Spoofy Sherlocks
If an icon hangs around long enough, it draws iconoclasts. In movies, this means spoofs, spin-offs and alternative reality trips—taking off from the revered stories and characters. Anti-Sherlocks had their heyday in the latter twentieth-century.
The other Holmes
If you've had enough Sherlockian genius, you might take a break with The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), a film that veers from hilarity to grimace-inducing silliness and back again several times.
Gene Wilder wrote,
directed and stars as Sigerson
Holmes, a heretofore unknown younger brother of the famous
sleuth. He is jealous of his older brother Sherlock, whom
he calls "Sheer-luck", and considers himself the smarter
sibling. (Mycroft goes unmentioned.) His big break, he thinks,
will be solving a crime that Sherlock couldn't figure out.
Also starring are comic actors Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman and Dom Deluise. But there are at least two cast connections to serious Sherlockian tradition: Thorley Walters sends up the Watson role he essayed with Christopher Lee in 1962 and Douglas Wilmer appears as Sherlock, reprising his role as Holmes in the first season of the 1960s British TV series.
Nearly stealing the show though is veteran British character actor Leo McKern (of Rumpole fame) as the villainous Moriarty.
So, obviously this flick is nowhere faithful to anything Doyle wrote. It's middling Wilder, with gags that put you on the floor followed by over-the-top antics that make you wince in embarrassment. The performers even break into really dumb song and dance numbers for no dramatic reasons.
And, dumber me, I enjoy it.
But enough of this nonsense. And on to to a higher grade of nonsense.
Sherlock Holmes's smarter partner
One of the cleverest send-ups of Holmes and Watson starred Ben Kingsley as the great detective, alongside Michael Caine as Sherlock Holmes.
Yes,
I got that right: 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 of Sherlock. But 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.
Far-fetched but somewhat consistent with Doyle's canon. You can at least imagine this is the real story behind the stories.
Things go somewhat awry when Watson, exasperated with his partner's ineptitude, tries to drop Holmes and create a reputation for himself as a crime-solving doctor (which ironically is close 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 picking Holmes's pockets) to Peter Cook appearing briefly as Watson's jaded publisher.
We'd like to see them all again, but this film seems to have been overlooked by the public and the call for a sequel never arose, I suppose.
Spoof or homage to Sherlock?
On into the twenty-first century, Sherlockmania shows no signs of letting up. Perhaps even accelerating, with at least three franchises launched in the first decade alone.
The earliest was actually born in the waning months of the twentieth century and expired within a couple of years. It's a series of Canadian TV movies starring the satirical Matt Frewer (Max Headroom) and the esteemed actor of staqe and screen, Kenneth Welsh.
These are shows that can't decide whether they're serious about Holmes or comic sendups.
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 a sort of anti-Brett.
The series starts in 2000 with (of course) 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 Adventure of the Sussex Vampire". But it is really a new story—probably the low point in a so-so, if offbeat, chapter in the never-ending adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
But it's still not as radical a departure as that of the new century's next adaptations of the Victorian-era classics.
