1954–55	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (aka Sherlock Holmes) television series featuring Ronald Howard, Howard Marion-Crawford, Archie Duncan
	1962	Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (originally Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes) dir. Terence Fisher, Frank Winterstein; writ. Curt Siodmak; featuring Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters, Hans Söhnker, Senta Berger
	1965	A Study in Terror dir. James Hill; writ. Donald Ford, Derek Ford; featuring John Neville, Donald Houston, Anthony Quale, Judi Dench
	1968	Sherlock Holmes television series featuring Peter Cushing, Nigel Stock
	1970	The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes dir. Billy Wilder; writ. Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond; featuring Robert Stephens, Colin Blakely, Christopher Lee, Genevieve Page
	1975	The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother> featuring Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman
	1984	The Masks of Death featuring Peter Cushing, John Mills
	1984–94	Sherlock Holmes television series featuring Jeremy Brett, David Burke (1984-85), Edward Hardwicke (1986-94)
	1988	Without a Clue dir. Thom Eberhardt, writ. Gary Murphy, Larry Strawther; featuring Michael Caine, Ben Kingsley
	1991–92	The Golden Years of Sherlock Holmes television mini-series featuring Christopher Lee
	2000–02	Sherlock Holmes television series featuring Matt Frewer, Kenneth Welsh
	2009	Sherlock Holmes dir. Guy Ritchie, writ. Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg, Lionel Wigram; featuring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes after 1950

Nostalgic fans consider the 1940s, when Nigel Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were ever-present on film and radio, the golden age of Sherlockian drama. But there have been so many great, more faithful and more interesting adaptations since then that the lustre has faded somewhat from the Rathbone-Bruce era. Those B-movies may have been cutting edge and thrilling at the time but in retrospect they seem somewhat melodramatic and farfetched.

Sherlock for the small screen
With the advent of television in the 1950s, Sherlock made a surprisingly easy transition to more credible renderings. The way may have been opened up by a well-acted British TV series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which ran in 39 instalments from 1954 to 1955.

Starring as Holmes in these black-and-white, half-hour episodes is Ronald Howard (son of Leslie Howard and unrelated to the later American director of the same name). In his mid-thirties Howard is younger than most Holmeses and plays the famous character more affably than most, but he is quite believable and engaging. Backing him, nearly stealing the show as Watsons often do, is veteran Brit actor Howard Marion-Crawford. His Watson is far from buffoonish, a stand-in for everyman, as well as a competent and knowledgeable aid to Holmes. And they are sometimes both upstaged by Scottish character actor Archie Duncan as probably the best—and funniest—Inspector Lestrade of all.

The series starts with the introduction of the two leads that is the most faithful to the books of any film. But after this, the cases are created anew, adopting only odd bits from the Doyle canon—with only two exceptions that I can tell: "The Case of the Red Headed League" is a straight adaptation of the story of the same name, though much condensed, and "The Case of the French Interpreter" changes the nationality from Greek. The latter change may have been inspired by the fact that the series was actually shot in France.

Unfortunately, twenty-five minutes for each episode does not allow any complexity of mysteries, but the writing, acting and production in this show make the most of the limited time to bring Sherlock entertainingly to the small screen for the first time.

Sherlock for the ages
In the years after Rathbone retired his magnifying glass, the most noted Holmes may have been Peter Cushing.

Cushing started with Hammer Studio's The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (see Hound movies), which co-starred his horror-film buddy Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville.

Cushing reprised his role in the 1968 series Sherlock Holmes for British television, when he replaced another actor who had been on the show since 1965. Cushing's Watson was played by Nigel Stock and the two of them created a memorable duo, acting out episodes that were often adapted from Doyle's stories. Four of the episodes have survived ("A Study in Scarlet", "The Sign of Four", "The Blue Carbuncle", and "The Boscombe Valley Mystery") and are available on video.

Then in 1984 Cushing played his final Holmes, The Masks of Death, as an elderly Holmes who comes out of retirement for one more case. Co-starring John Mills as Watson, along with Ann Baxter and Ray Milland, the British television film was a triumph, despite not being based on a Doyle story.

Sherlock for the aged
Interestingly, Christopher Lee has also had a lifetime association with Holmes. After being featured in Hound with Cushing in 1959, he played the title role in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962).

Strange and interesting film. Deadly Necklace was a joint German-English production filmed without sound, which was dubbed in afterwards. But for the English version different actors were used for the voices of the two leads, Lee and Thorley Walters. The screenplay by horrormeister Curt Siodmak is quite good but it's set perplexingly in what appears to be the 1920s, though with visual cues that range from 1918 to the early 1940s. At the helm though is Lee's old Hammer-horror director Terence Fisher, so the British-isms are done right, despite German and Irish locations standing in for London. And the black-and-white cinematography is more artful than found in most Sherlock Holmes films.

Tall, dark and aristocratic Lee is as a natural Holmes as he had been a Dracula—too bad about his masterful voice being stolen this time. His partner in crime detection, Walters, walks a line between earlier Watsons as a stuffed shirt and as a complete buffoon, acting as a perfect stand-in for the audience.

Best of all is the cat-and-mouse game Holmes and Moriarty (German actor Hans Söhnker) play over the latter's attempt to hold onto stolen jewellery attributed to Cleopatra. Plus there are a few lovely scenes of Holmes guiding Scotland Yard's finest in solving a murder, Holmes going undercover in disguise several times, and Watson getting picked up by a hooker.

A lot of fun is also had over how much Holmes uses London's famous newspaper for getting clues. Once when the inspector asks him if he knows the answer to an arcane question, he replies, "Naturally, I read the Times."

The Deadly Necklace is not overly thrilling, but a passable entertainment. Not at all the disaster that Lee himself called it, claiming his best work to date was destroyed by the voice substitution and by the film being cut in half to sell to television.

Lee didn't give up on Holmes work though. In 1970 he played Sherlock's brother Mycroft in Billy Wilder's better, though still Doyle-unrelated, film of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (see below).

Then finally he was back as the big guy himself in a couple of European made-for-television mini-series, Incident at Victoria Falls (1991, also known as Sherlock Holmes: The Star of Africa) and Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1992). The overall title of these series is The Golden Years of Sherlock Holmes.

As with Cushing's last outing as Holmes, Lee plays the detective being drawn out of retirement. Old age has sweetened him though. Lee's Holmes is downright sociable and charming. Patrick Macnee (of TV's Avengers fame) is an even more affable Watson. Worse for purists, Holmes has a love interest in the second film—no less than Irene Adler (she of "A Scandal in Bohemia"), played by no less than one-time TV sex symbol Morgan Fairchild. The two mini-series are both sumptuously produced. Not bad little adventures, but a fallible, congenial gentleman is probably not what most fans are looking for in an aging Holmes. I'd prefer a cynical, drug-taking, going-out-in-a-blaze dotage for the guy myself.

Sherlock and the Ripper
The 1960s squeezed in yet another Holmes, this film a one-off starring yet another classically trained actor, John Neville. Neville in his later years became better known for a five-year stint as artistic director of Canada's Stratford Shakespearean Festival, for a star turn in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and for a recurring role as The Well-Manicured Man in The X-Files television show. The latter part is most appropriate for our discussion here because, even as a younger man of about 40 years old, Neville made for a rather fastidious Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Terror (1965). Something about the actor, no matter how he tries to charm, is too neat, too cool, too delicate for us to really latch onto.

But, if you don't need to love Holmes, Neville is good and he's surrounded by a top-rate British cast, including Donald Houston blustering about as Watson, Anthony Quale at his dramatic peak as a crusading doctor, and Judi Dench as the ingénue, decades before she became a revered Dame.

The plot of A Study in Terror is cleverly contrived and it's filmed in brilliant colour, something new for Holmes sagas.

The films however is most noteworthy for launching what has almost become a subgenre: the bringing together in books and movies of those two icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Novels in this category include Exit Sherlock Holmes (1977) by Robert Lee Hall and Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1979). Later video presentations featuring the Ripper case (which Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote about) include the Sherlockian film Murder by Decree (1979); the movie From Hell (2001) with a deducing, drug-addicted detective obviously based on Holmes; several television episodes; and even a video game.

At this writing, A Study in Terror is not available on DVD, though it does occasionally show up on classic television.

Uncensored Sherlock
Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was much anticipated by fans who perhaps expected a reboot of a Holmes franchise similar to the Rathbone-Bruce series. Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers were rumoured to be sought as the leads (can you imagine!).

But what director Wilder delivered in 1970, based on his ten-years-in-the-writing script, was a very clever, sophisticated and somewhat risqué look at a Sherlock Holmes the public had never seen before. Fifty years after Watson's death, a trunk is opened in a bank vault to reveal the Holmes stories whose sensitive nature had kept Watson from publishing them. Four of these stories follow—in Wilder's Sherlock symphony that ran three to four hours as filmed. However, the great director ended up cutting out two of the episodes to present a more palatable two-hour film to theatres.

Even so, it works. They may not have been the first choices, but Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely are wonderful as Holmes and Watson—that is, as the uncensored Holmes and Watson depicted in this film. Holmes's drug use is open, Watson's womanizing is gloried in, and the seemingly infallible detective actually screws up occasionally. Moreover, they're just more human—regular guys of their time, albeit with unique talents (in some ways, precursors to the 2009 Downey-Law concoction, for which see below.)

Christopher Lee is almost unrecognizable as Sherlock's older—and smarter—brother Mycroft. Lee's really left his Dracula days behind now, bearing a bald pate, pencil-thin mustache, brisk working manner and a light touch of sardonic humour, as Mycroft works behind the scenes for the British empire while his better publicized sibling blunders about, turning up state secrets and apparent murder.

The tone of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is both tongue-in-cheek and serious, as Wilder films can be. The script has fun with Holmes chiding Watson for presenting him in his published stories as being taller than he is, playing violin better than he does, and sporting the ridiculous deerstalker outfit that the public now expects him to wear around London.

And yet one is still left feeling this is one of the more interesting instalments in the Holmes cinematic canon. Too bad we'll never see the original longer version, though some DVDs do include clips and script pages of the cut sections as extras, providing an extended look into Sherlock Holmes's private life. The public has a right to know!

Eccentric Sherlock
Holmes aficionados were overjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s to get several series produced by Granada for British television that were most faithful to the novels and stories. Jeremy Brett gave an eccentric but brilliantly effective portrait of an eccentric but brilliantly effective Sherlock Holmes—someone you could imagine being both an addict and an incisive genius, both a cynical introvert and a flamboyant upholder of Victorian society's values.

The Granada films presented Doyle's oeuvre almost completely, starting with the series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1984-85. The
Return of Sherlock Holmes followed from 1986 to 1988, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1991, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1994. In between these episodic series. longer individual films were produced, including The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Master Blackmailer (based on "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton"), The Last Vampyre and The Eligible Bachelor (from "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor").

Brett had two actors play Watson to his Holmes. The first series featured David Burke who was an energetic Watson, although he often gave the impression of suppressing an annoyance at something. When he left to take a role elsewhere, he was replaced by Edward Hardwicke who seemed older and more laid back, a more traditional Watson. Together Brett and Hardwicke created on screen the pair that most resembled Doyle's vision—the plodding but wise Watson (like Doyle he's a doctor and an author, after all), acting not only as foil but as an essential aid to the brilliant, moody and slightly scary Holmes.

Spoofy Sherlocks
Whenever an icon hangs around long enough, you get iconoclasts. In movies, this means spoofs, spin-offs, alternative reality trips—taking off from the revered stories and characters. Anti-Sherlocks had their heyday in the latter twentieth-century.

• One of the cleverest send-ups starred Ben Kingsley as the great detective, alongside Michael Caine as Sherlock Holmes. Yes, the conceit of Without a Clue (1988) is that Doctor Watson (Kingsley) is actually the brains behind the operation.

Watson has hired an alcoholic, down-on-his-luck actor, Reginald Kincaid (Caine), to play the figurehead. He investigates the mysteries himself, telling his fake partner what to say and do, and writes up the cases for The Strand magazine with Holmes as the hero.

Things go somewhat awry when Watson, exasperated with his partner's ineptitude, tries to drop Holmes and create a reputation for himself as the crime-solving doctor (which ironically is closer to Doyle's original inspiration for Holmes). The plot thickens and Kincaid/Holmes has to come to Watson's aid—we think.

All right, this gets a bit hackneyed in the second half. But the witty script and masterful actors, who seem to be having a ball even when they're losing their tempers with each other, carry it through. Terrific secondary roles too, from the small Baker Street Irregulars (who keep pickpocketing "Holmes") to Peter Cook briefly as Watson's jaded publisher. We'd like to see them all again, but this film seems to have got overlooked by the public and the call for a sequel never arose, I suppose.

• Then there's the more recent Canadian TV movies starring Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) and esteemed Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh—shows that can't decide whether they're serious or comic.

Frewer's Holmes is wrong in so many ways—zany and mean-spirited by turns and with an obviously fake Brit accent—although Welsh makes a believable Watson. But the production is quite good and some may find Frewer's smart-alecky detective refreshing, as sort of an anti-Brett.

The series starts (of course) with The Hound of the Baskervilles in 2000 and moves on to adapting another novel, The Sign of Four, in 2001. A Royal Scandal the same year is a very loose and unbelievable adaptation of the story "A Scandal in Bohemia" in which Holmes is up against his feminine nemesis Irene Adler. In 2002 the series closes with The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire, which you might think is based on "The Last Vampyre" again but is really a new story—probably the low point in an mediocre, if offbeat, entry in the never-ending adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

• If you've had enough Sherlock, or if Matt Frewer wasn't odd enough as Holmes for you, you might take a break w ith The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), a Gene Wilder film that veers from hilarity to grimace-inducing silliness and back again several times. Also starring Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Dom Deluise and...Thorley Walters, sending up the Watson role he essayed with Christopher Lee in 1962.

Generation Y Sherlock
Some purists would include the most recent Holmes outing in the above comic category, but they would be missing the point. Every generation gets to reinvent the world's most famous sleuth and there's no reason why today's should have to be content with the pinnacle reached by Brett for the boomer generation.

Yes, Sherlock Holmes (2009) turns our cerebral duo into a pair of action heroes in a buddy film. Sure, Jude Law is too young to play the veteran doctor of the books and Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock is too...well, too Robert Downey Jr. But, dammit, they're interesting in their own ways.

And it's a good action flick. Better than most, in that the SFX tricked-out action scenes may stretch the imagination but do not completely defy physics. And—such a relief—any seemingly paranormal elements introduced are rationally exposed by our scientifically minded detective.

Director Guy Ritchie pulls off something of a miracle, applying all his dynamic cinematic storytelling smarts (as previously seen in RocknRolla, Snatch, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrrels) to the Doyle characters, and making it work for both those who venerate the canon and those who have never laid eyes on it. Some core values of the original vision are upheld: the complementary comradeship of the two leads, Holmes's exasperating but exhilarating genius, the simultaneous spiting and embracing of social norms, the dingy Victorian-era setting, and the love of mysteries—for the solving of them.

Sherlockians may complain that "the woman", Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), is too amorously cozy with Holmes and that the whole plot of Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) coming back from the dead as a sort of Dracula figure to take over the British empire is way over the top for an Arthur Conan Doyle story. And they'd be right. We Holmes fans win some and lose some in this massive rebooting of the franchise (just as we original Trekkers did with the same year's Star Trek re-engagement).

But after all the brilliant Sherlock Holmes portrayals of the twentieth century, there was really nothing more to be added in that vein, and this latest Sherlock Holmes can newly energize the myth for the twenty-first.

And for those of us who still read or can still stand to watch in black and white, we have all those classic stories and videos to enjoy. No one can take those away form us. 

— Eric