’ license to license 007 paraphernalia.
Publicity promised “the Biggest Bond of All!” Directed, like Dr No and From Russia With Love, by Terence Young, Thunderball was the most capacious Bond adventure to date; it was filmed in Panavision, ran more than two hours and was markedly less taut than its predecessors. Insouciance rules: From 007’s opening-scene jet-pack escape to a late exercise in colour-coordinated underwater hand-to-hand combat, the movie ambles from impromptu boudoir to exotic battlefield against a backbeat of world-historical crisis as two Nato nuclear weapons are hijacked by the terrorist cabal Spectre.
With the nukes stashed in Spectre’s Caribbean retreat, Thunderball wends its way to the Bahamas. Nassau (where the Beatles had just completed shooting scenes for Help!) is conceived as a giant Club Med. The hairychested Connery spends half of his time in cabana wear or skin-diving gear. The villain (Adolfo Celi) keeps a swimming pool stocked with hungry predators, contributing to the sense that Thunderball may have been the most shark-obsessed blockbuster before Jaws.
The real shark, of course, is 007, a sleek, highly functional and remorseless killer, who was often seen as the embodiment of Cold War moral relativism. The international tensions were such that by 1965 Thunderball was taken as a comedy. ( The Times critic Bosley Crowther compared it to Mack Sennett slapstick.)
Bond circa 1965 was also — as argued by Alexis Albion in the essay Wanting to Be James Bond (part of the collection Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007) — an ego-ideal for both men and women throughout the Western world and thus something of a virtual reality character as well.