Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Sherlock Holmes (Sheldon Reynolds; TV series, 1954-55)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I came home at 10 last night and we ended up watching dueling 1950’s versions of Sherlock Holmes stories. His was a 26-minute adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” filmed in Britain in 1951 as the pilot for a proposed Holmes TV series that was never made. Retitled “The Man Who Disappeared” for TV, the show was an estimable try even though the uncredited screenwriter made some small but crucial alterations in the story line that actually weakened it. In the original, Neville St. Clair (played in the film by Hector Ross) turns out to have been an aspiring journalist who was assigned by his editor to write an article about London beggars. To learn about them he decided to become a beggar himself, adopting a disguise that made him look suitably pathetic and pitiable so people would give him money — and in fact so many people gave him money that he realized he could make more money as a beggar than as a reporter, so he quit his job at the paper, rented a room above an opium den (making its proprietor his confidante), went out to work every weekday and changed into the disguise that would allow him to collect from passers-by big-time. He kept this up so long that he was even able to marry, telling his fiancée that he had a job as a stockbroker in The City (London’s financial district) and somehow convincing her that she should never inquire any more than that about where he worked or how he made his living. The film, directed by Richard M. Grey, follows the story fairly closely for the first half but changes St. Clair’s motivation for begging — in this version he sells matchboxes and he’s been blackmailed by the opium-den proprietor into using this business as a cover for drug dealing (the drugs are concealed inside the matchboxes) — and ends in a big fight scene quite different from the quieter and more effective conclusion of the story. The show is surprisingly well cast: Holmes is played by John Longden, and though he was a bit long in the tooth for the part (this was 22 years after he made the only film on his résumé anyone is likely to have seen today, as the detective in Hitchcock’s Blackmail) he’s effective in this virtually impossible role. His Watson is Campbell Singer, a bit overbearing but at least not Nigel Bruce-level stupid, thank goodness, and the rest of the cast and Grey’s direction are effective within the limits of the script.

Afterwards I trotted out mine, an archive.org download of episode 6 in the much more famous 1954 Holmes series featuring Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford (the “H.” stands for “Howard,” in case you were wondering — which is probably why they went with just the initial: a TV series cast list in which the second-billed actor had the same first name as the first-billed actor’s last name might have got confusing) as Watson. The episode we were watching was number six out of 39 (the show was apparently a success but lasted only one season) and was called “The Case of the Shy Ballerina.” It suffered from the fact that, like all the other episodes in this series, it did not take its storyline from one of the original Conan Doyle Holmes tales. Instead it told a seriocomic story of Watson and another man accidentally leaving their club with each other’s hats and coats, and when Watson traces the man whose coat he has on instead of his own he goes out to his home to retrieve it — only to find that the man, an aspiring ballet composer, is dead. Holmes and Watson take the case on behalf of the widow, Elaine Chelton (Natalie Schaefer, who later played the wife of Jim Backus’s millionaire character on Gilligan’s Island), who accuses her husband of having had an affair with ballerina Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), whom he met in St. Petersburg and took up with again when the Royal Ballet of Russia appeared in London as part of a tour. It turns out that the real adulterer in the Chelton marriage was the Mrs., and her paramour was the ballet’s director, Serge Smernoff (Eugene Deckers, outfitted with one of the most ridiculous arrangements of false facial hair an actor has ever been cursed with having to wear) — and she killed her husband to eliminate him and clear the way between her and Smernoff. Oddly, I didn’t find this one as well cast as the failed pilot with John Longden: Ronald Howard is a good Holmes but he’s a bit too overbearing and nasty to be a great one, and H. Marion Crawford is more or less just there as Watson, with Archie Duncan as a sleazier and nastier Inspector Lestrade than usual, Still, both shows were fun to watch, indications of how well half-hour crime dramas could work with strong enough plots and actors to pull them off. — 6/18/10

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Charles and I broke open the box from Mill Creek Entertainment of the complete Sherlock Holmes series from 1954-55 (it only ran one year and virtually all the stories were originals by the series producer, Sheldon Reynolds, rather than drawn from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originals) and watched the first two episodes, “The Case of the Cunningham Heritage” and “The Case of Lady Beryl.” Ironically, both were about women who were framed to take the fall for murders actually committed by men. In “The Cunningham Heritage” it’s Mrs. Cunningham (Meg Lemonnier) who’s framed for the murder of her boyfriend, a rich man who secretly married her just one week before — only the real killer is the murdered man’s brother and, after blackmailing his brother over the marriage, he killed him when he refused to pay anymore. In “The Case of Lady Beryl” it’s Lady Nina Beryl (that’s right, Beryl is the family’s last name, though I couldn’t help but joke that writer Reynolds should have named her Beryl Beryl — and indeed one of the most fascinating characters in the Holmes canon, Mrs. Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles, is named Beryl), played (in a nicely etched performance that showed her fall from grace in mainstream movies hadn’t eroded her acting chops) by Paulette Goddard, who’s accused of committing a murder that actually was done by her servant Ross (Duncan Elliott). The series regulars were Leslie Howard’s son Ronald as Holmes (though he’s not at the Basil Rathbone/Robert Stephens/Jeremy Brett level he’s quite a good Holmes), H. (short for Howard) Marion Crawford as Watson (a bit too fussbudgety and Nigel Bruce-ish for my taste) and Archie Duncan (whom I remember as a florid character actor in quite a few British films around this time) as Lestrade — whose name is pronounced “Les-TRADE” and not “Les-TRAAD” as it was in the Rathbone-Bruce films. The first episode, “The Cunningham Heritage,” actually contains an account of Holmes’ and Watson’s first meeting quite close to the one Conan Doyle gave in A Study in Scarlet (though with Mormonism in the news these days and a Gay ex-Mormon on the cover of the new Zenger’s I would have much rather seen the rest of the story Conan Doyle wrote than the rather wimpy, at least by comparison, one Sheldon Reynolds came up with) — one wonders if producer Reynolds’ deal with the Conan Doyle estate included a proviso that though he could write original stories he had to keep some elements of the canon in his scripts, the way the writers of the Rathbone-Bruce films were obliged to do (much to the benefit of the series as a whole, actually) — and one thing I give Reynolds points for was shooting the series in 1890’s period instead of updating it as most previous Holmes adaptations had done. Indeed, Reynolds’ director, Jack Gage, shot quite creatively, making expert use of overhead crane shots at a time when U.S. TV shows (even ones made on film rather than broadcast live) were pretty plainly directed and photographed. The series also benefits from the relative brevity of the half-hour format — all too many modern-day policiers on TV seem padded to fill a full hour’s running time now that the half-hour time slot is used only for comedies — and nicely incisive performances by Howard and Crawford (Duncan gets way too overbearing) and some quite good supporting actors — most of the cast was British, though according to imdb.com the series was actually filmed in France (well, it wasn’t that far for them to get to work), and overall the shows are good entertainment even though they don’t sound quite the depths of the best Holmes features (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Rathbone and the last three-fourths of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with Stephens). — 4/26/12

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I ran the third episode in the sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as the great detective and H. Marion Crawford as Dr. Watson. This episode was called “The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun” and was actually a fairly close adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Valley of Fear — the original motive for the crime was changed from Conan Doyle’s elaborate one about labor unrest in America (the supposed victim was a person who had moved from the U.S. to Britain and set himself up in a castle to avoid vengeance from the former members of the “Scowrers,” a militant miners’ organization based on the real-life Molly Maguires which he had infiltrated and busted as a Pinkerton working for the mine owners) to a simpler quarrel over a mining claim, but the other basics were there: the supposedly impregnable Birlstone Castle with its 40-foot moat (which was supposed to make it impassable when the drawbridge was up — an intriguing variant on the locked-room mystery) and the payoff that the supposed “murder victim” wasn’t in fact murdered at all: he turns up alive towards the end, hiding in a sealed room in the castle, while the corpse was another person altogether and the murder weapon, a double-barreled shotgun, blew the true victim’s face to smithereens so no positive identification was possible. (An early scene establishes that Holmes is interested in furthering the science of fingerprint identification and is getting pooh-poohed by the authorities.) This time the blundering representative of law enforcement is not Inspector Lestrade but someone named McLeod (Russell Waters), but otherwise it’s the usual mix, though this time around Sheldon Reynolds directed as well as producing and writing the script, and Reynolds seemed to revel in the more campy aspects of the Holmes character, especially his (supposed) preoccupation with fishing (a hobby he knows nothing about — how refreshing to see Sherlock Holmes trying to deal with a subject he truly knows nothing about — though his fishing gear comes in handy when he has to fish out documents that were thrown into the moat and weighted down with one of a pair of dumbbells and which are key to his unraveling the case). This was a nicely done episode of what was on the whole a nicely done series, and it’s a surprise it only lasted one year, especially with Ronald Howard quite good as Holmes even though not quite at Basil Rathbone’s level (but then to me, to paraphrase Conan Doyle himself, Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes. — 4/29/12

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The last two nights Charles and I have watched episodes from the boxed set of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series in sequence. Episode four was called “The Case of the Texas Cowgirl” and showed how the series’ makers, producer Sheldon Reynolds, director Steve Previn and writer Charles and Joseph Early, were really going for camp. Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son, who worked both in the U.S. and Britain but did mostly television and B-movies and never came anywhere near his father’s level of stardom) is a properly authoritative Sherlock Holmes, very much in the Basil Rathbone manner, and H. Marion Crawford as Watson isn’t as much of a doofus as Nigel Bruce but is similarly cast in the mold of a comic-relief sidekick. One of the interesting aspects of this series is that producer Reynolds seemed to be particularly interested in stories in which a woman is framed on a murder charge by a man, and Holmes (of course) sorts out the truth and exonerates her. In this case the woman is Minnie O’Malley, played by Lucille Vines (an actress who’s so obscure her imdb.com page doesn’t even specify whether she was American or British, though by the sound of her voice I’m inclined to think she was a Brit doing her best stab at an American accent) in a charmingly campy way owing a lot to the obvious prototypes for the Wild West woman she’s supposed to be playing (like Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun and Doris Day in Calamity Jane) but still getting all she can out of her character, a stunt tomahawk thrower in “Bison Jack’s Wild West Show” (Bison Jack — no points for guessing what real-life character he’s based on — appears briefly in the latter part of the show and is played by Bob Cunningham) who’s framed for murder when a man she’s never seen before is tomahawked to death in her hotel room. Her main concern is that she’s met and fallen in love with a young man from the British nobility and she’s worried that if she’s publicly accused of murder, that’s going to blow her chances of marrying into the peerage. The show features a marvelous scene in which Dr. Watson is lassoed and forced into the covered wagon Minnie uses for transportation, even on the London streets, and it also has a nice ending in which Watson, who’s caught on to the art of lasso-throwing surprisingly quickly, lassoes the villain at the end.

Last night’s was episode five, “The Case of the Belligerent Ghost,” an intriguing little tale (this time written by Charles Early solo) in which Dr. Watson is accosted by a man he’s already seen die, and while I thought for a while it might be the brother of the dead man (à la the Conan Doyle story “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk,” in which one brother impersonated another to make it seem as if the same person was in two different places at the same time) it turned out that the plot involved a scheme to steal a priceless (and fictitious) painting called “Moonlight Madonna” by Leonardo da Vinci by substituting a forgery, and the first appearance of Watson’s mysterious “ghost” was the actual thief, Van Bentham (Lou Van Berg), curator of the museum at which the “Moonlight Madonna” was being exhibited, who hatched a plan to steal it by hiring a former counterfeiter (the person Watson actually pronounced dead) to paint a copy, following which the evil curator knocked off his confederate, did the switch himself, hid the painting in his home behind another in the same frame, only Sherlock Holmes figured it all out. Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode as well as producing the entire show, and he came up with one inventive shot — a corpse’s-eye view as Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) — and the script staged the action so that once again Watson had the satisfaction of actually vanquishing the villain (by literally pulling a run out from under him as he held a gun on Holmes, thereby getting the gun to fly out of his hands and into Watson’s). This Sherlock Holmes series didn’t have that much to do with the letter of the Conan Doyle canon (aside from episode three, “The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun,” which was a fairly close adaptation of The Valley of Fear), but aside from the overlay of campiness (reflected here mostly in yet another proletarienne, Maggie Blake, the dead man’s landlady, played by Gertrude Flynn) it seemed reasonably faithful to the spirit, and though not in Rathbone’s league (who was?), Ronald Howard was a quite credible and authoritative Holmes and it’s a mystery why he didn’t become at least as important a star as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. or Jane Fonda. — 5/4/12

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I ran the next two episodes in sequence of the Sherlock Holmes TV series from 1954-55 with Ronald Howard as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson. One was “The Case of the Shy Ballerina,” a neat little story in which a British diplomat named John Chelton is murdered — and Holmes and Watson get involved before he’s killed, when Chelton’s and Watson’s overcoats are mixed up at their club (they’re visually the same but of different sizes), and when Watson’s hat is found at Chelton’s murder scene (Chelton visited Baker Street and he and Watson exchanged coats but then Chelton mistakenly left with Watson’s derby hat, once again identical in appearance to Chelton’s own except for being larger) he’s briefly suspected of the murder. Sheldon Reynolds directed as well as produced but Charles Early wrote the script, in which it turns out that Chelton let slip some British government secrets to Olga Yaclanoff (Martine Alexis), a Russian ballerina he was dating on a posting to St. Petersburg (if she was a Russian wouldn’t she have used the female form of the last name, “Yaclanova”?), and for this he was being blackmailed — only it turns out towards the end that the supposed “affair” between John and Olga was only a cover for the real intrigue, which was an affair between John’s wife Elaine (Natalie Schafer, who later played Lovey Howell, trophy wife of Jim Backus’s multimillionaire character Thurston Howell III, on Gilligan’s Island — and ironically both she and Backus made films with James Dean, though Schafer’s was only a bit part in Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which Dean only had a bit part as well, and her bit in that film was left on the cutting-room floor) and the ballet’s choreographer, Serge Smernoff (played by Eugene Deckers as the predictable crazy Russian “genius” stereotype, complete with blatantly fake handlebar moustache and beard), and it turns out Elaine Chelton murdered her husband so she could be with Serge — though he’s appalled by the idea, especially since Elaine deliberately framed Olga for the crime by committing it with a prop dagger Olga used when her character was supposed to commit suicide in one of her ballets. One of the gimmicks is that John Chelton was an amateur composer who was writing a ballet for Olga, “The Spider’s Web,” in which he wanted her to play the spider — only the work, of which we only hear the opening (a series of heavy, dissonant chords), is supposed to be terrible even though it doesn’t sound half-bad to me. For that matter, one annoyance on this TV show is Holmes’ violin playing; the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described him as quite competent on the instrument (in A Study in Scarlet Watson notes “that he could play pieces, and difficult ones,” and what got on his nerves about Holmes’ fiddling wasn’t lack of technical command but the way he would improvise aimlessly as one of his ways of ruminating over the details of a case), but Sheldon Reynolds’ Holmes is a fiddler at Jack Bennyan levels of incompetence, barely making it through a scratchy, largely out-of-tune version of Dvorák’s “Humoresque” which prompts Watson, when Holmes asks him if he likes Dvorák, to say, “Certainly. You must play him sometime.”

The other episode we watched last night was “The Case of the Winthrop Legend,” in which an old family curse — supposedly the Winthrops have regularly died young and have received a handful of silver coins when they were about to be dispatched, and a gold doubloon was found on their bodies once they finally croaked — serves as an excuse to stage a reasonably engaging old-dark-house story in which John Winthrop (Peter Copley) decides to defy the curse by reopening the old Winthrop Manor, which has been closed for the last 30 years since his father died, supposedly from a fall downstairs but with the dreaded gold doubloon on his person. Holmes’ client is John’s brother Harvey (Ivan Desny) — we’re told he’s older than John but he looks considerably younger — who’s worried that if John dies early he will be suspected because John inherited the entire family fortune but the will specifies that it will pass to Harvey on John’s death. There’s also John’s blind wife Alice (a nicely chilling performance by Meg Lemonnier) and Harvey’s fiancée Peg Hall (identified in the imdb.com credit listing merely as “Karen”), who turns out to be the killer of John Winthrop once he exits permanently. There’s nothing particularly new about this story and it’s not all that exciting, but it’s engaging and writers Reynolds and Harold Jack Bloom and director Jack Gage expertly create a sinister neo-Gothic atmosphere that makes it a winner. — 5/7/12

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The Sherlock Holmes episode, the eighth of 39 in this very interesting if somewhat cheap-looking series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as a pretty campy, Nigel Bruce-esque Watson, was written by Lou Morheim and directed by the series’ producer, Sheldon Reynolds, and it opens with a quite atmospherically directed scene in which sailor Jocko Faraday (Gregoire Aslan) is intimidated when the foot of a dead chicken is hung over his table at a cheap dive where he’s been drinking; he’s lured outside and is stabbed to death by a man wielding a sword cane. After that the show becomes a bit dull as it spends 10 minutes giving us the exposition — Holmes has traced another person murdered similarly, also with a chicken’s foot given to him as a warning first, and the clue leads him to the island of Trinidad (where giving a chicken’s foot to the man you’re about to kill is a native superstition) and to Dr. Jonas, who’s just received the obligatory chicken foot and once served as a ship’s doctor — only just after Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard (Archie Duncan) leave his office, a mysterious apparition wearing black clothes, a jet-black wig and dark glasses to make him look blind (though since the episode is called “Blind Man’s Bluff” we can easily guess he isn’t blind even before the script tells us that) who’s been sitting in the doctor’s waiting room enters Dr. Jonas’s office and gives him the sword-cane treatment. Holmes traces all the victims to a ship that sailed from Trinidad to England five years earlier and deduces that the next victim will be the ship’s captain, Pitt, who’s now a supervisor at Scotland Yard — only Holmes arrives at Pitt’s home too late to save him, though he does encounter the villain, Vickers (a nicely honed performance by Eugene Deckers), and finds out his motive: he was in love with a Trinidadian native and had married her, fathered a child with her, and paid 100 pounds to Captain Pitt — a notorious smuggler of undocumented immigrants — to bring his wife and child to Britain, only just out of Southampton the ship was apprehended by customs vessels and, rather than get caught with the merchandise, Pitt had the immigrants tied to chains and weighted down with anchors so he could drown them all before he was caught with them. Holmes hears Vickers out and responds as Vickers promises he’s going to track down every other crew member of that ship and kill them as well, and Holmes asks what end of justice all that bloodshed will serve. “Before you go out that door, look in the mirror,” Holmes tells Vickers — and in the mirror the criminal sees Watson, Lestrade and police sergeant Wilkins (Richard K.Larke), and the two official officers are just waiting to disarm and arrest him. This is the odd sort of mystery that gains when you already know who the bad guy is and aren’t trying to second-guess the author, but within that limit it’s a fine film and Deckers’ performance really makes it. — 6/3/12

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The show was the next in sequence from the Sherlock Holmes boxed set containing all 39 episodes from the short-lived TV series, shot in France but with British actors in the leads (and in English!), made by producer Sheldon Reynolds in 1954-55 with Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son, as Holmes and H. (short for Howard) Marion Crawford as Watson. The show was called “The Case of Harry Crocker,” and Harry Crocker turned out to be a Houdini-like escape artist who had twice escaped from police custody after he was arrested following the murder of a chorus girl he was attempting to pick up. Eugene Deckers (whose last name sounds Belgian), who had been in two previous episodes of the series — as the stereotypically crazy Russian choreographer in “The Case of the Shy Ballerina” and in a superb performance as the villain in “The Case of Blind Man’s Bluff” — played Harry Crocker, and played him as so obnoxious you wanted to strangle him whether he was guilty of the chorus girl’s murder or not. Directed as well as produced by Reynolds, “Harry Crocker” was written by Harold Jack Bloom and went a lot more towards the campy direction than most of these shows — down to Holmes showing Crocker the key to a trunk escape that his father had performed perfectly but which had always baffled Crocker fils — with too few suspects to make for much of a mystery. The culprit turned out to be Charlie Willis (Harris Towb), who had met the victim in Manchester, been attracted to her, got her a job with the show in hopes of getting together with her and then got jealous when she started dating Crocker instead. Also, this show seemed to come to an abrupt ending just before the final credits, suggesting the print available to Mill Creek Entertainment when they prepared this box had some missing footage at the end. — 6/8/12

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Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV box — and it turned out to be the best show in the season we’ve seen so far. It was called “The Mother Hubbard Case” and started with a sequence in which a young man is lured by a little girl into giving her a ride home, whereupon he disappears. Sherlock Holmes is hired by the young man’s fiancée, Margaret Martini (Delphine Seyrig, an actress who went on to a major career in France and worked on such prestigious films as Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) — a last name which inspired Charles and I to add the names of cocktails to the other characters’ names: “Sherlock Holmes Manhattan,” “Dr. Watson Gimlet,” “Inspector Lestrade Sloe Gin Fizz” — and while at 221B Baker Street she’s accompanied by her father, George Martini (Jean Ozenne — remember that though set in 1890’s Britain this show was actually shot in France and that’s why the proliferation of French actors in the supporting roles), who makes it clear that he never liked his daughter’s boyfriend. Holmes realizes that his disappearance is identical to those of seven other men in the previous two weeks, and he decides to go after the killer himself, trying to deduce where the killer will strike her grandmother to use the new “address” to which she’s supposed to lure the next victim — they use a different house each time and pick out residences whose owners are away for the summer (including one who’s interviewed at Brighton next and where the child (who, it develops, is an innocent victim and doesn’t know what’s going on) will pick up the next would-be victim. He meets the child and takes her home after overhearing her being coached by because the last victim’s body was found at his house — a ghastly actor who wears a handlebar moustache and a swimsuit of the period and whose accent is neither fish nor fowl, credible as neither British nor French) — and in a plot twist screenwriter Lou Morheim pretty obviously borrowed from the play Arsenic and Old Lace the grandmother, Mrs. Enid (Amy Dalby) — and yes, it was a bit chilling that the villainess’s last name was the same as my mother’s first name! — has been luring the young men to her apartment out of sheer loneliness and offing them, not with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, but with divinity fudge laced with strychnine. “The Mother Hubbard Case” has a truly interesting bad girl — there are enough hints of the darkness that motivates her to give the story power without overexplaining her psychopathology as would be the case in a modern crime story that would have to have a full hour (less commercials) of running time to fill instead of the half-hour here (though shows have so much more commercial time now that the difference is 25 versus 43 minutes) — and also is generally refreshingly free of the camp interludes that marred this series. The campiest moment of the show is also, for a change, genuinely funny: Watson is making Holmes tea but can’t find the Chinese tea he wants to use; Holmes hands him a large bottle labeled “SNAKE POISON” and assures Watson it actually contains tea — Holmes broke the tea container and happened to have an empty jar of snake poison handy in which to put the tea — but Watson has his doubts, and the looks on H. Marion Crawford’s face as he puts the teacup to his lips and samples a brew that just might be lethal are priceless. — 6/13/12

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I ran the next episode in sequence from the boxed set of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson. This one was called “The Red-Headed League” and, as the title suggests, it drew its plot not from the head of producer Sheldon Reynolds or someone on his writing staff, but from the actual Holmes canon as created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — and what’s more, Lou Morheim’s script was a quite close adaptation of the original story even though I’d always thought of the red-headed pawnbroker James Wilson (whose actual business was not made clear in the TV script) as shorter and rangier than Alexander Gauge, who played him. The plot, as Holmes buffs will remember, deals with James Wilson being hired by “The Red-Headed League,” ostensibly an organization offering stipends to red-headed men for “nominal duties” — in Wilson’s case, copying the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in longhand. For this Wilson was paid four pounds per week until one Saturday, when he showed up at the League’s office and saw a sign stating that “The Red-Headed League is Dissolved.” What was really going on was that Wilson’s assistant, Vincent Spaulding (Eugene Deckers), and the ostensible office manager of the League, Duncan Ross (Colin Drake), cooked up this plot to get Wilson out of his office, which happened to be located next to a major bank that was getting in a gold shipment that they planned to rob by tunneling under the bank from the basement of Wilson’s pawnshop. The script omitted Spaulding’s real identity, John Gray, and that his ears were pierced (“He said a gypsy did that to him when he was a boy,” Wilson told Holmes in the story), and that his cover story for spending so much time in the basement was that he was an amateur photographer and had set up his darkroom there, but aside from that it told the same story Conan Doyle had and told it effectively, though with a few decorations — at the beginning Holmes is firing bullets from a revolver into a straw bale in his living room, which makes Watson and Wilson scared (Wilson actually faints outside Holmes’ door) but Holmes is clearly attempting to invent the ballistic test. — 6/28/12

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I showed the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV show, produced in France (but in English) by Sheldon Reynolds for American TV with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson ­— who, I was gratified to note, delivered an opening narration in which he pronounced the “t” in “often.” It was called “The Case of the Shoeless Engineer” — and was based on an actual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, though Conan Doyle’s original was called “The Engineer’s Thumb” and had a macabre twist that was bowdlerized in this version. It deals with a young man named Victor Haterley (David Oxley) who’s set up in business for himself as a consulting hydraulic engineer and is making such a wretched deal of it financially one wonders if Conan Doyle was drawing on his own impoverished past as a young eye doctor in Edinburgh; he made so little money that one year he declared just 146 pounds as his annual income on his tax form, and when the examiner at the Bureau of Inland Revenue, thinking Conan Doyle was cheating, wrote, “Very unsatisfactory” on his tax return and sent it back, Conan Doyle resubmitted it after adding the words, “I entirely agree.” He sees a way out of his difficulties when a mysterious man named Col. Lysander Stark (Richard Warner) stops by his office one evening and offers to hire him then and there, paying 50 pounds to repair a hydraulic press on his property in the country. Col. Stark gives him a cock-and-bull story about wanting him to compress the fuller’s earth he’s mining on his land so his neighbor, whose property he covets, won’t realize they’re both sitting on deposits of a valuable mineral. But Stark’s mute housekeeper, Ruth Connors (June Shelley), tries to warn Haterley, both with gestures and by slipping him a note — although she’s caught doing the latter by Stark’s sinister assistant, Bruno Carreau (Georges Hubert), and is beaten. Holmes stumbles on all this when he and Watson are taking a vacation in the country and they encounter Haterley and Ruth fleeing from the Stark manse — he unconscious but clearly weakened and she conscious but in shock. Eventually he comes to, thanks to some restorative brandy Watson feeds him (Charles joked that though Watson is supposed to be a doctor, we never see him prescribing any normal medications — just alcoholic potables), and tells Holmes his strange story — about how he finally repaired Stark’s hydraulic press and then was locked inside it, Stark apparently having made it a habit of eliminating anyone who came to fix his machine by putting them in it and having their bodies compressed. Holmes deduces that the real reason Stark and Carreau wanted a hydraulic press was to manufacture counterfeit coins, and eventually he summons Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) and Stark is caught in his own trap while Carreau is arrested. In the original story Haterley escaped the press when Ruth set him free, but not in time to keep one of his thumbs from getting caught in the press and severed; in this version, perhaps bowing to TV codes of conduct, he merely loses a shoe (but not his foot) in the device and Holmes recovers it and presents it to him after the crime is solved. Despite the bowdlerization, it’s still a pretty macabre tale and a workable story, and Ruth Connors’ regaining her ability to speak for once doesn’t seem like a cheap device but a legitimate response to her being freed of the terrors of living with two unscrupulous baddies who so casually knock off the tradesmen. I’m not sure why the Sherlock Holmes series producer, Sheldon Reynolds, ran two canonical stories in a row after all the previous episodes had been newly concocted tales from himself or his writers — but just as the Perry Mason series episodes that used Erle Stanley Gardner’s actual plots were consistently stronger than the ones merely based on his characters, the Sherlock Holmes episodes that drew on the canon were better than the ones that didn’t (and this had held true for the earlier radio shows, including the series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, as well). — 7/6/12

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I screened Charles the next episode in sequence from the Sherlock Holmes boxed set — the episodes from the 1954-55 TV series produced by Sheldon Reynolds, shot in France and with Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son, as a surprisingly effective Holmes (though H. Marion Crawford’s Watson was too campy, too Nigel Bruce-ish, for my taste). The show was called “The Case of the French Interpreter,” and was based directly on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — only for some reason screenwriter Lou Morheim changed the title from “The Greek Interpreter” and adjusted the character names appropriately. He also wrote Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft out of the story — it still begins in the Diogenes Club, the notorious establishment whose members were strictly forbidden to say word one to each other except in the Strangers’ Room, but there’s a long comic scene as Watson bursts in and breaks the no-talking rule right and left to get Holmes’ attention — but the tale is still pretty much the same as what Conan Doyle wrote: interpreter Claude Dubec (Lou Van Berd) — he was called Melas in the story — shows up at 221 B Baker Street with a wild tale of being accosted by a man named Lattimer and told that his services as an interpreter would be needed. He’s taken to the house where he is to do the work in a cab with its shades kept carefully closed, and Lattimer tells him that he doesn’t want him to know the location — and even threatens him with a gun. When he gets there he sees a man tied up and being held against his will and starved, and Lattimer and his associate Judd (a marvelously snickering performance by Charles Brodie) explain that he is to tell the man they’ve got tied up that he is to sign a paper and if he doesn’t do it he will be tortured and ultimately killed. Dubec sneaks questions of his own into the conversation to find out who the mystery man is and why the baddies are holding him and forcing him to sign — a plot device that, as Charles pointed out, was far more believable in the story, not only because Greek is a more unusual language than French to a British resident but because in the story the interpreter and the victim are writing out the conversation, and since Greek is written in a non-Roman alphabet the interpreter could play his dangerous game with much less fear of discovery than he could asking out loud a French person’s name and risking that the baddies would recognize its sound immediately. As in the original story, the interpretation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the victim’s sister, who appears to have been seduced by Lattimer but still harbors family feelings for his brother and recognizes his voice instantly when he calls out in pain from the torture. The interpreter is paid off and told not to mention what happened to anyone — and Lattimer catches him outside Holmes’ office and kidnaps him, but not before Holmes has interviewed the interpreter and pieced together clues to the house’s location from what he heard and felt during his trip there. In the end, Holmes, Watson and Lestrade find the house in time to rescue the man and his sister from the baddies. It was a well done program, though as usual during this series I found the “comic relief” bits a bit of a trial, and despite the arbitrary changes (probably the interpreter was made French because the show was shot in France and it was presumably easier for them to find an actor who spoke English with a French than a Greek accent) it was a decent adaptation of the story and gained strength from being based on one of Conan Doyle’s original Holmes tales. — 8/5/12

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Eventually Charles and I ran the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 TV series Sherlock Holmes, made for U.S. television by British actors in France (according to its imdb.com page the shows weren’t aired in the U.K. until 2006!). The show was called “The Case of the Singing Violin” (one wonders what else a violin would do — bark?) and featured Delphine Seyrig, a French actress best known as the heroine of Alain Resnais’ deliberately obscure Last Year at Marienbad in 1962, as Betty Durham, who as the show begins is asleep in her bedroom when the ghostly image of a man playing a violin appears before her, finishes whatever it was he was playing, then approaches her and leaves her screaming. Her boyfriend then turns up in a cab in front of Sherlock Holmes’ (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson’s (H. Marion Crawford) home at 221B Baker Street, only as the cab pulls up two gunshots are heard and when Holmes and Watson go out to see what’s happened, they find the boyfriend dead. It turns out it’s all a plot by Guy Dunham (Arnold Bell), Betty’s stepfather and sole survivor of a partnership that monopolized virtually the whole British market for tea, to keep her from getting married by driving her crazy and having her committed, because the will of Betty’s real father (Guy’s late partner in the business) stipulates that the stepfather will hold the tea fortune for her in trust until she gets married, when it will go to her. Charles said he thought there was a non-canonical (i.e., not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Holmes story which contained a similar plot twist — I couldn’t think of one and he couldn’t recall enough about it to allow us to identify it, but certainly there were plenty of Holmes stories Conan Doyle did write in which the gimmick was a sinister parent, step-parent or relative anxious to keep a young woman from marrying for fear he’d lose access to her fortune if she did (including one in which the stepfather adopted a disguise and courted his stepdaughter himself, aiming to get her to promise him that if anything happened to him she would never date again). This episode was written by Kay Krausse and directed by Steve Previn, who staged an effective near-silent final climax (rare in a series that if anything tended to overuse a few musical themes until we either got totally sick of them or wanted to wave to them and say hello) that makes up for the fact that Krausse’s script revealed whodunit way too early to sustain interest — but it was still a fun show. — 9/21/12

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We watched the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes boxed set, “The Case of the Greystone Inscription,” which like “The Singing Violin” wasn’t based on an actual story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but recycled common plot elements Conan Doyle did use in the canon; in this case, the plot was a pretty obvious rehash of “The Musgrave Ritual” that employed many of the same elements. Holmes gets involved when a young woman named Millicent Channing (Martina Mayne) shows up on his doorstep with a story that her fiancé John Cartwright (Tony Wright) had stumbled on an old inscription that would mean fame for both himself and the Greystones, an eccentric old family living in a moldering castle in Scotland. By now the Greystones are down to just two people, father Thomas Greystone (Archie Duncan, a regular on this series who usually played Inspector Lestrade but this time got cast as the principal villain instead) and his son Walter (Eric Micklewood), and needless to say they’re suspicious of outsiders. It seems that a fragment of the Greystone inscription had survived on the mantel of the Greystones’ fireplace but John Cartwright had stumbled on a complete version that gave the location to a secret treasure King Richard II had buried on the Greystone grounds just before the assassins hired by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV, caught up with him. Needless to say, the Greystones aren’t happy to see Millicent Cartwright turn up on their doorstep asking about her boyfriend, and they’re even less happy when Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford) turn up and slip past Thomas Crawford, who’s posing as a mute butler (since Archie Duncan’s makeup makes him resemble Boris Karloff in his mute-butler role in The Old Dark House that’s actually not surprising; indeed, there’s a nice frisson when we realize the man is neither mute nor a servant but is the Master of the House himself). It turns out that the Greystones received John Cartwright in a similarly uninviting way but changed their minds about him in a hurry when he revealed that he was looking for a treasure on their property — whereupon they locked him up in a tower on the castle grounds and tortured him to get him to reveal the secret location of the treasure. Holmes, who also has a copy of the complete inscription, uses it to figure out the hiding place but insists that Richard’s treasure belongs to the Crown and says he won’t let the Greystones keep it for themselves — whereupon the booby-trapped secret entrance closes and Holmes, Watson and the Greystones appear trapped inside. Only the last two lines of the inscription give away the secret of how to open the door again (by tapping twice on the head of a lion statue in the room) and Our Heroes are able to overpower the Greystones, free John Cartwright, reunite the lovebirds and return the treasure to Queen Victoria, from whom Holmes gets a letter of congratulations while Watson is wearing on his watch-chain a coin he filched from the stash. (Shame on you, Watson!) While I could have done without the tacky music that accompanied the action climax (Steve Previn, the director of “The Singing Violin,” helmed again this time but did not stage the climax without music, as he had in the earlier episode), “The Greystone Inscription” was a perfectly nice bit of Holmesiana and Ronald Howard, as he showed elsewhere in the series, was one of the better Holmeses in what I like to refer to as “the long interregnum” between the Basil Rathbone series in the 1940’s and Jeremy Brett’s TV performances in the complete Conan Doyle Holmes canon for British TV in the 1970’s. — 9/23/12

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For the last two nights Charles and I had watched episodes of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series; the night before last we’d seen “The Case of the Laughing Mummy,” which had a promising title but was a disappointment — Reggie Taunton (Barry MacKay), an old medical-school friend of Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford), reports that a mummy he recently received from his uncle Joseph, an Egyptologist doing an excavation work among the surviving tombs of the Pharaonic era, has started laughing and making other odd noises. Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) makes short work of that mystery — he finds that the “mummy” noises have a perfectly normal explanation, a weather vane Reggie installed on his roof one month before (exactly when the mummy started “laughing”) — but he uncovers another one: as a house guest of Reggie, his girlfriend Rowena Featheringstone (June Crawford) and Prof. Von Gaulkens (Paul Bonifas), Joseph Taunton’s partner in Egyptology, Holmes realizes that the mummy case is properly authentic for the 14th Dynasty but the mummy itself is modern, and deduces that Von Gaulkens had killed Joseph and mummified him to get the body out of Egypt. Von Gaulkens confesses that there was a struggle between him and Joseph over the mummy case, but says Joseph died of a heart attack — and Holmes eventually realizes that the mummy case was booby-trapped with a hollow needle filled with asp venom by the ancient Egyptians who built the mummy case in the first place and therefore Von Gaulkens is innocent of murder. It’s an O.K. episode but the characters are too full of high camp — like Watson’s old buddies in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies, Reggie is played for comic relief (Charles Early wrote the screenplay and producer Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode himself) and the old-school-twit gags really get to be too much — and so does the trick ending in which the mummy starts making noise even after the weather vane has been removed.

Last night’s episode, “The Case of the Thistle Killer,” was considerably better: a macabre tale obviously inspired by the real-life Jack the Ripper, it was about a serial killer who targets young women alone at night and manages to gain their confidence to trust him before he kills them. As the movie opens we see him working on his sixth such victim — one more than the real-life Ripper (who was matched against Sherlock Holmes in the 1961 movie A Study in Terror, directed by James Hill with John Neville, later the Duke of Marlborough in the BBC series The First Churchills, as Holmes) — and we see a cleverly staged scene (by director Steve Previn, working from a script by Charles and Joseph Early) in which the mystery killer accosts a young woman, wins her confidence (she boasts that she would never talk with a stranger she’d just met on the street even as we see her doing just that), offers her caramels and then kills her by strangulation (it seemed to me that he didn’t strangle her long enough for her actually to die, but give Reynolds, Previn and the Earlys a break: it was just a half-hour show), all shown (at least until the girl falls to the ground, dead) with both characters seen just from the waist down. The reason for this becomes apparent later on — I guessed it at about the start of the second act, though the Earlys saved the big reveal until later: the killer is actually a police officer, John Phoenix (Richard Watson), who’s committing the murders to taunt Scotland Yard. Holmes deduces the motive behind the murders when he realizes that the locales of the first six murders are London neighborhoods whose names begin with P, H, O, E, N and I, respectively and even the three thistle plants the killer leaves on top of every body after he’s done are code for Scotland (the thistle is the national plant of Scotland, something Charles had known before and I hadn’t) Yard (there are three of them, and there are three feet to a yard). But he doesn’t realize the killer is a cop until the final sequence, when they send a policewoman (a “police matron,” as she’s called in the script) to act as a decoy once Holmes has deduced the name of the neighborhood beginning with “X” where the Phoenix killer will strike next. “The Thistle Killer” is a genuinely chilling, low-keyed (but a bit overly scored) vest-pocket thriller and represents the sort of villain the Holmes story needed — intelligent enough at least to have a fighting chance against Holmes’ brilliance — and marred only by some bizarrely obvious dubbing of the voice of the actor playing the superintendent of Scotland Yard (he’s credited as “William Smith” on the imdb.com page for this episode but is obviously a French actor — the Sherlock Holmes series, though made for American TV and starring British actors, was filmed in Paris and most of the supporting players were French or Belgian — and Smith may be the British actor who dubbed him, in a vocal acoustic that makes the dubbing obvious even though the lip movements match surprisingly well, probably because the French actor we see on screen was at least attempting to speak English). Even the comic-relief scene — an innocent man, Herbert Brown (Roland Bartrop), gets busted for trying to neck with his wife in Xerxes Park, the location where Holmes has deduced the Thistle Killer will strike next — is for once genuinely funny. — 9/26/12

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I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes, H. Marion Crawford as Watson and Archie Duncan as Inspector Lestrade. This one was called “The Case of the Vanishing Detective” and was one of the sillier ones so far: Watson and Lestrade become convinced something dire has happened to Holmes because he’s left the flat at 221B Baker Street for over a day and didn’t take his razor, and left his violin outside of its case on the living-room table. They trace him to an “old curiosity shop” run by an eccentric — the moment we see the proprietor we know it’s Holmes in disguise, but it takes Our Doofus Anti-Heroes about 10 minutes’ worth of running time before Holmes finally “outs” himself and says he’s after a prison escapee, serial killer John Carson (I joked, “Johnny Carson? This could have been called ‘When TV Late-Night Hosts Go Bad’”), who’s using the book section of this shop to pick up notes slipped to him by his girlfriend Helene (Judith Haviland). Needless to say, the arrival of Watson and Lestrade screws up Holmes’ plan completely, though they eventually figure out that Carson means to kill Judge Westlake (Colin Drake), who sentenced him to life imprisonment and has since retired to an inane existence doing private puppet shows with his wife (June Peterson). A messenger ostensibly from Carson arrives and Holmes — acting as stupidly as Watson and Lestrade in this episode — doesn’t recognize the supposed “messenger” as Carson the way we do immediately; instead the three more-or-less good guys leave and only midway through their ride in a horse-drawn cab does Holmes realize what’s happened and tell the cabbie to swing back to the judge’s place, where they find Mrs. Westlake locked in a closet and Holmes shoots down Carson just in the nick of time to save the judge’s life. The script by Charles and Joseph Early is one of the dumbest ever concocted for this show — the puppeteering scene seems to go on forever and, as I’ve said of some 19th century operas, it’s the kind of story that only works if you can believe that all the protagonists are behaving like total idiots: a real disappointment for a show that generally overdid the comic relief more than I would have liked (H. Marion Crawford’s Watson was definitely in the Nigel Bruce tradition, for good and ill) but mostly managed to create serious and appealingly sinister drama from the Holmes mythos. — 9/30/12

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Charles and I screened an episode of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, made in France by producer Sheldon Reynolds with Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son and a quite capable actor in his own right, as Holmes. The episode, our next in sequence as we plow through the Mill Creek Entertainment boxed set of all 39 (this is number 20 so we’ve just passed the mid-point) was called “The Case of the Careless Suffragette” and begins with suffragette Doreen Meredith (Dawn Addams, whose presence puts this whole cast one degree of separation from Charlie Chaplin — she was the leading lady in Chaplin’s last starring film, A King in New York) chaining herself to the front gate at 221B Baker Street to protest the recent defeat of a women’s suffrage bill in Parliament. Though the vote was so lopsided only one M.P. supported it, the suffragists have blamed the whole thing on a parliamentary leader named Pimpleton, who lives two blocks away from Holmes’ legendary abode, and Meredith has decided that what they need to do is a major gesture: they’ll make a bomb and blow up one of the stone lions in Trafalgar Square in order to get people to pay attention to the cause of women’s suffrage. There’s only one problem: neither Doreen nor anyone else in her suffrage group, led by Agatha Axton (Héléna Manson), actually knows how to make a bomb. So they seek out the services of stereotypical Russian anarchist Boris Turgoff (Frédéric O’Brady, whose presence puts this whole cast one degree of separation from Orson Welles — he had a small supporting role in Confidential Report, a.k.a. Mr. Arkadin), whose shaved head and gnome-like demeanor puts him midway between Erich von Stroheim and Elmer Fudd. He gives them a list of ingredients and says he’ll assemble the bomb for them once they’ve procured the supplies they need for it. This duly happens — though the chemist’s shop from which they get the materials (actually in the U.K. a “chemist,” at least as far as a retail business is concerned, usually means a pharmacist) has a rather befuddled clerk who looks over their shopping list and tells them, “You could make a bomb from all this!,” then when they’ve left furrows his brow and says (to himself, and us), “In fact, a bomb is all you could make from it!” Turgoff then presents Doreen, Agatha and Doreen’s boyfriend Henry Travers (David Gideon Thomson) with his finished bomb, disguised as a croquet ball — only Travers throws it out the window and it blows up. Turgoff then makes the suffragists a second bomb and gives it to Doreen — only Holmes informs her that it’s just a croquet ball, while the real bomb gets delivered to Pimpleton’s croquet field, where it blows up and kills him as soon as he starts to play. So the investigation becomes centered around the question: who substituted the real bomb for Pimpleton’s croquet ball, and thereby killed him, and why? Travers is briefly suspected because as a distant cousin of Pimpleton’s he would have been in line to inherit the estate — but Holmes discovers a clause in the grant of nobility to Pimpleton’s family that allows the estate and title to be inherited one time only by a woman, and it turns out Agatha Axton was the next in line and she was the one who planted the bomb and murdered Pimpleton so she could inherit. This show was by far one of the campiest in the series — though the best joke was when Doreen and a male rival are earnestly debating the cause of women’s suffrage in Hyde Park, before only one listener, who impartially applauds them both and then explains, “I don’t understand much English.” (Since the series was filmed in France and most of the supporting actors were French, that could have been true of the actor playing him as well!) Still, it was fun and a worthy piece of half-hour entertainment even though it didn’t sink its teeth into the canon as well as some of the other episodes (especially the few actually based on Conan Doyle stories) did. — 10/19/12

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After Elementary Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence from the “real” Sherlock Holmes TV show from 1954-55: “The Case of the Reluctant Carpenter,” which deals with a fire (represented by stock footage visibly taking place more recently than the 1890’s setting specified in the new footage) deliberately set by an arsonist with an incendiary bomb, who ordered four satchels and made a bomb in each one, and said he will continue setting fires until the city of London agrees to pay him 50,000 pounds to stop. It’s basically a race against time with Holmes (Ronald Howard), Watson (H. Marion Crawford), Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) and his sidekick, Sgt. Wilkins (Kenneth Richards) needing to find the final bomb (the other three have already gone off) after Bricker (Pierre Gay, an actor I remember seeing in previous episodes of this show) has explained the plot and presented the demand to them but then has got himself killed (we actually never learn by whom). The good guys eventually trace the last bomb to two carpenters working on remodeling a ramshackle structure (just who’s going to be hurt by this even if it does go off — aside from the two people there — is a mystery, especially since in their previous actions the terrorists have set out to maximize the death toll) and one of the carpenters (Roland Barthrop), the only one identified in the imdb.com cast list, is “reluctant” to tell Holmes, Watson, Lestrade and Wilkins where the bomb is. At the last minute he does, however, and Holmes is able to grab it and hurl it away from the building into an open field, where it goes off harmlessly. It’s one of the least campy episodes in this series but it’s also one of the least interesting plot-wise (Sheldon Reynolds wrote the script himself from a story by Sidney Morse, and it was directed by Steve Previn), and if the latest episode of Elementary had too many reversals (a common failing of crime shows today), this one had the opposite problem: it just plodded along towards an all too predictable resolution (though when you only have 25 minutes one thing you can’t really do is plot complexity). I think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had the right idea: a number of the original Holmes stories build up to one reversal but don’t keep throwing them at the reader, making the suspension of disbelief harder as we’re wrenched from one understanding of the events of the story to another. — 11/16/12

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I decided to bring out the boxed set of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes series starring British actors Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son — who incidentally pronounced the “t” in “often,” though Charles would probably say some B.S. like, “He only made that mistake because he was so traumatized about losing his dad in the war”) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson. I was surprised we hadn’t watched any of it since last November — we’d been concentrating on Man with a Camera instead — though we picked it up where we had left off and the episode we watched last night, “The Case of the Deadly Prophecy,” was quite good. It began with a long, almost wordless opening scene which set up the basic plot premise; at a boarding school in a small village in Belgium, an eight-year-old student named Antoine (alas, unidentified on imdb.com) walks from the school grounds at 4 a.m. to scrawl a name on the steps of the local church nearby. Then the person whose name he has written suddenly dies, apparently of natural causes. Holmes gets involved in the case when Marie Grand (Nicole Courcel), the assistant to the headmaster Carolan (Yves Brainville), wants to write him when Carolan’s name is the next to appear on the church steps. Carolan talks her out of it but then dies, and later Grand does write Holmes, who takes the boat-train across the Channel and arrives in the Belgian village to investigate. He realizes that there’s a connection between the murders and Madame Soulé (Helena Manson), who’s offering to sell well-heeled locals — including the richest man in town, Comte de Passevant (Maurice Teynac), a “philter” (a word I certainly didn’t expect to hear in a TV show written in 1955!) for 100,000 francs that will “protect” them from danger. Holmes immediately deduces that there’s a connection between Madame Soulé and the killer, and the whole thing is an extortion plot by someone with access to Antoine who can hypnotize him into going to the church and chalking the name of the latest person who’s refused Soulé’s extortion demand on the steps — but who’s the accomplice? Holmes realizes it’s the school’s doctor, Dimanche (Jacques François), because he’s there once a month to examine the students and he previously studied with Dr. Charcot at the Salpêtrière mental hospital in Parks and there learned hypnotism, which he used to hypnotize Antoine into chalking the warnings. It doesn’t sound like much in synopsis but the show was quite well done, with long silent scenes creating an effective atmosphere — even though the church looks like an exterior set in some scenes and a glass painting in others — and was one of the better episodes of this show, maybe not owing much to the letter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation but being quite faithful to its spirit. — 5/3/13

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I showed the next episode in sequence of the very interesting 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes half-hour TV series, “The Case of the Christmas Pudding,” which begins with serial killer John Norton (Eugene Deckers, a quite interesting character actor we’ve seen in several episodes of this show as well as feature films like So Long at the Fair, The Iron Petticoat and The Longest Day), a Landru-based murderer who’s offed five women — three widows and two spinsters: does he get credit for a full house for this? — for their money, being sentenced to death for his crimes, and as he’s led out of the courtroom he turns to Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and threatens to kill him for revenge. Norton has a surprisingly faithful wife named Bess (June Rodney) who takes him a Christmas pudding and gives it to him in prison. The warden (Richard Watson) inspects the package personally and doesn’t find anything in it that would help John Norton escape — but Norton breaks out anyway, sawing through the bars of his cell and bending them out. Then he hunts down Holmes and seemingly shoots him inside the Baker Street apartment — only Holmes, in a gimmick writers George and Gertrude Fass borrowed from the real Holmes (the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories “The Empty House” and “The Mazarin Stone”), has substituted a wax statue of himself and it’s the statue, not the real Holmes, that Norton shoots up (a bit of a surprise since in his courtroom revenge speech he had specifically promised to kill Holmes by strangling, not shooting). This was directed by Steve Previn and it was one of their better episodes — fast-moving, atmospheric, relatively believable — even though the Fasses’ script was oddly structured in that it’s not until after Norton is recaptured that we get an explanation for how he broke out of jail in the first place (through diamond dust impregnated in the ribbon in  which his Christmas-pudding package was wrapped) and overall, instead of a whodunit, it was really a how’s-he-gonna-do-it. — 5/28/13

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Charles and I watched the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, made in France even though the stars, Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson, were British — and the main challenge of the casting director seems to have been to find French actors who could speak English well enough to be comprehensible by TV audiences in Britain and the U.S. This episode was called “The Night Train Riddle” and while it wasn’t as good as its immediate predecessor, “The Case of the Christmas Pudding” (at least because “Christmas Pudding” had had a genuinely interesting and powerful villain), it was fun and refreshingly free of the campy treatment of Dr. Watson that had afflicted earlier shows in this series (as it did with Nigel Bruce’s portrayal in the Basil Rathbone film series). Lydia Kendall (Roberta Haynes) is governess to young Paul Winmaster (James Doran), and she’s taking him to his first day away at boarding school when he suddenly literally disappears from the train. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson happen to be on the train because Watson has got the bright idea that Holmes needs a vacation, and what on earth could happen to him on a train going to Scotland? Of course Lydia seeks him out and asks him to help find the boy, and Holmes does so. Lydia narrates the obligatory flashback (virtually all the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes stories began with Holmes’ client narrating the backstory as he or she explained what they wanted Holmes to do), through which we learn that Paul is the son of self-made Canadian lumber tycoon Lance Winmaster (Richard Watson), and Paul has an independent streak that Lance used to indulge until he suddenly did an about-face and started behaving like a martinet towards his son, ordering him not only to go to school (though Lance himself made it without a formal education) but to abandon his pet white mice (a pity it didn’t occur to Paul to tell his dad he would need them for his school’s science classes!). While his dad has suddenly become beastly towards him, Paul has been spending a lot of time at the local circus, where he’s been taken by his uncle Cecil (Duncan Elliott). He’s become friends with Coco the Clown (Billy Beck, who according to the imdb.com page on this episode doubles as the station manager), and the two have hatched a plan for Paul to run away: at a point in the railroad where the train has to slow down to five miles an hour to negotiate a bend and a local train on a parallel track just happens to be passing the same way at the same time, Coco and Paul escaped from one to the other and Paul fulfilled his ambition of running away to join the circus (effectively represented by carefully edited stock footage with appropriate insert shots). Only Holmes soon realizes that Paul’s life is in danger — though the script (uncredited on imdb.com but probably the work of Steve Previn, who also directed) doesn’t make it all that clear how he figured it out — and eventually we learn that Paul was the victim of his uncle Cecil, who will inherit the entire Winmaster fortune if he can get his brother’s inconvenient kid out of the way (we never hear of Paul’s mother and we’re no doubt supposed to believe she’s dead), and who hired Coco to befriend Paul and lure him away to the circus, then bump him off and make it look like an accident. Needless to say, Holmes arrives just in the nick of time to keep Coco from pushing Paul into the ring where he would have been trampled by the elephants — or, if that failed, eaten by a tiger. The show’s debt to Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps — another story in which the ending revolves around the contrast between a place of innocent merriment and a dire plot — is pretty obvious, but it’s a good, workmanlike piece of entertainment that manages, in just half an hour less commercials, to be faithful to the spirit of Conan Doyle’s Holmes and a capable thriller which more or less plays fair with the audience and doesn’t subject us to the ridiculous plot twists, reversals and splices between different story lines that afflict all too much crime TV today! — 6/6/13

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I ran Charles the next episode in sequence from the Sherlock Holmes TV series from 1954-55: “The Case of the Violent Suitor.” It opened with a sequence that could well have occurred today: Alex Doogle (Brookes Kyle) shows up at Holmes’ flat at 221B Baker Street to see him professionally. Holmes tries to get Watson’s attention but nothing seems to disturb him — until Holmes realizes what’s going on and pulls the plugs out of his ears. Today they’d be earbuds and Watson would have been plugged into an iPod, but the principle would be about the same. Aside from this regrettable reversion to treating Watson as a campy comic-relief character (a temptation for Holmes adapters since he was played that way by Nigel Bruce and the writers of his films with Basil Rathbone) by writer Lou Morheim (he isn’t credited on screen but he is listed on imdb.com), it kicked off an episode in which the hapless Doogle — like the title character of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and quite a few movies, some based directly on the West novel as well as a story Warner Bros. remade four times but appropriated nothing from West but the central situation — writes an advice-to-the-lovelorn column for a local paper under the pen name “Aunt Lottie.” “Aunt Lottie” received a letter from a young woman named Susan Dearing (Marie Sinclair) asking whether she should marry her fiancé, Jack Murdock (Eric Micklewood), despite his penchant for outbursts of temper and beating people he thinks have crossed him. Not surprisingly, “Aunt Lottie” replies that she should break off the engagement immediately — it’s bad enough today when a woman marries a violent man who’s likely to turn his wrath on her in an era in which we know something about domestic violence and women subjected to it have at least some legal options; it was even worse in London in the 1890’s, in which the law was that a woman essentially became the property of her husband on their marriage and he could do as he pleased both with her body and her possessions. Only Jack Murdock turns up at the newspaper office demanding to see Aunt Lottie, and when poor, hapless Alex confesses that he is the advice columnist with a female pseudonym, Jack says, “I’m glad you’re a man, because I’d never do what I’m about to do to you to a woman.” Then he belts him one in the eye. (We knew that was coming because Alex is narrating a flashback in Holmes’ sitting room and we’ve already seen his black eye.) Jack threatens Alex with further bodily harm if he doesn’t re-contact Susan and convince her to go ahead with the marriage after all — which he does, though he feels badly enough about it (especially since, as you’ve probably guessed by now if you’ve seen more than two movies in your lifetime, he’s fallen in love with Susan himself) that he goes to see Sherlock Holmes and ask him for advice. Holmes and Watson hatch a plan to be on the grounds of the Dearing estate — they’ve visited it and realized that Dearing is the heiress to a great fortune since her father died in a bicycling accident six months earlier — while the wedding to Murdock is going on. They bring Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) with them because they want an official police officer there to arrest Jack Murdock, who Holmes is convinced actually murdered Susan Dearing’s father with a female accomplice. Holmes was convinced of this when he saw a newspaper photo of Dearing père with his coat buttoned on the left side — as if a woman had buttoned it and mistakenly did it the way she was used to doing it instead of the way a man would. (The idea that men’s and women’s clothes are made to button in reverse ways is one of those quirky little aspects of life that’s always baffled me.) Holmes disrupts the wedding by firing his gun outside, and though Lestrade can’t understand what he’s up to, it works the way he intended it to: it flushes out Murdock’s accomplice — Susan’s housekeeper, Tilda (Rolly Bester), who idiotically thought Murdock would marry her if she helped him knock off Dearing père and then, once he married Dearing fille, kill her as well — and she gives up Murdock, though Murdock flees up a flight of stairs in the Dearing home until Alex Doogle, who in the meantime had been practicing his boxing skills so he could better defend himself if Murdock attacked him again, punches out Murdock and sends him crashing down the stairs. So all is well and Holmes and Watson have not only brought a couple of murderers to book but got together two nice young people. Brookes Kyle overdoes the nerdiness a bit but is otherwise personable, with a resemblance to Montgomery Clift that stands him in good stead in a story that rips off at least two of Clift’s movies, The Heiress and Lonelyhearts. And Eric Micklewood is a quite good villain, concealing his psychopathology under an air of affected prissiness that works for the role — we hate him immediately even before he strikes the protagonist — even though we also can’t help but wonder whatever possessed a seemingly decent, innocent young woman like Susan Dearing even to consider marrying him in the first place. True, he fed him a cock-and-bull story about owning a mine in South Africa, thereby assuring her that he wasn’t a gold-digger (of course, if she’d married him him grabbing her money would have been the least of her problems!), but still— 6/7/13

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I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Baker Street Nursemaids.” Co-written (with Joseph Victor) and directed by the series’ producer, Sheldon Reynolds, it was one of the campier shows in the series. It begins with Holmes temporarily stepping out of the Baker Street flat — there’s an annoying buzzing sound throughout the opening sequence that at first we think is just a fly but turns out to be a queen bee, which astonishes Holmes because his knowledge of bees tells him that the queen almost never flies out of the hive — and while he’s gone Watson takes delivery of a wicker basket. Just what’s in the basket we don’t find out for several minutes until it starts emitting human-like cries that Holmes and Watson each think is the other making noise — until they realize that there’s a third person, however small, in the room. They finally open the basket and find a baby, along with a note from its mother, Madame Henri Durand (Dominique Chautemps), explaining that she’s shipping her child to Sherlock Holmes because her husband has been kidnapped by baddies who are after him for a military secret. It turns out that Monsieur Durand was in Britain as part of a secret naval treaty between Britain and France by which his new invention, the submarine, would be built in Britain and would bolster the U.S.’s worldwide naval superiority. Unfortunately, Madame Durand is subsequently kidnapped herself — and soon after that, while Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) are investigating the kidnapping of the adult Durands, some thugs break into 221B Baker Street and club Watson (H. Marion Crawford) over the head so they can take Durand fils — who turns out, in a gag ending, to be Durand fille instead — and complete the abduction of the entire family. Holmes deduces that the kidnapping, and the attempt to extort the secret of the submarine out of Durand père, can only be the work of one of three foreign powers, so he has Lestrade stake out the embassies — until he receives word from the actual kidnapper, Count Tennow (Roger Tréville), that the Durands will be killed immediately if there’s any sign of a police presence around his house. Holmes announces that Count Tennow’s name narrows the country behind the affair to just one — though the script rather coyly refuses to tell us what it is (we assume Germany if only because the Holmes stories took place in the 1890’s, two decades before Britain fought World War I with France as an ally and Germany as an enemy) — and he and Watson manage to get into Tennow’s house and foil the plot by the simple expedients of disabling Tennow’s servant’s bell-pull (by which he was supposed to signal his gang to knock off the Durands if and when he needed to) and beating up the thugs — even when the thugs had guns Our Heroes were able to take them on unarmed by the simple expedient of sneaking up behind them. This was an O.K. story but a disappointment after the last two shows in the series, “The Christmas Pudding” and “The Violent Suitor,” which were genuinely thrilling vest-pocket crime stories with much more interesting villains; generally this show was better when it was taking the Holmes mythos seriously than when it was kidding it (which was true of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, too!). — 6/13/13

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Last night Charles and I squeezed in the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, with Ronald Howard as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Dr. Watson (both of whom, much to my delight, pronounced the “t” in “often”!), which turned out to be one of their better ones: “The Case of the Perfect Husband,” a chilling tale with, for once, an excellent villain: Russel Partridge (Michael Gough, one of the few actors in this series I’d actually heard of elsewhere), the well-known and well-respected art collector, who shocks the hell out of his wife Janet (Mary Sinclair) after their first-anniversary party by announcing that he’s going to murder her next morning at 9. At first, of course, she thinks he’s joking — until he puts his hands around her neck, starts to strangle her, then lets up but reminds her that at next 9 a.m. he’s going to finish the job. She first goes to the police, but Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) tells her what a wonderful person he thinks Russel Partridge is — as does Dr. Watson when she then shows up at 221B Baker Street — and she’s ready to leave when Sherlock Holmes shows up, takes her seriously and gets involved in the case. With only half an hour’s worth of running time (25 minutes less the commercials) this story can’t get too complicated or unpredictable, but it’s marvelously done (it probably helps that series creator Sheldon Reynolds had no hand in the writing or direction this time around; the script is by Hamilton Keener and the direction by Steve Previn) and benefits from Gough’s marvelously restrained and matter-of-fact performance as the villain. Though one wonders just how he was able to restrain his murderous impulses towards his wife for an entire year after their marriage, then come out with them and boast that he’s knocked off seven of her predecessors in his affections, Gough makes the character convincing and considerably scarier than he’d be if he’d chewed the scenery. It’s also got a nice shock ending: Russel tells his wife that not only are all her seven predecessors dead (a good offtake on the Bluebeard myth) but they’re all somewhere on his own premises, and Holmes deduces where: up the Tara-like stairs in the Partridge home. “The Perfect Husband” is one of this series’ best shows, eschewing some of the campy humor this show sometimes indulged in as an imitation of the Rathbone-Bruce films (H. Marion Crawford’s performances range all over the map from the good, if rather square, intelligence he shows here to Nigel Bruce-ish foofiness) and giving us a really frightening villain, even though the brevity of the show’s format makes sure that he gets his comeuppance all too easily and swiftly! — 6/26/13

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I ran the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Jolly Hangman,” which after the marvelous “Perfect Husband” was a bit of a let-down even though it had the same director, Steve Previn — though different writers, Charles and Joseph Early, who steered it towards the campiness that proved annoying in all too many shows in this series. Jessie Hooper (a haunting actress named Alvys Maben) — the last name is spelled “Hoper” on imdb.com but “Hooper” is clearly what the actors are saying — is complaining that her late husband William was found hanging in a room in Glasgow and the death has been ruled a suicide. She’s put out by this not only because William’s loss is affecting her — he was killed on his last run for a sales company that was about to let him go — but also because her life insurance policy will be invalidated and she won’t be able to collect if her husband killed himself. She’s convinced that he was murdered, and Sherlock Holmes not only deduces he was right but convinces Glasgow police inspector MacDougal — who’s depicted as the second cousin of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard and is played by the same actor, Archie Duncan, albeit wearing some of the worst, most obvious false hair I’ve ever seen an actor saddled with — only he still has trouble finding out who the murderer was even though Mrs. Hooper is convinced it was a man who was sitting near her on the train laughing his head off — and Holmes fails to make the connection even though he sits near a laughing man on his train back from Glasgow to London. Eventually, of course, the killer — Henry Baxter (Philip Leaver) — is caught, though his motive proves to be preposterous: he knocked off William Hooper because he’d killed another man decades earlier and Hooper, then still a boy, had witnessed it. This show could be an excellent Holmes pastiche when it either drew on an authentic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plot line or had a writer (like “Perfect Husband” scribe Hamilton Keener) who could come up with a sufficiently “Doylean” story to work, but when it fell back on producer Sheldon Reynolds’ weakness for camp it was considerably less interesting and that, along with its obviously cheap production, is probably the main reason it didn’t last longer than one season. — 7/3/13

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Charles and I did squeeze in the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, which turned out to be quite campy but also delightfully entertaining. It was called “The Case of the Imposter Mystery” and was written by Lou Morheim (though the credits gave his first name as Joe) and directed by Steve Previn. Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford) return from a trip to Brighton to find an angry man named Sir Arthur Tredley (Basil Dignam) claiming that he had been to see Holmes, who had told him to put all his valuables in an obvious hiding place because the crooks only look for non-obvious hiding places — so he’d put his jewelry and bonds in a biscuit jar and within a day a thief had broken in, gone right to it and stolen everything. Then Holmes gets a visit from Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan), who claims that Holmes had told him to remove his stakeout from one jewelry store and move it to another — and of course the jewel thieves had hit the store from which he’d removed his protection. Holmes deduces that in his absence someone broke into his home and impersonated him, and in order to trap the impersonator he disguises both himself and Watson as East Indian maharajahs visiting London and wearing small fortunes (or not-so-small fortunes) in jewels. (The baubles from the producer’s prop department are so transparently fake they don’t look like they would fool anybody, but that’s a common enough movie failing we can forgive it.) The imposter shows up in the guise of a reporter, Bolingbroke — Holmes sees through him immediately because the seat of his pants isn’t worn the way a real reporter’s would be from sitting down and writing, and also because his glasses are clearly fake, just plain glass panes without any correction (though quite frankly he could also have figured it out from the transparently fake beard the man was wearing!) — and he invites the maharajahs to come to 221B Baker Street to talk to Sherlock Holmes about stopping one of their daughters from running off with an Englishman. (Holmes has set this up by faking another out-of-town trip, complete with getting into a cab carrying a large fish net and asking the driver to take him and Watson to Charing Cross Station — “Quick! We have a train to catch!”) The trap works but the imposter gets away and Lestrade and the backup he’s called in, Constable Hennesie (Richard Watson), mistakenly wrestle the real Holmes to the ground. Eventually the good guys track down the imposter — only his sidekick shows up with a gun and holds it on them, but the real Holmes pretends to be the imposter and gets the sidekick to give him the gun, and the crooks are caught. I had half-expected that Ronald Howard would be playing the faux Holmes as well as the real one, but instead Bob Cunningham plays the imposter (though the resemblance between the two men is surprisingly convincing), who turns out to be an ex-actor named Tony Simmons who used facial putty to remodel his appearance as each character. The whole show is quite charming and a welcome exception to the usual rule of this show that it got less entertaining as it got more campy — though Charles was still put out by how un-canonical the whole conception of the story was! — 7/11/13

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I ran the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series: “The Case of the Eiffel Tower.” Written by Roger Emerson Garris and directed by Steve Previn, this was almost an inevitability — the Eiffel Tower went up in the 1890’s, the decade in which most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were set, and it would have been a major novelty back then — and the first half of this episode was quite good but it sloughed off badly after the original commercial break. Two uniformed police officers in London find the dead body of international terrorist Frederick Martinez — they and Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) I.D. him by a label sewn into his suit jacket with his name (a plot point which bothered Charles more than it did me — it could have been an alias he was using publicly, not knowing that that was one identity the police had already “outed”) — and his walking stick contains a message in rhyme which Holmes deduces is a meeting place for further instructions. After being run around London by similarly coded messages Holmes realizes that the final meeting is going to take place atop the Eiffel Tower — and a series of ancient stock shots depicts the Tower and the rest of the Paris tourist attractions. (Charles wondered why a series filmed in Paris would use old stock footage instead of going out and shooting fresh film of the landmarks — but I thought producer Sheldon Reynolds and director Previn figured that old footage would more closely resemble the Paris of the 1890’s rather than that of the 1950’s.) Alas, the terrorist gang — the MacGuffin is a French coin with a hollow inside that contains an important government secret on microfilm, or whatever the 1890’s equivalent was — has already heard of Martinez’s death, so two thugs, Gustav (Sacha Pitoeff) and Bayard (Frederick O’Brady from Orson Welles’ Confidential Report), try to ambush Holmes atop the tower. He gets away in an unwittingly (or maybe wittingly) comical chase scene reminiscent of the climax of The Naked City (though in The Naked City the thug was inexplicably trying to escape his pursuers by climbing up the tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, not down!) but in order to avoid it being seized by his pursuers in case they catch up to him, Holmes throws the coin down from the top of the tower. It’s retrieved, undamaged, by Lestrade, who promptly gets tricked into giving it to a woman who’s part of the gang, entertainer Nana de Melimar (a nice performance by Martine Alexis, who even gets to sing a song!). Holmes deduces her profession and he, Watson and Lestrade look at all the posters advertising stage and cabaret performers until Lestrade I.D.’s her, they show up at her club and there’s a confrontation featuring a surprisingly open-ended ending for a 1950’s TV show (were they planning this as the first half of a two-part episode?). It was an O.K. show that blew the premise of an interesting introduction, but then the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes series was surprisingly uneven despite Ronald Howard’s authoritative presence as the title character. Sometimes you got strong stories that either were from the Conan Doyle canon or well constructed enough they could have been, sometimes you got camp-fests and sometimes, as here, you got interesting premises that weren’t properly developed. — 7/30/13

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I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Exhumed Client,” which was considerably better than its immediate predecessor and was directed by Steve Previn with real Gothic flair. The opening shows a funeral, with extreme close-ups of the mourners’ faces that made me wonder if Previn had seen any of Ingmar Bergman’s films and was ripping off his lighting and angling. Later there’s a sequence in which the will of Charles Farnsworth is being read — the imdb.com page on this episode doesn’t credit an actor playing him, though there is one since he’s seen later in a flashback sequence — and the four main heirs are Charles’ sister Elizabeth (Alvys Maben), his brother George (Alan Adair), Sylvia Taylor (Judith Haviland) and Dr. Henry Reeves (Michael Turner). When the will is read, it turns out to have an unusual codicil: Charles Farnsworth was so convinced someone was going to kill him, he insisted that his body be exhumed and autopsied no matter what the original finding of his cause of death was, and that Sherlock Holmes be hired (presumably paid for by the estate) to investigate his demise, however it ostensibly happened. The initial cause of death ruling was a simple heart attack, but the autopsy reveals Charles was actually killed by arsenic poisoning. From this writers Charles and Joseph Early spin a fascinating little Gothic web of intrigue, including a secret room at the Farnsworth estate — a typically crumbling castle dating from medieval days — in which supposedly no one can spend a night and still be alive in the morning. There’s also a flashback sequence in which Charles threatens to disinherit virtually all his potential heirs over something or other — the usual trope in whodunits: create a lot of characters with a motive for the victim’s murder so you have a nice pool of suspects and can keep the audience guessing — and a scene in which Holmes himself volunteers to spend the night in the presumably fatal room and ends up in convulsions on the floor, seemingly about to expire any moment when the commercial break falls. Watson, who was supposed to be at the ready to open the door to the room if Holmes got into trouble, nodded off and was awakened only when the big clock in the adjoining room struck midnight and woke him just in time for him to rescue Holmes. Holmes eventually deduces, in a plot element the Earlys got from “The Devil’s Foot” in the Conan Doyle canon, that the murderer figured out a way to impregnate a candle with arsenic so the candle would release a deadly gas as it burned (something Charles had a hard time believing was scientifically possible), and he gets all four of the suspects into the room, closes the door behind them, and lights the candles in hopes the murderer will give himself or herself away — and it turns out to be Charles’ long-suffering sister Elizabeth. (“The Devil’s Foot” also featured a dysfunctional family who used the combustion-driven poison to knock each other off.) Her motive wasn’t all that clear, but who cares? This was a quite good episode, atmospherically directed by Previn (a far cry from his usual slovenly work on the series) and well acted, even though the handlebar moustaches on the male Farnsworths got a bit much after a while. — 8/1/13

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I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Impromptu Performance.” It’s a quite good show even though its basic plot line is one of the oldest tropes in the mystery business: the private detective is called in by a condemned man facing execution literally in hours and challenged to do a race against time to find the real killer. In this one the condemned man is Herbert Brighton (Patrick Shelley), a milquetoast accountant who, like Holmes’s client in the story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” meets, falls in love with and impulsively marries a woman who agrees on condition that he never make her speak about her past. Then she is found dead and he is found collapsed on the stairs outside their home, accused of killing her. Brighton asks as his last request that he see Holmes in prison on the night before his scheduled hanging, and Holmes immediately takes his side and in a series of whirlwind deductions — they have to be whirlwind not only because Holmes takes the case with Brighton being only seven hours from his hanging but because this is all happening in a half-hour (less commercials) show — he figures out that the real killer of Phyllis Brighton was her previous (and still) boyfriend, actor Amos Carruthers (Colin Drake). The two hatched a scheme by which she would marry their “mark,” he would take out life insurance, then they would kill him, she would collect and they would split the proceeds. Holmes traces Carruthers to a small theatre where he’s in the middle of a production of Othello in which he’s playing the lead and he’s about to kill Desdemona — originally the theatre manager, Mr. Pettyfoot (the marvelous Eugene Deckers, who would have been better used as the villain than as this comic-relief character!), doesn’t want to stop the show to allow Holmes (Ronald Howard), Watson (H. Marion Crawford) and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) to apprehend the murderer, so Holmes disrupts the show himself by sticking his hand through various openings in the set and making funny gestures, then manages to capture and subdue Carruthers despite the actor’s attempt to stab him with the same prop dagger with which he was supposed to kill himself at the end of the play. (There’s a nice gag scene at the end in which Holmes stabs Watson with the dagger, then shows him the mechanism by which its blade collapses on cue so it isn’t really dangerous, then throws the dagger and it lands, point first, on a table and sticks to it like a genuinely lethal weapon.) Though it might have been a better show if Eugene Deckers and Colin Drake had switched roles, and the story’s debt to the George Cukor-Ronald Colman movie A Double Life (also about an actor who plays Othello and murders a woman in real life) is pretty obvious, it’s still one of the most inventive and exciting scripts in this serles, written by Lou Morheim and once again directed by Steve Previn, and with Ronald Howard as a quite respectable Sherlock Holmes who, praise be, pronounces the “t” in “often” — “Well, that explains why he never became as big a star as his dad!” Charles said rather snippily. — 8/2/13

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Charles and I screened the next Sherlock Holmes episode in sequence, “The Case of the Baker Street Bachelors,” which sounded promising but turned out to be one of their weaker shows, a camp-fest which begins with aspiring Parliament candidate Jeffery Bourne (Alan Adair) about to have his promising political career wrecked by blackmail because his wife is accusing him of beating her in public (which sounded a bit too much like the current sex scandal facing San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to be comfortable watching these days, even as fiction) and demanding a 4,000-pound blackmail payment to keep quiet. Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Howard) and Dr. Watson (H. Marion Crawford) learn that Bourne met the woman, Pamela (Alvys Maben), through the “Cupid’s Bow” marriage bureau (today it would be called a dating service) run by slimeball J. Oliver (Duncan Elliott), who’s using his agency to identify rich or influential people and using his stable of supposedly eligible women, Pamela and Edna (Penny Portrait), to extract information that can then be used to blackmail them. Holmes and Watson pose as eligible bachelors (students of the Holmes canon will recall that Watson did get married pretty early in the cycle, while Holmes remained resolutely uninterested in women — which has led Queer authors like Larry Townsend to argue he was Gay and cherry-pick the canon to make the point, though it’s pretty obvious to me that Conan Doyle meant Holmes to be what would now be called asexual) and Holmes invents a nonexistent fortune for himself and his equally nonexistent “Aunt Agatha.” Oliver sends the four of them — Holmes, Watson, Pamela and Edna — to a double date at a tea shop, but Bourne shows up, accosts Holmes for trying to steal his wife (odd since it was Bourne who called Holmes into the case in the first place), they have a fight and Holmes ends up arrested and spending the entire second act behind bars while Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) burgle the Cupid’s Bow agency to find the letters Oliver is using for blackmail. Holmes deduces that they’re behind the Toulouse-Lautrec paintings that hang in Oliver’s office — he figures that out when Oliver has never heard of Toulouse-Lautrec (“I haven’t either!” Watson whines) and the blackmail ring is busted while Lestrade and the arresting officer, Inspector Mason (Seymour Green), have fun at Holmes’ expense while Holmes is still in jail. This was one of those frustrating shows that took a basically interesting premise and drowns it in sheer camp — like a lot of modern crime shows, come to think of it! — 8/8/13

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I ran Charles the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series, “The Case of the Royal Murder.” My immediate thought was that the script by Charles and Joseph Early was going to be about Sherlock Holmes solving a murder involving a member of the British royal family; instead it takes place in an unnamed Ruritanian state ruled by King Conrad (Jacques Dacqmine), where Holmes and Watson are vacationing as a reward for having previously solved a case involving a secret of Conrad’s government they successfully protected. Instead, at the banquet given at Conrad’s palace, a Gypsy woman fortuneteller sees an imminent sign of death when she reads the palm of Prince Stephan (Maurice Teynac), the heir to the throne of a neighboring kingdom ruled by King Johan (whom we never see). Prince Stephan drinks a wine glass and suddenly croaks — Dr. Watson’s medical skills are, of course, useless — and the suspects are Princess Antonia (Lise Bourdin), who dated both King Conrad and Prince Stephan; and Count Magor (Jacques François), Conrad’s principal advisor, as well as the King himself. Holmes traces the Gypsy woman to her camp (where she does an exciting dance sequence so dangerously close to the open-pit fires I kept worrying her dress would catch in one of the fires and set her aflame), where she says she witnessed a pre-dinner fencing duel between Conrad and Stephan. Just how was the poison administered to Stephan? In the wine, on the edge of his epée, or via the napkin used to dress Stephan’s wound after Conrad scratched him? At one point the King orders Holmes and Watson arrested because he thinks they’re going to frame him for the crime, but in the end the killer turns out to be Count Magor — Charles thought it would be the princess but I guess Magor as the killer but got his motive wrong. The plot has King Johan threatening to invade Conrad’s kingdom and conquer it out of revenge for Stephan’s death, and I thought Magor had been bribed by Johan to turn traitor and had thought the surest way to start the war would be to kill Johan’s son. Instead the motive the Earlys supplied was jealousy: it seems Magor, too, had dated Antonia, and when she dumped him for Stephan he decided to kill Stephan and frame his other rival for her affections, Conrad, for the crime. It sounds a bit silly in synopsis but this was actually one of the better episodes of this show, with Watson used relatively seriously instead of turned into a Nigel Bruce-like camp figure (a regrettable tendency in various Holmes adaptations since the Rathbone-Bruce films shaped audience expectations of how Sherlock Holmes should be filmed), and the story (effectively directed by Steve Previn — any relation to Charles and André?) is genuinely thrilling and legitimately mysterious. — 8/19/13

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I screened Charles the next episode in sequence from the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes TV series. This was called “The Case of the Haunted Gainsborough” and featured Archie Duncan, the actor who usually played Inspector Lestrade (pronounced with a long “a” instead of the short one used by Dennis Hoey in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films), in an alternate part as Malcolm MacGregan, laird of a Scottish castle he’s about to lose in foreclosure to Archibald Ross (Zack Matalon as a nicely nasty villain). His only hope of bailing himself out is to sell a Gainsborough portrait of his ancestress, Heather MacGregan — only every time a buyer shows up, Heather’s ghost appears and scares them off. The latest pigeon is Sam Scott (Roger E. Garris), an American — portrayed as a clueless Texan with a bad accent — and of course it turns out that the “ghost” is a phony, an actress (Cleo Rose in a nice performance) hired by Ross to impersonate a ghost and use the (inevitable) secret passages that honeycomb the castle to make herself appear spectral by suddenly (apparently) disappearing. Needless to say, this isn’t exactly the freshest story premise of all time, and it doesn’t help that the secret-passage gimmick is hard to take seriously these days after it was parodied so brilliantly in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein — but this was still a fun show in spite of, or arguably because of, the over-the-top acting (Archie Duncan is even schtickier as the Scottish laird than he was as Lestrade, if such a thing is possible) and writing (one character, Malcolm’s butler MacLeish — played by John Buckmaster — seems to exist only so he can play a bagpipe solo whenever anyone enters the scene). It was another Charles and Joseph Early script, and once again Steve Previn was the director — and Charles (my Charles) complained that the shows in general are pretty monotonous, with Ronald Howard playing only one side of Sherlock Holmes and ignoring many of the character’s fascinating quirks in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This show also suffers from being only a half-hour long — some 1950’s crime shows on TV benefited from the shorter length (the rapid pace and matter-of-fact presentation of Dragnet made it superb in the half-hour format and would have seemed oppressive in an hour slot) but this one didn’t: the Jeremy Brett series from British commercial TV in the 1970’s (all of whose plots were adapted directly from Conan Doyle) established an hour (actually 50 minutes) as the right length for an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes for TV (long enough to do justice to the complexities of character and plot, short enough to avoid boredom). Still, this was a pretty good episode and Cleo Rose’s performance was especially interesting even though while posing as the “ghost” she came off more like Lady Macbeth than the presumably innocent young woman of the “Gainsborough” portrait! — 8/23/13

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I screened the next episode in sequence of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes half-hour TV series with Ronald Howard (Leslie Howard’s son) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson, with Archie Duncan back as Inspector Lestrade instead of the titled but impoverished Scotsman he hammed it up as in the immediately previous episode, “The Case of the Haunted Gainsborough.” This one was called “The Case of the Neurotic Detective” and it was one Charles remembered having seen before, though I didn’t — I suspect it was a rerun off the UCSD channel, which Charles could get over the air at the place on Centre Street where he was living when we first got together even though it wasn’t on Cox Cable (indeed, he might have watched it without me) — in which Holmes suddenly starts getting incredibly short-tempered and snapping at Watson. What’s more, there’s a string of major thefts of public property being committed by a gang led by a super-criminal — including secret state papers as well as Queen Elizabeth’s crown jewels — and Lestrade comes to Holmes’ apartment at 221B Baker Street to plead for his help. He’s rudely rebuffed, and in order to see what’s going on Watson adopts a series of singularly inept disguises to follow Holmes, including one hilarious scene in which he’s pretending to be a cabdriver and, so he can keep an eye on Holmes, he turns down a young couple who want to hire his cab to elope. Watson spots a stolen necklace in Holmes’ tobacco pouch (after Holmes had told him that was a “special blend” Watson wouldn’t like — which briefly made me wonder if writer Lou Morheim was depicting Holmes using another recreational drug besides his occasional injections of a 7% solution of cocaine) and traces Holmes to a secret hideout where he and a few others, including a woman, are plotting further crimes. It all turns out to be innocent, of course — Holmes had been hired by the British government to test their security (though if that’s the case I wonder why Morheim didn’t use Mycroft Holmes, who in one Conan Doyle story Sherlock actually said practically was the British government, as the character giving Sherlock his marching orders) — and the episode is enlivened by Ronald Howard’s convincing playing as a Holmes (presumably) gone bad as well as a brief, uncredited but easily recognizable appearance by the great character actor Eugene Deckers as “Prof. A. Fishblade,” a member of Holmes’ “gang.” Still, this was one of the campier episodes in the series, and thereby one of the less effective ones. — 9/6/13

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Charles and I ran the third-from-last episode in the interesting 1954-55 TV series Sherlock Holmes, a half-hour series produced in France with a mixed cast of British and French actors. This one was called “The Case of the Unlucky Gambler” and the person who brings the case to Holmes is an 11-year-old boy called Andrew Fenwick (Richard O’Sullivan) — he comes to report the disappearance of his father Herbert (Rowland Bartrop), who’s been away from home for three weeks. Holmes deduces that Herbert, originally an accountant, has become a gambler (he figures this out by noticing that some of Andrew’s clothes are new and expensive, while others are old, worn and ragged, indicating his dad has wildly fluctuating financial fortunes), and he traces gangster Jack Driscol (Duncan Elliott), to whom Herbert owes 1,000 pounds. At first we’re clearly being led to believe Driscol killed Herbert when Herbert wouldn’t — or couldn’t — pay his debt, but eventually Holmes realizes that Herbert is still alive, and that he plans to rob one of the pubs he frequents to raise the money to flee to America. There are also some subplots (it’s an indication of how good writer Lou Morheim — better than most of the people who wrote these shows — is that he can cram not only a main plot but subplots into a show that runs less than half an hour), including one in which Holmes and Watson hang out at a gym training prizefighters and drop Herbert’s name to attract Driscol’s attention (the word from the bartender they’ve been talking to is that Driscol’s current sporting interest is boxing). In the end Holmes and Watson catch Herbert, in a very bad disguise, robbing one of the pubs, but as he did in several of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Holmes lets Herbert get away on the ground that his actions, though technically illegal, were morally justifiable. Directed by Steve Previn — as were most of the later shows in  this series — this episode is about in the midrange, with its campy moments (like the preposterous outfit Andrew Fenwick is dressed in when he goes to see Holmes, as if he just walked off the stage of a Shakespeare production) and some silly acting but an effective and truly Holmesian resolution. — 9/7/13

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I ran Charles the next-to-last episode of the 1954-55 Sherlock Holmes series, “The Case of the Diamond Tooth.” This was an oddly confusingly plotted show in which Watson (H. Marion Crawford) accidentally stumbles on a diamond cut in the shape of an eye tooth, and there’s a lot of campery about (Sheldon Reynolds directed this episode personally from a script not by one of the usual suspects) as Watson tries to draft a lost-and-found ad for the Times offering to return the tooth to its rightful owner. Harry Harkins (Charles Brodie), a squirrelly little nerd, shows up and grabs the tooth (though actually it’s a glass decoy Holmes left in a bowl for him) even though he’s not the rightful owner — he describes it as a right eye tooth when in fact it’s a left one — and the chase leads to the docks where Watson found the tooth, and where it turns out Harkins is actually the captain of a ship who had the tooth’s owner, a Brazilian, murdered for his money. The middle section that occurs on the ship is actually genuinely suspenseful, but all the laugh-getting around the rest gets pretty tiresome after a while and the whole episode is not one of their better ones. The show was really running out of gas by this time and it’s not surprising it didn’t last more than one season. — 9/11/13

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Charles and I ran the final episode in the 1950’s Sherlock Holmes TV series, produced by Sheldon Reynolds and starring British actors Ronald Howard (son of Leslie, and to my mind a more butch and therefore better-looking man than his dad even though he hardly reached anything near Leslie Howard’s career heights) as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford (since the “H.” stood for “Howard” it’s likely he used his initial so he wouldn’t be confused with his co-star) as a futzy, campy Nigel Bruce-ish Watson. The show was actually a good one for the series to exit on: it was called “The Case of the Tyrant’s Daughter.” The tyrant is Harringway (Basil Dignam in a marvelously well-honed performance as the petty bad guy — he’s dead when the episode opens but we see him in a flashback midway through), and the daughter is June (the actress playing her is unidentified on imdb.com), who’s displeased her tyrannical dad by getting herself engaged to Tom Vernon (Zack Matalon), who has no money and therefore dad is convinced that he’s just after the Harringway fortune (such as it is). Inspector Lestrade (Archie Duncan) becomes convinced that Tom is the killer and arrests him because Harringway was killed by poison introduced into his heart medicine — he had heart disease and his doctor had told him he’d be dead in a year anyway — and Tom worked as a chemist (which in Britain can either mean a chemical scientist or a pharmacist) and was seen by Harringway’s maid, Mary Dugan (June Petersen), carrying a little bottle of something in his inside jacket pocket and taking it out briefly before he went to fetch Harringway his medicine to prevent an imminent heart attack … only the stuff was spiked with something that killed him. The mystery was genuinely perplexing because there was such a limited range of suspects — frankly I thought writer Roger E. Garris was going to make Mary Dugan the killer, even though she’d been the one who brought the case to Holmes in the first place (there are Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, including “The Retired Colourman,” in which Holmes’ client turns out to be the murderer) and I couldn’t figure out what motive she could possibly have had, but in the end Harringway committed suicide in such a way as to frame Tom (another gimmick Conan Doyle used in “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which the unhappy wife of a fabulously wealthy man kills herself and frames the man’s governess, with whom she suspects he’s having an affair). Though the show, directed by Steve Previn (who helmed most of the later episodes), has a rather annoyingly campy tag scene, for the most part this was a quite effective Sherlock Holmes pastiche and a good note on which to end this series, which despite the lapses into campiness (especially in Crawford’s all too Nigel Bruce-ish Watson and Archie Duncan’s clichéd accent both as Lestrade and other “Scottish” characters he was cast as so he could still be in episodes in which Lestrade did not appear) was generally a good account of the Holmes mythos and worthy of the radio broadcasts Rathbone (still … well, as I’ve paraphrased the opening of “A Scandal in Bohemia” on the subject, to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes) and Bruce did, especially in the early part of the run (1939-1946) when they were quite often taking their plots straight from Conan Doyle. — 10/1/13