1929	The Return of Sherlock Holmes dir. Basil Dean; writ. Basil Dean, Garrett Fort; featuring Clive Brook, H. Reeves-Smith
	1931	The Speckled Band dir. Jack Raymond; writ. W.P. Lipscomb; featuring Raymond Massey, Athole Stewart, Lyn Harding
	1931–37	Sherlock Holmes five films featuring Arthur Wontner, Ian Fleming (1931-32, 1935-37), Ian Hunter (1932)
	1932	Sherlock Holmes dir. William K. Howard; writ. William Gillette, Bertram Millhauser; featuring Clive Brook, Reginald Owen
	1933	A Study in Scarlet dir. Edwin L. Marin; writ. Robert Florey; featuring Reginald Owen, Warburton Gamble, Anna May Wong
	1939–46	Sherlock Holmes fourteen films featuring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to 1950

There are few movies actually called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as that title refers to Arthur Conan Doyle's first collection of short stories about the late Victorian-era detective. However the stories have been made into many films and television features over the years, as have the novels and the stories from Doyle's subsequent publications—often quite mixing up the sources.

So we'll run through the various Holmes series without worrying overly about which stories they adapt.

Failed Sherlocks
The first movie adaptation of Sherlock Holmes was a 1908 Danish silent film. As silent pictures were being replaced by talkies in the late 1920s and early 1930s, studios and lead actors competed to establish successful series based on the Holmes canon—a trend that has never completely let up. To date, over seventy actors have played the detective in about two hundred and forty films, plus hundreds of television episodes.

Among the contending films in 1932 was Sherlock Holmes, which was actually adapted from a stage play, rather than directly from any Doyle work. It starred silent-era veteran Clive Brook. Suffice it to show how far Brook's character was from an accurate portrayal of Sherlock Holmes to note the movie starts with the sleuth about to be married!

Paradoxically, this movie was actually a sequel to The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1929. It's the 1929 movie that introduces the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson", which got picked up by later films, although it had never appeared in Doyle's writing.

Otherwise, both Brook films were disasters for Holmes fans but the second one is notable for its Watson being played by the estimable Reginald Owen. Owen got little screen time as the sidekick but he was encouraged to take on the main role himself the following year. Owen even helped write A Study in Scarlet (1933) in hopes of launching a popular series with himself as the detective.

Although it's a vast improvement, A Study in Scarlet unfortunately is not faithful enough to excite avid Sherlockians. It's not really based on the novel of the same name. The plot and subsidiary characters are entirely different, as the producers had bought rights to only the title (although I've counted at least two lines lifted almost verbatim from the book).

Owen's Holmes, operating in contemporary times, is an affable and suave gentleman and his Watson (Warburton Gamble) is a stuffy, obsequious fellow, reminding one of English butlers in old films. The storyline is that of a decent mystery thriller of the era, involving a series of murders, an exotic femme fatale, secret passageways and a murky atmosphere. There's even a Moriarty-style villain, called Merrydew.

But Owen's dream failed to catch on and the projected series ended with this first instalment.

In the meantime, Canadian-born Raymond Massey had offered a quite different take on Holmes in The Speckled Band (1931). It was not the first adaptation of Doyle's story of the same name from The Adventures collection, as there had been a silent treatment in 1923. The new version is hardly out of the silent era either, with melodramatic acting from much of the cast, including Lyn Harding as the villain (more on him later), and with attempts at some very early special effects, such as double exposures. The film is big on atmospherics, trying to create a spooky feeling of foreboding through much of the plot, despite being set in contemporary times.

Holmes himself is shown in a bizarre modern light, operating a modern crime detection office set up by Watson with what seem to be proto-computers  to track criminals around the world. Massey himself though is the most relaxed, even languid, actor in the film, quietly amused by the overacted antics of those around him, until he leaps into action to defeat the "speckled band".

Unfortunately he's not in this short movie enough —available copies run anywhere from forty-two to ninety minutes—with the villain, the damsel in distress and a bald Dr. Watson (Athole Stewart) taking up most of the screen time. And Massey would never again play Holmes in a feature film.

Iconic Sherlock
The first widely acclaimed Holmes of the talking-picture age was Arthur Wontner, who was in late middle-age when he began a series of five films in the 1930s.

Wontner's Holmes is a gentlemanly figure of the contemporary period, offset by a bon vivant Watson, played four times by the smooth Ian Fleming (sometimes credited as Jan Fleming and, no, not the James Bond author) and once by the stiffer Ian Hunter.

The films were shot by American studio Warner Brothers in England with British actors, the plots taken from Doyle's stories and novels, as well as from entirely new material.

The first, The Sleeping Cardinal (1931), combines two middle-period Doyle stories, "The Empty House" and "The Final Problem". A print of the film has only recently been discovered, and it seems not to be available on DVD yet, but shows up on TV channels featuring classic movies, under the Americanized name, Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour

Today's viewers may find The Sleeping Cardinal slow and ponderous, with a too obvious conclusion, but for its time it must have been enthralling. And perhaps Holmes is too kindly, too soft-spoken, for the solitary, eccentric genius we've come to know and love. But Wontner pretty well created in this film the look and manner of the intelligent screen character that future actors would try to match. And Fleming is a capable, if dapper, partner in detection.

This was followed in 1932 by The Sign of Four. It contains the basic elements of Doyle's identically named novel, though told in a different order: while the novel starts with our detecting duo entertaining the fatherless young woman with a note promising her riches, the screenplay first gives us the background tale of the men, including her father, who find a treasure and fall out over it with deadly consequences—which removes (for the viewer) some of the need for Holmes's detection.

The film Watson, played this once by Hunter, does however fall in love and proposes marriage in the end as the book Watson does. When Holmes is perplexed by this eventuality, Watson gets to return, "Elementary, my dear Holmes, elementary," putting a twist on the phrase he's put up with a couple of times already.

Again the film is somewhat leisurely and melodramatic for a modern audience, and the sound—at least on the available DVD—is horrid. But it does open up the action a bit, including some chase and fight scenes, as well as some delightful episodes with a disguised Holmes that might still surprise you.

Next up should be Wontner's The Missing Rembrandt, adapted from the story "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" and with Fleming back, but you might never get a chance to see this possible masterpiece as its prints are... well, missing.

The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935) is adapted from Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear, which takes place mainly in the United States and in which Holmes appears only about a third of the time. But the film pretty well sticks with him in Britain. The American story here is told by a main character (not Watson) and dramatized as a flashback about halfway through the story.

This adaptation also drags in Holmes's arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty, who is not in the book, in the person of the aforementioned veteran Welsh actor Lyn Harding. This actually appears grafted on, as even some of the other characters comment that the mystery seems to have nothing to do with Moriarty—but in this version of Valley of Fear Holmes is of course proven right about the professor's involvement and, truth be told, Harding plays a great villain and adds some drama to the flick.

The last film in the series, Murder at the Baskervilles (1937), is partly adapted from "Silver Blaze", the lead story in Doyle's second Holmes collection, but changes it drastically, bringing in elements of the novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles. And, once again, Harding is imported into the story as Moriarty. (See The Hound of the Baskervilles movies for more on this film).

The available Wontner films are in generally poor condition, with sound especially deteriorated. The mysteries are rather slow moving and the production stagy, as might be expected in such early movies. But they are worth catching for what many consider the Holmes who comes closest in the black-and-white days of moviemaking to Doyle's conception.

Updated Sherlock
The most popular Holmes in the public mind is probably that of Basil Rathbone who, with Nigel Bruce as his bumbling assistant, starred in fourteen Sherlock Holmes movies from 1939 to 1946.

The first two, The Hound of the Baskervilles (see The Hound of the Baskervilles movies) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) were made for Twentieth-Century Fox. Oddly, these are the only ones that take place in Victorian times. After the films were hits, Rathbone and Bruce continued the roles in two hundred and twenty radio dramas over nearly eight years.

Meanwhile, Universal Pictures brought them back to the screen with Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942). This and the successive eleven films are updated to the 1940s to involve Holmes in more modern adventures, such as foiling Nazis in the British war effort.

The Universal flicks were inexpensively produced B-movies, each lasting usually only an hour to seventy-five minutes, and often shown as parts of a double bill. But they were written, acted, directed and produced better than most B's of their era and they proved quite popular. At times the films took on an atmosphere of American film noir which was then current, though they always remained British (despite being shot in Hollywood studios) and ended with happy conclusions. Even more so than in the Wontner films, the plots veered radically away from Doyle's mysteries. Many of the films had no relation to any original stories apart from the lead characters.

In Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943), Holmes starts in Switzerland, rescuing an inventor of a new bomb-sight from German agents. But he is soon back in London protecting the inventor from an even more devious foe than the Nazis: Professor Moriarty of course. It's a fairly intense game of intrigue played out with codes (modelled on Doyle's story of the "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"), kidnapping, secret passages, and Holmes repeatedly going under cover in disguise.

The plot is certainly more interesting at least than its previous WWII entry (Voice of Terror). Both Rathbone and Bruce shine as the detecting duo, despite the displacement in time, along with Lionel Atwill as the devious professor. But what many people remember most about this film is the patriotic speech (jingoistic, some would say) Holmes makes at the end, essentially to encourage Brits to buy war bonds.

The most interesting of the Universal films may be The Velvet Claw (1944) in which Holmes and Watson investigate a French-Canadian village where a murderous monster is said to be roaming the marshes—shades of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Rathbone and Bruce are at their comfortable best, easily making us anxious and making us laugh by turn. It's a twisting plot that keeps one guessing till near the end.

The second-last Rathbone-Bruce film, Terror by Night (1946), is not particularly terror-filled, though it does take place in that cliché of a mystery-movie locale: a train that runs all night, complete with a carriageful of suspicious-looking passengers. It is credited as being based on a Doyle story, but the only one that comes close to sharing a plotline with it is "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax"—and the only connection is that ladies with similar names, a specially made coffin and jewels play (quite different) roles in both.

Holmes is assigned to guard the fabled Star of Rhodesia diamond from a clever gang of thieves and murderers he suspects are led by Colonel Sebastian Moran, Professor Moriarty's successor. There's plenty of sneaking into and out of compartments, murders, secret identities, and twists and turns of plot. Bruce nearly steals the film with Watson's particularly bumbling, but endearing, attempts to solve the case on his own. One of the faster moving and entertaining entries in the series.

The series ends with Dressed To Kill (1946), which has very faint echoes of Doyle's story "Scandal in Bohemia". The femme fatale Hilda Courtney is compared to the woman Irene Adler, the hiding place of valuables is uncovered via the artifice of a fake fire, and both Holmes and Watson refer to the earlier case. Oh, yes, and the credibility of the English state relies on Holmes's success in retrieving certain items.

Our two leads are as game as ever in this last effort, with Bruce particularly charming, but the mystery and action are pedestrian. Much relies on Holmes decoding a music box-embedded message from an imprisoned criminal to his associates. But one has to ask: why did the convict bother encoding it in such a complex fashion instead of just telling them? After all, he had to tell them about the boxes and secret message anyway. It smacks of providing Holmes one last opportunity to play with clever codes—and not very clever at that..

In all these movies Rathbone's Holmes is more outgoing and cosmopolitan than the iconoclastic calculator of Doyle's stories. Nonetheless Rathbone's forceful performance further established Holmes in the public imagination during the energetic war and post-War years and made his characterization the one for all future Holmeses to beat.

Many Holmes fans however find Nigel Bruce portrays Watson as too much a buffoon to be the observant literary and medical man of the books. But Bruce's comic turn keeps Rathbone from killing the movies with high seriousness and it's great fun to watch the two leads interact. In a way, Rathbone and Bruce created enduring characters quite different from Doyle's heroes—which drives Holmesian purists mad but has delighted audiences.

— Eric

Sherlock Holmes after 1950

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